“Restart now or much sooner than you want to?” Another Microsoft design blunder

– posted December 14th, 2006 by Brian Donohue Comments (4)

I bet you’ve been here before: This morning I started up my machine and soon saw this cheerful dialog box from Windows:

Updating your computer is almost complete. Your computer needs to be restarted for the updates to take effect. Windows will restart you computer automatically in 4:56 minutes. Do you want to restart your computer now? Restart Now. Restart Later.

Not again!

Why this dialog stinks

So Windows automatically downloads an important security update and wants to encourage me to restart. All good.

But what if I don’t want to restart now? What if I’ve got several applications going, plus lots of browser windows, and I’m in the middle of actually being productive? Well, Microsoft does its best to interrupt that productivity, again and again.

With this dialog box, I’m going to have to keep clicking that “Restart Later” button every 10 minutes .

And what if you do nothing? What if you left your machine for a few minutes? You’ll come back to find it restarted on its own, without even letting you know what happened? This is the stuff that makes you want to throw a PC in the bin.

I want a new option in that dialog box:

“Personally punish Microsoft for this atrocious display of design incompetence.”

How Microsoft can embarrass you

It’s bad enough when this happens when you’re at your desk, but this happened to me once when I was delivering a training. The cruel part is that, in the eyes of the audience, Microsoft’s incompetence inevitably spreads over and drips on to me. (Use a Mac instead — then you can have the elegance of Mac unfairly improve your audience’s opinion of you.)

You can fix this problem, just about

Fortunately, you can actually change the settings for this (not that you’ve ever be able to figure this out in a million years without the help of Google). Do a search on this topic and you’ll find loads of people who shared my deep annoyance at Microsoft on this issue. Here’s one that explains how to fix the problem. (Scroll past the rant to find the fix.)

Good interface design can make us happy

To be honest, this morning’s episode wasn’t a big deal. I wasn’t in the middle of anything important, and it was minimal hassle. But it still annoyed me. Then after I did restart, and I restarted Firefox, this message appeared:

Your last Firefox session closed unexpectedly. You can restore the tabs and windows from your previous session, or start a new session if you think the problem was related to a page you were viewing. Restore session. Start new session.

Firefox reopened all my browser windows with the tabs that I had open. Fantastic. Before doing so, they even explain why you might not want to restart your session. This sort of design makes me think: “I love you Firefox.”

When was the last time you thought that about a Windows design?

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Categories Design

4 comments so far

1. Dom on Dec 14th, 2006 - 12:19

Opera had the feature years before firefox got it. Nobody loves Opera

2. Lar on Dec 14th, 2006 - 14:01

Hi Dom,

Opera is a great browser but why did it not grow like Firefox? Do you think it had anything to do with insisting on ads with its free download?

Lar

3. Keith Donegan on Dec 14th, 2006 - 23:18

Opera has finally gone completely ad free a few months ago, but a little too late. The Firefox Marketing Team have done a great job of promoting the browser.

4. Lar on Dec 15th, 2006 - 13:41

I wonder what they have really done to market it, apart from creating a really great browser. I think it’s really the community that did the marketing for them. Perhaps there was a viral or Word-of-mouth marketing campaign behind all that, but I’m not so sure.

From a traditional markting perspective, they got many things wrong. They first named it Phoenix, when that didn’t work for legal reasons they changed it to Firebird. Again there were name conflicts with another organisation so they changed to Firefox.

In marketing terms, not a great start! Apologies, Brian, for hijacking your thread, but it goes to show that a great interface that makes people happy can succeed, despite some fairly basic marketing hiccups!