Examples of usability disasters. 6 Disasters Caused by Poorly Designed User Interfaces. Until humans learn how to command machines with their minds (or vice versa), we're always going to need some sort of menu, control panel or whatever to interact with our machines and tell them to do our jobs for us.
And these controls had better be really freaking clear, and simple, and easy to use. A speedometer doesn't do any good if, say, it's mounted inside the glove box and requires you to do calculus to read it. Yet in the real world, you run into interfaces that are almost that bad. Final thoughts on Windows 8: A design disaster. A week ago, Microsoft delivered the Windows 8 Release Preview, the final pre-release of the platform before the forthcoming operating system hits the release-to-manufacturing stage.
OEMs get their hands on the final code at this stage, which is followed by Windows 8's general availability, where it's available to us all. I've been following Windows 8 closely over the past few months, spending a lot of time not only with the official releases but also with a number of leaked builds, and I've had the chance to install the operating system on a variety of hardware platforms, both old and new. However, since my primary working platform is a desktop system, this is where I've had the chance to spend the most time with Microsoft's new operating system.
I'm now ready to sum up my Windows 8 experience with a single word: awful.