New Approach to Usability: Annoy Users

When I saw this article, Microsoft Exec: UAC Designed To ’Annoy Users’, (via Bryant Likes), I thought, “Nah, one of those April Fool’s jokes.” Then I looked at the date—April 10—and realized it wasn’t a joke. In fact, David Cross is quoted saying:

“The reason we put UAC into the platform was to annoy users. I’m serious.”

I was floored. First you create buggy operating systems for years and years, they expose people to all kinds of threats, and now you “fix” it by… annoying them?

Hey, Vista team, great job! I can express my annoyance with your product only in expletives.

It reminds me of commercials. Back home I often saw commercials obviously lipsynced, and I always bothered me that they didn't put in the effort to make such a poor ad slightly better simply by creating one in the native language.
It turns out that the bad lipsyncing annoys us and makes us remember the product much more. They actually shoot the ad in whatever language and purposely re-sync the ad poorly, so we take more notice of the ad.

I guess the quote is out of context. One has to read entire post to understand it. Besides, you can turn off UAC if you wish to. I don't because I see its benefits and clicking yes once or twice per day isn't such an anoyance :-)

Miha, I read the article twice to make sure I wasn't ripping the quote out of context. Of course, by itself the quote doesn't present a complete argument.

The first thing I do is turn UAC off. I believe an OS should be secured on a much deeper level rather than on interaction with the user. An average user would simply click his/her way out of the annoying pop-ups just to make them go away. Which brings us right back where we were all these years.

Sure, in an ideal world it would be like that.
But in the present one, how do you know whether an application is (possbily) harmful or not when running as an admin?

I wouldn't know if it's harmful or not even if it wants to install something and pops up a UAC dialog. :) I mean, *I* would know from experience, but most people aren't power users.

Well, normal people shouldn't be admins :-) and being an admin by default is root of all the evil.
How would your OS protect you against your (I mean normal user's) own ignorance or stupidity?

Yep, and then they throw the Silverlight install popup in your face every time you visit one of their pathetic community sites. Evidently they enjoy pissing their users off to the point where they give in. That strategy is not gonna work with me! They can continue (they will), but I promise I will not be installing Silverlight nor Vista because of this unethical bullshit. I even received a free copy of Vista Ultimate (both 32-bit and 64-bit) at the recent launch event, but the poor discs didn't even make it out to my vehicle! I'm building a new PC as we speak, and it shall run XP 64-bit.

Keep it up Microsoft, and you will continue to lose my respect and patience.

@Josh: I don't get it. You won't install Vista only because of UAC? The feature, if you don't like it, that you can turn off in 30 seconds?
As per Silverlight popup, I saw it only on http://silverlight.net/ and even that popup appears only the very first time you visit the site. Perhaps I've missed the others.
And good luck with 64bit XP and drivers. :-)

I've tried Vista 64 too, and had little luck with drivers. :( It was always a hit-and-miss.

Users see UAC as just another step required to do the thing that the really want to do (install virus ridden junk, reorganise the start menu, etc.) not as something trying to protect them from bad. If UAC came up and said "Are you a completely retarded wife beater? Y/N" it might be useful and make the occasional person click 'No', but as it is everybody just clicks 'yes' and goes about their business building bot nets.

UAC is usefull when you are handling a complain, you ask the customer: did you click yes in the dialog box?, if they repond YES, you can say: then is your fault, you allowed that program to crack your computer. And then the customer gets annoyed.