The Simple Interface

Let’s talk this morning about how incredibly sucky and annoying the Windows interface world really is.
Now of course, you’d expect this from me, a Mac user since 1984. But seriously, just a few moments using this bastard of an operating system is enough to make me scream. Let’s take one, and only one, example from this morning.
I have Windows installed on my MacBook Pro, mostly as a curiosity because after using it for only minutes I am likely to shut it down and not venture back into it for months. This morning, I started up windows only to be greeted with beeps and voice from the virus program updating itself. (This is, in itself, an annoyance just because in the 22 years I’ve been using Macs, I’ve never had to use a virus program.)
After poking around trying to figure out how to open the freakin’ virus program — clicking the tiny icon in the “tray” only brought up an information window), I was greeted by something that the Avast! folks call a “simple user interface.”

And here’s what their “simple user interface” looks like.

Now, you tell me — looking at this simple interface, can you tell where one should click to turn off the sounds this program makes?
Hell, there isn’t even a menubar. So, one must mouse over all the various interface elements and wait for pop-up tool tips to figure out what they do.
Would you believe that the little “Eject” symbol on the top left is what you press to get the main menu?! (On the Mac, the menu bar is always there, so there’s no need to hunt for the options you want.) Eject? What does that have to do with a menu? Since the other icons apply to disks and other media on the computer, the obvious function for the eject button is… well, eject. But this is the Windows world, where nothing is what it seems and nothing is simple.
So, clicking eject brings up a control panel window. Finally, there’s what I was looking for — a button for “Sound.” I clicked it, and was presented with this:

After jumping through all these hoops, the sound pane doesn’t even have options for sound. You have to press ANOTHER button to go on to sound options. (Although, you can simply mute all sounds from this pane, which I did.)

And there is the nub of the problem: every single operation in Windows takes at least twice as many clicks and twice as much time as on a Mac; more often than not it takes even more effort to do a single thing. The interface is a mess, it is the antithesis of intuitive, and it is not likely to change because there is such a huge industry out there devoted to technical support for Windows. There are millions of people whose livelihood depends on answering phone calls from people who can’t figure out where to click to do one simple thing.
And while there are repair depots and hardware tech support for Macs, you rarely hear of calls from people who can’t figure out how to change the volume on their iMac.

That said, let me take aim at the other side: the new version of iTunes takes a page from the Windows world by tweaking the interface so badly that no one can figure out anymore what the buttons do. To make this worse, the buttons come and go depending on what you click on in the main window.