Back around Vista time I went to watch a talk by one of MS's UI designers about all the time and effort they'd put into designing the Vista interface. He gave a demo showing a walk-through of some set-up "wizard" and talked about all the details he thought were important. At no point did he mention the fact that depending on which screen you were on the "next" and "previous" buttons would swap places with the "cancel" button. If you tried to skip quickly through a setup wizard by clicking on the "next" button, you'd cancel everything on screen 4.
This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.
Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.
This perfectly summed up Microsoft's understanding of UX to me. The things MS cares about in design are entirely unrelated to the things users care about. Users want to know where the next button is without having to hunt for it. Users want to not accidentally cancel something they've already spent time on. In many ways, this encapsulated Vista as a whole. None of that OS was made for the user, it was all territorial infighting inside MS.
Sadly, I think Apple has lost this focus now too. The Touch Bar is a load of accidents waiting to happen at any given time, and the new dialog boxes with a stack of buttons below remove the ability to use muscle memory to hit the right one and need to be scanned every time.