Blog » Another Good Feedback from Microsoft
Microsoft is the best source when it comes to good windows user experience etiquettes. This post is about another good example from Microsoft on providing appropriate feedback to the user.
I experienced this as I was installing the Windows Live Mail program on my laptop. After I started the setup program I notices two very interesting messages appear on the setup dialog box that actually made me smile.
The first one showed up as the setup was taking longer than expected to download the packages from the Internet:
“Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes”
And the second one showed up when it was installing the downloaded packages:
“Installation may take a few minutes. Feel free to do other things while you wait.”
This way of acknowledging the user is very important for a better human-computer interaction. I think the traditional 3 limits for response times have to be altered to facilitate the sophistication available on modern hardware. Nowadays, the time limit for keeping the users attention on a given context is way below 10 seconds. This value continues to shrink down if feedback is further delayed from the machine. You may have heard people say ‘my computer is so slow’ if the software has lack of appropriate feedback. Software installation packages that download certain parts of the package from the Internet are notorious in breaking users’ patience. This eventually leads the user disliking and discontinuing the software. The move towards providing friendly messages certainly help people to bond with their software better than they are now.
2 comments
John, thank you for pointing this out. However, I did not experience the situation you have mentioned. When I installed the Live Messenger, it installed without issues.
But I guess if the setup doesn’t give useful error messages when it goes wrong, then that branch of the setup is clearly a failure in proper user experience.
I’m typically an MS fan but I disagree about the Live Installer. I’ve put it on my old work computer, my home computer, my home laptop and my work laptop and it’s failed on everyone. I’ve had to delete registry keys, hidden folders and try again on multiple occasions and I get little in the way of useful error messages that help.
For instance, it gets stuck on “sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes” for about 5 minutes before it ends with “To try to fix the problem, click “Try again later”". Well, it never works when I “try again later” probably for the same reason it didn’t work the first time… as to what that reason is for sure, I’ll never know because they don’t share the contents of that error. Very, very frustrating. The live suite has some great products, but the installation process is sub par at best.