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0 pointstanzam7512y ago0 comments

It's simply astonishing that the "Vista shut down menu" meme continues to come up after all this time, and that the wrong lessons continue to be drawn.

Between Windows Vista and Windows 7, Microsoft changed exactly one thing. They replaced the two icons with a single text label that said "Shut down."

Nothing else changed. There was still a fly-out menu. There were still half-a-dozen options that users vaguely understood. They still had strange labels like "Hibernate" and "Sleep." There was still a "Log out" option. There was still a "Lock" option.

Turns out, none of that was the problem. The problem was that people didn't understand what the power icon did. Replace the icon with text that said "Shut down", and suddenly they knew what it did, and started clicking on it. They stopped opening the fly-out menu, and the "Paradox of Choice" went away.

The lesson is not that you should stop offering choices to your users! You can offer simplicity and choice at the same time. Just stop replacing text labels with confusing icons.

Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000 had a "Shut down" text label. Windows XP had both an icon and text. Windows Vista had an icon but no text. Windows 7 went back to just text. The only design that caused confusion was Windows Vista.

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3 comments · 1 top-level

gnaffle12y ago· 2 in thread

I agree that the main problem wasn't the options, but I do think that some of options are were unnecessary (the distinction between hibernate and sleep, for instance).

The real lesson is that design by comittee over years trying to reach a compromise will often result in terrible design decisions. It wouldn't even have been a problem if they had kept the icon, if it just did what people expected it to! (shutdown, not sleep as was the default). And now we have Windows 8, where they've hidden the shutdown menu inside Settings.

lurkinggrue12y ago

Sometimes a designers experience does not match other people. Example is I use reboot and logout far more than I use Shutdown

tanzam75OP12y ago

I agree that the default was wrong in Windows Vista. I disagree that an icon would've been OK -- as Joel Spolsky pointed out, he had no idea what the icon would do. That's why he opened the fly-out menu, and that's why a lot of users opened the fly-out menu. Where they got confused.

I just found it frustrating that the tech press echo chamber ganged up on the fly-out menu, when that wasn't even the problem. The fact that Microsoft eliminated the complaints with just one button in Windows 7 shows exactly where the actual problem was.

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