Pants Full of Unix

Microsoft Project's interface sucks.

Who woulda figured?

MS isn't, you know, well known for user-antagonisitic interfaces or anything. It's not like I was expecting Apple- (I'm talking pre-Mac OS X here; they're on a steep and slippery slope right now) or Adobe-quality workmanship here (and I certainly didn't get that), but this rivals the incompetency of horrendous GUI interface horseshit that the GNU moronic interface-design-by-loosely-connected-committees shove down our throats.

First, they present a GUI interface and use it only for display, forcing text entry where the obvious thing to do is use a mouse gesture. This screen is part of the make-a-new-project wizard (I'm using that so that I don't end up with a lot of crap that doesn't make sense together and have a bitch of a time cleaning it up later… that may happen eventually, but at least my behavior is limited in this “wizard”, making it easily repeatable without logging every mouse click). The point is to define the working hours for the week. They're showing me a week-sized calendar that looks a lot like the calendar they use in Outlook, where you can stroke out on the calendar to select an area when you go to schedule a new appointment. So the first reaction (even without the Outlook pre-training, I'd say, since the blue area is “working hours” and it sure looks “selected”) is to go select some yellow areas that I want to add in. Nope. The red circle indicates what happens when you do so. That's right: it selects the text in that pane. Whoever made this design decision at Microsoft needs to have his or her intestines flayed. So, okay, fine, whatever, I'll just select the times I want from the calendars (at least you allow me to blank the second set of from/to fields to remove the lunch-break-sized hole in everything I might schedule).

Then it gets worse.

That's right. I just got done telling them that I wanted my work hours to be defined as 8 am to 6 pm, Monday-Friday… and they have the gall to ask me how many hours per day, hours per week, and days per month constitute a “time unit”. “It is recommended that you set the settings below to match…” wait, why am I doing this? Why aren't your default values driven by what I just told you about which hours were a “workday”? (Note that they're not; I just defined a 50 hour work week with 10 hours per day, and this is what I got.) How is this an even remotely separate concept from what I just said? You're the fucking computer, you do the math!

I just know this is based off of some middle-management type who thought that this was responding to users' persistant requests for configurability. “Well, who knows, they may have said that they want a work day to be 9-5, but when they say 'day', they want it to mean ten hours!” No, you fucking idiot! I'd've defined the work time like that if that's what I meant! Shut up and get out of my way!

Jesus Fucking Christ riding a Sybian, people! This isn't goddamn rocket science. Here, let me give you a tip: try to find ways to not irritate the user with useless requests for information you already have. That won't solve all of your UI problems, but it's a pretty simple concept that needs to be applied all over the fucking-ass place.

And those of you foaming at the mouth to jump in here with a comment about the precise volume and texture of the balls Microsoft sucks (as compared with Linux! It r0×0rs d00d!) or about how I shouldn't say bad things about GNU or open source software design should think very carefully about whether you really want to have that fight with me in my forum. This post of 's may help you in those considerations.