I cannot even begin to count how many times I've tried to search for an application by name that I know is installed, only for it not to be found, then have to manually navigate in Windows Explorer to Program Files (or Program Files x86, damn you Microsoft) and launch it by double-clicking on the executable itself, which was named exactly what I thought it was and yet Cortana couldn't find it.
I never want to perform a web search from the Windows start menu. If I want a web search I'll do it in Chrome's address bar. When I type "notepad" I want it to launch Notepad, not query the web!
Does anyone think that Cortana is an improvement? How did it even get launched in this state?
It's weird that there are no great "magic search" tools on any desktop environment I've used. Windows 7 is close, but doesn't include any fancy results (can't have it do quick math, etc). Mac's Spotlight gets everything right, except it won't open a new window if I type, say, "firefox". It'll just pull up a window I already have open (no way to change that behavior without weird hacks). Unity's gets confused and breaks too often. Cinnamon's sorts results alphabetically. Gnome's is fairly close to ideal, though it forgets launch history too quickly (if I type "calc" and select LibreOffice's Calc just _once_ it'll start showing that first, instead of Calculator which I want 95% of the time when typing "calc").
Type 'updat' and all search results disappear completely.
Type 'upd' and now it shows Windows Update but not the Java update.
Type fast and get different results than if you type slow.
Type the same thing a third time and get different results than the first two times.
And now Cortana keeps bugging me with lame notifications. How do I turn this off?
https://everything.en.softonic.com/
"Everything" is a fantastic lightning-fast system-wide search that's tiny and can run standalone.
Personally, I think it's done on purpose, as every time it searches, it counts as a search in Bing, and that way they can use that to show how many people use Bing to charge more for advertisers.
Meanwhile, all this stuff just works on desktop Linux, because its goal is still to optimize user experience rather than some monetization metric at the expense of usability.
I have an iPhone now, but Siri is so hit-or-miss that I rarely use it for sending, and it doesn't read me received messages at all. With Windows phone when I got a text in the car I immediately heard "You got a text from __________, would you like me to read it, or ignore it?" That's what a digital assistant is made for, and it was amazing. If only Windows Phone hadn't stagnated and died, I'd happily still be on it.
The inability to find installed programs by name is laughably unacceptable. How they continue to push this stuff out is amazing, their management must be really awful.
I have no idea, but I hit the exact same behavior in Mac OS’s command-space menu and iOS’s “two finger drag down on the home screen” search bar. (Sample queries: “calc”, “calculator”)
For me, the real question is: How did this behavior get cloned by multiple vendors?
Implementing something this bad is non-trivial. How did it make it into multiple operating systems? How can more than one person on earth think it’s a good idea?
How did these 2+ people hire engineers competent enough to implement it? Who told accounting to approve this project?
What is it like to work in this office? Do they keep the toner in the coffee machine, and the cream in the xerox machine, but only on Tuesdays? Do they drive like they design products (are they the reason my 9 mile freeway commute is creeping up to over an hour)?
The more I think about it, the more questions I have.
After I upgraded to the paid app, the problem suddenly fixed itself. But I keep having shivers. It shouldn't be Spotlight's business.
The other thing was, naturally, it has a database behind the scenes which historically was prone to silently breaking with no UI cue. Back when I did Mac system administration one of our scripts ran this periodically to deal with missing or duplicate entries in e.g. the Open with… menu:
/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -seed -r -f -v -domain local -domain user -domain system
mdutil -E -a
Windows Search was great in Windows 7 - you could configure the fulltext search index through control panel and use it from the start menu. I used to index all my markdown notes and pdf documents with it. Then it started getting worse and worse with later versions of Windows. The start menu search looks comppetely detached from the index settings and, as you noticed, can’t even find installed applications. The only way to use the „old good” search is by using the search box in the explorer window when you are on the computer level. I’m still wondering what was the reason for those changes.
Install Classic Shell and disable Cortana. I do it on every Windows machine I set up.
Most people just want to change things to make a name for themselves. It doesn't matter if it's an improvement for the user.
https://www.howtogeek.com/273824/windows-10-without-the-cruf...
This is exactly why I use a ChromeBook.
No Cortana, just old school search like in win7.
>How did it even get launched in this state?
Microsoft wants to make money with services not software. I can understand their reasoning. Nobody wants to pay for an OS anymore. Win10 is their new business strategy: Cortana and the Store.
Another fix could be putting a shortcut to the exe (named what you want) into C:\Users\YOUR-USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs, for me these seem foolproof.
However I'm similarly flabbergasted with what's going on in the start menu search (which I assume is part of Cortana since this is where her blue ring appears after clicking the home shaped icon): I type in 'downloa' and I get option to search the web (in Bing in Edge of course, despite my default being Firefox + Google) and/or 'Download maps for offline use', 'Delete downloaded maps', 'Windows Defender settings', 'Windows Defender security center' (all are built in Windows things) and after few seconds (and my Windows is on an SSD) it seems to catch up and detect the Downloads folder (that comes standard with English Windows install and isn't in any deep or hidden spot...). I add one more letter and get 'download' and the same happens but Edge online search is available only for a split second.
And then the finale: having 'downloads' (or 'Downloads', not that Windows is sensitive even if NTFS deep down can supposedly be set to be) in there looks like this: https://imgur.com/a/Jlhno I have no idea WTF just happened to have the actual Downloads folder as third result after Microsoft Store (?!) and online search with Bing in Edge (sigh...) and hidden in a sub-menu after looking for literally 'downloads'.
Another funny thing is that for me searching for 'Notepad' matches Notepad++ first and Windows built-in Notepad second. I'm not exactly unhappy about this one but it's weird, it might be heuristics but then why doesn't it work heuristically for the 'downloads' search and gives me the store I never used instead of the folder I access daily?
So to find µTorrent, you don't type 'tor' like any sane person on earth will do, but have to "translate" that to µ to a u, and even then it will not show up. I have to type 'uto' to find it. Easy, right?
I hate this kind of writing. It undermines the otherwise good point the author has.
I think the underlying point of the article is that the experience of using Cortana could be improved, and Microsoft should be providing explicit next steps at every phase so that you aren't left wondering what's going on. I'd agree with that. But claiming someone should be fired is ridiculous, especially considering that the author still doesn't know what the feature does and it could still pleasantly surprise him. It may just need an additional dialog explaining what to expect next.
I assume the feature gives you desktop notifications when the package transitions between tracking stages, and even if that's all the functionality it provides it'd still be more useful than manually checking the tracking website yourself.
Also, there is a happy path where Cortana does pick up things like tracking numbers from email automatically without having to manually enter them into the Notebook. Though it's easy to miss that happy path, because it also surfaces primarily as cards on the Home tab. (Though Outlook.com now has deeper, more direct, integration than that, showing the tracking cards directly above the email; Outlook (OG) has something like that in Preview, though not yet Cortana connected, and the Windows Mail app looks like it will pick up the feature eventually, too.)
Now whether it is warranted in case, I cannot judge as I don’t use the product.
Broken UX flows like this are usually distributed among a bunch of different teams (each with their own PMs) so that no "the product manager" actually exists, and it's organizational seams you're running into. In many cases the individual PMs on each team are well aware of the problems with the overall flow and want to fix them, but find it hard to make room in their "day jobs" for coordinating with other teams to actually do so. So if anything I bet many of them are happy your post could give them more ammo to push prioritizing fixes.
I'm only somewhat familiar with Cortana but I think your example broken flow crosses four or five teams’ feature areas, and I know that some of the problems you identified have had solutions proposed/designed/even prototyped by various teams for years now, but I guess so far nobody's managed to get all the teams to commit to any one particular solution.
IMO though the biggest sin in your story wasn't that a broken flow for a feature existed, but that someone decided to push/spam a notification that led to said broken flow (and that someone else set up an incentive structure that drove that decision).
The same people saying you shouldn't reproach clear and obvious incompetence are the same people calling you, the author, "some random idiot"... in this very comment section.
It's just a bit extreme considering you submitted it to HN, where the people directly involved actually have a chance of seeing it.
People who perform poorly at their jobs should either be transferred to another position or terminated. Why is this a controversial position?
If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.
First, because some random idiot on a blog post does not know whether the person "performed poorly at their job" in general. He just has a specific gripe. The other person might have done miracles in other parts of Cortana. There are such things as shipping priorities, and they're not determined by random blog posts or comments.
Second, because people deserve chances for improving. Anybody at any current position has "performed poorly" at this or another project earlier on. Terminating or transferring them only makes sense if they don't get to improve, which a random blog post can't determine.
>If you are the product manager in charge of Cortana, you failed big time. Again, this should be incontroversial.
That's why companies don't base their decisions on random posts or comments.
It can't even fuzzy search. Type "view event" and it brings up "view event logs", if you type "view events" it instead searches bing, in edge, for "view events".
Edge isn't even my default browser. Bing isn't my default search engine, and I didn't want to browse the web.
Any slight deviation from an exact phrase and it goes straight from "here's the program you want to run" to popping up it's search engine.
Most notably, I never remember what the name of Windows' built-in screenshot application is. It's "Snipping Tool". I often mis-remember it as "Clipping Tool". But anyway, it comes up when I type "screenshot", "clip", or "clipping" into the search bar.
Type out "clipping tool" and watch.
It matches all the way to "clipping t". Then it stops matching, then matches again at "clipping tool".
So even if you know a phrase which it matches on, you might or might not get a patch from an exact partial of that matching phrase.
Greenshot is the one Windows tool I really missed on Linux.
Just awful.
I can see Microsoft put a lot of work into making Win10 user friendly, but it seems like their designers don't understand their users or something. OSX has some bizarre interactions as well (like Finder, wtf is happening there), but for the most part it just works.
I guess I don't really know what I want my operating system to do precisely. I want it to be smooth, I want it to open programs quickly, I want it to move files around without hassle, and I want it to be secure while also be easily extensible. Unfortunately there's a lot of different interpretations of what those things should be. I can appreciate that making a world class operating system on top of decades of legacy code is difficult, but I also need to say: WTF is half of this shit?
Windows doesn't even come with a simple key reassignment. I had to download SharpKeys to set Caps Lock as Ctrl. That sort of thing just comes with OSX.
But I totally agree that designers don't understand their users. I think there's a sense that Windows has to be "cool" like Android and iOS rather than just "useful".
I'd agree that the OS shouldn't come pre-installed with major applications. Those are things that I've invested time and effort to learn and where I have a definite preference on what I want to download.
But to having to research little things like key reassignment apps becomes a real chore. Then you have to download and install it, make sure it's not malware, and if you use multiple machines, repeat those steps.
The older versions of the iPhone and the iPad didn't come with a calculator. I don't know if current versions now include a calculator, but having to test a dozen different garbage calculators out of 1000 mind-numbing choices in the app store was a real pain in the neck. Any simple ad-free calculator included in iOS would have been OK.
I've tried and failed. I don't know why it is necessary an auxiliar app just to index my executables just to be able to type a few letters and start them quickly.
Personally, what bugs me the most is the constant reads and writes to the hard disk. I have 8 GB of RAM. I just have a web browser open. Windows, you don't need to do everything at this very moment.
Why can't Windows Update be as simple as this? https://tr3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/2015/05/29/0cfbdde4-cc21-4d... https://i.imgur.com/7IWTX2q.png
Instead what I get (even with Windows 7) is a spinning wheel that says "Failure configuring Windows updates. Reverting changes...". Happens every time I want to use Windows (which is more of a reason to stay in the Linux partition tbh)
I've been trying a Surface but it's going back because it isn't good at being a tablet nor laptop.
Google can figure it out. I order something, i get cards in Google Now telling me exactly what i ordered and its shipping status, without any interaction on my part. It just happens.
If microsoft can't figure out how to do this, fine. But if they're going to pop up notifications saying "hey, i can track packages for you", they should be at least sort of on par with the competition.
Now what tells you this doesn't work with emails received in your outlook.com mailbox?
Or do you expect Windows to read all your Gmail's email somehow?
GMail, for example, only parses out package numbers if the retailer sends schema.org markup for it. (https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/reference/parcel-...)
Not everyone uses gmail. But, in the UK, for ecommerce, you can fully expect more than 50% of the order emails to be gmail addresses. Therefore the xml snippets approach is worth doing.
I mean, I can almost imagine how this thing happens. Someone somewhere sometime said, "hey, wouldn't it be cool if xyz?" Someone else replied with "oh yeah, and it's not THAT hard!" And the PM is probably like "well, low risk, too, so whatever you wish."
Then, the feature is thrown together, with or without explicit planning. It probably attracts way higher attention than expected, because either it is hooked into mechanism intended for real important stuff or it can be demoed so nicely (imagine: if you are the developer doing demoing, you probably have the damned tracking number ready for copy and paste). It does not support all operations, because no one looks at it twice after some brief "yo, so cool" moment.
The annoyance may or may not have a bug associated with it somewhere. But let's be realistic. If you are a PM, which one would you choose: "some nobody-care feature is not easy to use" or "if you stand on 1 leg, jump 3 times, press the code of Mordor, Windows seg faults itself". The 1st one is vague and, let's be frank, not that big of a deal. The 2nd one is a big deal: data loss and all manners of unspeakable conditions may break loose. So, any PM would do the 2nd bug first.
I mean, seriously, how would you ensure this tiny corner (which a comment below actually says, "I did not realize it exist") is "easy to use"? No automation tests can catch it. Demoing (again, the developers know how to use it and probably come prepared) won't catch it. A/B testing probably won't even get to it. Its bugs (except if that bugs involving Start menu crashing down) probably have priority between "when I have better work-life balance" and "when the machine is capable of fixing its own issues."
--
I will agree that all of these don't justify for a shitty experience. Shitty experiences, no matter how small, are shitty. But then, even LaTeX, perfected as it is, annoys me once in a while. Even Emacs, glorious as it is, has "I swear I will switch to Eclipse" moments. And Scheme has about 70 different ways of doing OO programming, none of which really works for my little case.
So, maybe a bit more love/understanding? It probably helps your (i.e. the users') blood pressure anyway.
So much software development today is about getting story points on a velocity chart and claiming that features have been delivered even if the feature is actually useless. A Minimum Viable Product should actually be viable.
I just recently was forced to use Windows again for some piece of software that requires it. Windows immediately proceeds to update itself after startup, fails midway to bluescreen. I ended up spending an hour to revert to the latest restore point instead of getting work done.
I don't see how Windows is getting any better than what I used 15 years ago. I think a lot of people using their tech have Stockholm syndrome and fear losing the sunk cost of their investment in that ecosystem. As someone who used to program exclusively in C and C++, I can say it's always worth switching...
Anybody who has done this knows with Linux it's easy - RHEL/Centos and Kickstart files are the best, because they work. Next best is Ubuntu/Debian as Preseeds work but they're bloody awful. Once you've got one that works you're fine.
I had all the Windows 10 VMs with 'Professional' keys. Now, I imagine like you i'd suspect a 'Professional' key would imply this sort of lifecycle - rinse, reinstall. This worked for the first month.
But...
Part of the install was getting updates from WSUS, which itself is awful. Turns out halfway through our build Microsoft decided after these updates they'd change the rules. So, where I was providing the autounattend.xml (ks / preseed equivalent) this particular update decided my keys were not worthy. Professional wasn't good enough, when it was previously, so I now needed Enterprise. So none of my VM rebuilds would work without intervention. These are headless VMs. This cost us tens of thousands in engineering bucks.
If I started a company tomorrow i'd go nowhere near Microsoft. I'd not let one of my employees get near a place where they decided business logic needed to go into an Excel spreadsheet. They'd have a Chromebook and i'd pay the $6 a month for them to work without any of the extra crap Microsoft decide to do this month. Yes, Google can do the same, but i'll take the chances at $6 per month as opposed to the Windows, RDS and assorted other CALs that Microsoft decide to do tomorrow. I'd even go to O365 if I trusted them after this. Which I don't.
It would be so wow if Cortana were really able to parse the URL, identify the tracknig ID and then use it but how can implement such stuffy. Different providers have different URL and query params for their tracking page. Some may call it TrackingID, some may call trackId, tid, t, xyz....
But my main problem with searching is when I search for settings and windows apps. That's just pure trash. There're no aliases so if you don't know exactly how MS named the functionality you're fucked. And if you know the english word for it, it doesn't show up either. And the worst thing: if you KNEW how it used to be called but not the current translation you're also fucked. E.g. in english you search for screen saver. In czech it used to be "Spořič obrazovky" but now it's "Šetřič obrazovky". (btw neither of these even show up in the creators update, but in falls they fixed it and "Šetřič obrazovky" will return correct result).
Another thing that bothers me with search is diacritics, you have to use it if you want to find anything that has it. And gl with that when using english keyboard layout.
It's increadibly frustrating to use and I've mostly given up on it and use powershell whenever I can. That doesn't fix my problems with diacritics when searching documents though.
That means users will get frustrated quickly if it misunderstands or or makes other mistakes. It completely breaks the interaction. To add on top of it, it makes the human feel stupid having to enunciate or repeat the same thing over and over. If they'd would be typing into a search box for search application, they'd be fine with it not working because it's just a stupid program. As soon as the program is an "AI" or an "assistance" it better be darn good, or it will make users very angry and frustrated.
There is also some little part of the human brain that says "oh you think you can act like a human, let's how you respond to this", so they will deliberately mess with it or provide it with confusing input just to see what would happen. (I saw customers do it, they were already frustrated because of a different reason, but used the speech interaction API to really demonstrate how broken the product is). Can't blame them, it was broken, but it was a useful less on to learn.
And to top it off Spotlight shows me accurate previews of Excel and Word documents. But Cortana, another Microsoft product, does not. Perhaps that's a compliment to the team that makes Office for Mac.
How is this entire post anything but "getting worked up as hell"? Seems to me to be a case of "when other people complain, they're whiny, but when _I_ get annoyed, heads must roll!".
No MS I don't feeling spending half an hour figuring out what the hell is going on in that UX. That pretty much says it all about how intuitive it is dear designer...
To be honest all of these smart digital assistants have failed me as of late. I used to be able to just text-to-speech searches straight to Google and it did what I wanted to for the most part. Now when I try just any type of reasonable query (I think so at least) Alexa or Google Assistant usually comes back with "Sorry I don't know how to do that" which is frustrating.
Reminds me of the VR hype. Maybe I should just wait for 10 years and this stuff will finally be usable.
From the perspective of a dialog system I see it as a bunch of assumptions that are made prior to engaging in the dialog. And given that hypothesis I have looked at people interactions to see how people deal with this sort of 'communication mismatch' and how they detect it.
Certainly there are repeated asks of the same question slightly rephrased as an indicator of a mismatch, but there is also a general resistance to interacting. So with people if someone gets frustrated talking with you and stops, I've seen people use that as a signal to seek out an understanding of where the mismatch is, but in computer dialoging systems that check, and subsequent re-framing is completely missing.
The other thing I've observed is that often a dialog system seems to try to be 'human' in its interaction but because it is a computer the user communicates to it like a 'user' not like a human. Adding what might be relevant search terms to the utterance as an example. For example, I listened as a person pitched to Siri "I want pizza" and was frustrated at the response ("This is what I've found on the web about Pizza") And added "I want Dominos Pizza" (additional search term, vendor name). But Siri appeared stuck on being unable to parse an acceptable language target for 'I want'.
Changing that to "Call dominos" or "Where is the nearest Dominos" works well because it as a pre-built in answer action (Telephone call, map directions).
All of this the "level 4" version of autonomous conversations where the computer can navigate what it is you are saying and what you expect as a response.
Oh wow, you can! https://www.howtogeek.com/265854/how-to-disable-hey-cortana-...
Thanks, had no idea - assumed that when MS shipped that update the old kinect voice recognition just went away. "Xbox, turn off" and "Xbox, record that" were the two most used voice commands in our house, but "Hey cortana" never seems to respond when you call her.
I use an old, discontinued app called Executor that I configure manually. It's not a whole lot better in terms of matching, but, because it can be configured, it is much better in terms of getting it to do what I want. It definitely can't track your packages, though.
Just start typing (like you're supposed to do now), but it would search only programs and settings pages, lightning fast. Then Cortana came and it tried to read your mind and search the internet and it all went to shit again.
How do I know? Took the number and looked it up at ups.
I think, I'm not sure, but I think, if ups delivers on time. Cortana will give you a message, stating the package will arive tomorrow right on 24th of November. Just one day before.
Maybe John David Back will give us an update, when his package arrived.
BTW delivery times in the US are terrible compared to Germany. Next Day delivery is the state of art. Germany is also much smaller in comparison.
When these things do finally get their act together, we will all live in a world that is different from the one we live in now. I hope it is a better one.
I pulled my hair out one day after telling Siri a half dozen times to “remind me about [an appointment] in two weeks”
It kept making an immediate reminder that said “appointment into weeks” - into weeks??? When would someone even say that unless they were saying something like “Days turn into weeks”???
If I type "skype" the default option is to install Skype for Business, even though I already have it installed.
It is very unintuitive. It is as bad as the search in Jira/Confluence, and that's saying something.
I mean if you have the URL just go to the URL and track your package.
I’m pretty sure Cortana was designed as a human interface and not a web browser...
Slowly type out eclipse in search bar
Watch it randomly switch between the two at each character
Randomly as in, sometimes it suggests oxygen on ecl and sometimes it suggests neon on ecl
"Searching the web for 'Knot every clothes'..."
