Given that I am CEO of a company (Zula) developing a user facing service, I am sensitive to user-friendliness of new apps/gadgets/”computers”. In order to understand why I ended up with a Toshiba laptop running Windows 8, a little background.
For the past two years I have mainly worked off an iPhone, an iPad, and sometimes an old (3-4 years) “desktop” in my winery office.
My favorite, hands down -- the iPad, along with a Logitech cover keyboard. Unfortunately it was stolen two months ago, and since then I have trying to figure out with what to replace it. A healthy combination of procrastination and "too-busy" have had me limping along with my iPhone and borrowed time on winery desktop. Definitely cut into my productivity.
On the home front, various wintel (Intel based running Windows) laptops died or slowly ground to almost a complete halt when trying to do anything beyond stare at the screen saver. My almost-seven year old son is going through a phase where he needs to lose himself in computer games to calm down. My older kids have long figured out that having no cable does not mean they need to miss the latest content (what we used to call TV shows and/or movies) -- but rather they can tune in via Hulu, Youtube, Amazon, and more. But all that requires an available surfing device.
I bought two HP Chromebooks, but unfortunately found out days after that that version of HP Chromebook suffered from a defective charging system. Google sent me new chargers but they didn’t work. Now I need to go chase HP/Google to replace them.
Which means at home we are down to an old laptop running Windows XP that turns off randomly and has zero battery strength left (needs to be plugged in to work) and Haviva’s Mac Air. Now Haviva is justifiably sensitive about kids using her Mac Air, but regardless they take it all the time, challenging Apple to fight off all the viruses they seem to attract.
So I have been under pressure for some time to get something new for the house…
At Ben-Gurion Airport this morning I had some time to check out laptops in the duty-free. And realized that I was embarking on 4 day business trip with just my iPhone, which is bit risky. On top of that, I thought of typing long emails (or blog posts, like this one) on my iPhone and the pressure mounted to get something.
There was a table of Mac laptops, which with all the different configurations, but still a small table. Apple makes beautiful machines without too many different options. And there were tables and tables of WinTel laptops. Toshiba, Assus, Lenovo, and more. Prices all over the place, options way too confusing to understand.
Finally I said to the salesman “look, I just need a computer for the kids to use.” He suggested the Toshiba, it was a reasonable price and I said OK. Then I saw it even had DVD player -- I thought that was a cute retro touch, but will allow us to play the hundreds of DVDs Haviva made me keep when we recently moved (our DVD player died last year).
Salesman asked me if I wanted him to “take it out of the box and set it up.” I wasn’t sure what he meant by that but said OK, however explained that I wanted the settings and all commands to be in English (I love the Hebrew language but even after 18 years I simply can’t follow Hebrew computer speak, gives me a headache). Of course, after I opened the computer waiting at the gate (plane was delayed so had time to play) I saw he chose Hebrew as the default language….
OK, back to the computer itself. The laptop is running Windows 8. Very pretty tiles. First problem -- how to get online? I could not find in any of the pretty tiles something like good old wireless network manager. Anything I did push simply said I wasn't connected (which I knew). Finally I found a way to get to a familiar looking screen which had the network doo-hicky [that is a very technical term for the traditional network icon]. Clicking on that allowed me to select the free WiFi network in the airport (supplied by Netvision, talk about a blast from the past).
OK, now on-line. Uh…what to do now? I clicked on Office icon, but that just asked me to sign up to buy license. I just bought a computer, I should be able to type some text without paying -- no? Finally found my way to email app, which asked me to sign up for an outlook email address. That seemed to be free (also could have signed up for Hotmail but that would have been way too anachronistic). I sent myself a test message to my gmail address and -- it worked! Very exciting.
Allowed me to be comforted that at the very least I will be able to use the email application to type on the plane (which I am doing). Almost every other tile was an add for something, clicking on resulted in Internet Explorer being launched and needing to buy a subscription.
Couldn’t figure out how to set the time and date.
Bottom line, on my experience so far this laptop, and it’s rendering of Windows 8, gets a big fat ZERO on the intuitiveness index.
I am sure Microsoft had many, many UX/UI experts involved over several years to deliver the experience I just went through. I am sad to have to say that outside of team meetings not sure what they were doing all that time. Outside of the pretty tiles, which does take us away from the standard and very-tired “start” button, Windows 8 needs a lot of work before regular people like me will enjoy using it.
But soon I will be back on line, will download Chrome, and use the laptop as glorified Chromebook. Hopefully with a charger that works!
