11 years after About Face, Windows still stops the proceedings with idiocy 15 February, 2007
In 1995 Alan Cooper’s About Face coined the phrase ’stopping the proceedings with idiocy’. He was describing the needless dialog boxes that blight our interactions with computers. About Face 3.0 is due this year so I might send my original copy to Microsoft. Why? Windows Updates.
The good thing is that updates happen more-or-less in the background so I don’t have to be troubled by them. No, the trouble starts once the updates are complete.
Up pops the Automatic Updates dialog box. Windows arrogantly assumes it is more important than the diagram I’m drawing or the document I’m writing. My concentration is broken and now I must choose, not whether I want to restart my computer, but when.
I imagine that only the most ardent security nut is going to want to restart immediately – to save all their work, close all their open applications and wait for several minutes until Windows comes back up. Most people would rather get on with what they’re doing oblivious to the inner workings of the operating system. Presumably Restart Later is Microsoft’s concession to the rest of us. But even this choice is illusory; the dialog being dismissed only to reappear later on. What’s the big hurry? I’ve managed just fine without these changes up ’till now. The fact that they’ve been released shouldn’t override what I’m doing. Why not just wait for the computer to be restarted naturally, at the end of the day or whenever it usually happens? Or, even better, engineer the software so that it doesn’t have to be restarted at all.
The computer is a tool, not an end in itself. It’s good that Microsoft takes security seriously, but not at the expense of my work. Excellent interfaces respect the user. They tiptoe, working in the background, presenting things when they’re needed and very rarely interrupting. They don’t blunder straight in, assume they’re the most important thing on the computer and then wrest control away from you. These kinds of dialog boxes are the idiot in your computer talking. Every one that we can remove means the idiot’s voice gets a little quieter. As interface designers its our job to try and silence him.