The Microsoft Surface Setup Experience has some Issues
Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 3:49AM I found this post from a company called FD Kinesis in which they describe their frustrations with setting up a new Microsoft Surface computer: Skin Deep Usability. Some sample problems: it took half an hour and a support call to figure out where to connect the power cord; to start using the machine (by agreeing to the license agreements) they had to plug in a keyboard and mouse, something not mentioned in the documentation, and also just a bit ironic.
To be fair, out-of-the-box setup isn't the main focus of this product, but it's still an important part of any user experience, even if the problems are only encountered once.
An excerpt:
We still had an hour or so to go before we could call it a day –
time filled with other mind-bogglingly frustrating usability issues –
but in the end, we did get it working. And we did deploy a truly
dynamic and stunning user experience on the Surface, which our client
is extremely happy with. And we’re still very excited to do more
development on this platform. But for all the good experiences I’m
going to get from interacting with this machine down the road, I’ll
always remember feeling like a character in a The Davinci Code on that first day just to try to get the status lights to turn pink…excuse me, rhodamine.
And the shame is that it didn’t have to be this way.
No doubt it took a lot of very smart people a very long time to
bring this machine to market. It’s obvious that this represents the
dedicated labor and craft of programmers, artists, designers, engineers
and more, and I honor their work. But it’s a shame that Microsoft
failed to with even the most basic usability review, which would have
turned up the issue of the power cord. Even a simple, final walk-thru
of the most common Use Case - that of a customer who buys and receives
a new Surface unit - would’ve revealed the fact that there is no
instruction, anywhere, to open up the keyboard and mouse and use it to
launch the software.
Link: Skin Deep Usability.
Updated to clarify a little bit: I don't think there's anything wrong per se with using a physical keyboard and mouse with Surface -- sometimes they're the right tools (and Steve Bathiche from MS made this same point today at the IDC conference). The issue here is that the instructions apparently didn't say that this was the first thing you need to do. And of course one person's report of problems like this should be taken with a grain of salt.
Reader Comments (2)
It might as well be the user...