Why must software companies change the UI?

I like to think of myself as flexible and adaptive.  I'm pretty good at picking up new technology.

However, there are limits.

Last week I upgraded two of the software tools I use for work - Visual Studio 2012 and Telerik Test Studio 2013.

And I wondered who the designers had talked to before changing the UI?

It certainly wasn't me.  Or my coworkers.  Were any customers consulted?  Any customers over 25 years old?

The new flat, black and white UI is hard to read.  It's hard to identify the icons.  The font is smaller.  It looks like the UI from the Windows 3.1 days.  Wait.  Even that included some color.

And I wondered, Why?

Why change the UI at all?  Was there something fundamentally wrong with the old UI?  I didn't notice any problem.

Is it necessary to change the UI just to convince people to upgrade?

I know that many times the UI changes are driving by marketing concerns.

But, shouldn't usability be considered?

Regressing to childhood - sort of

I was thinking the other day that my life is so predictable that blog topics can be difficult to think of.

My life basically consists of work, dogs, TV, and books.

I wondered if I had become too settled, too boring.  Had I reached an age where it was just easier to not look for adventure?

Then I remembered how I spent my days when I was in elementary school.

School, dogs, TV, and books.

I'm not changing.  I'm not settling.

I'm regressing to the person I was at my core.

Two dogs, two sleeping choices

I have a low-profile, king sized bed.  Angel can easily get onto it but she prefers the floor.

Maybe it has something to do with the fan, barely seen at the left. 

Bogie, on the other hand, gets quite comfy on the bed.  

Fortunately, there is still plenty of room for me. 

My upcoming birthday has me bothered

Turning 40 didn't bother me. Turning 50 didn't bother me. 

For some reason, my upcoming 59th birthday bothers me. 

I am disappointed in myself.  I always claimed the philosophy that getting older is better than the alternative.  It seems I don't believe it myself.   

Movies like RED and Invasion Roswell don’t help.  Loved RED.  Invasion Roswell was a cheesy SyFy movie. 

What they both shared was aging characters. There were frequent reference to the “old” guys, “gramps”, “behind the times”, etc.  These people are my age!

Sixty seems to be society's cutoff for “old”.  And despite the fact that I am in better shape now than I was at 48, or even 38, it appears that I am buying into this ageist attitude.   

I find myself using my age as a rationale to myself.  “I’m pretty good at Combat for a 58-year-old”, "I'm pretty flexible", etc. This has never been the case in the past.  I think even in my own mind, 60 is the tipping point to old age.  Bah. Humbug.

I think about retirement a lot more now, maybe because I enjoyed my laid off time. Or maybe because it seems "time" to think about it.  I worry that I won't be allowed to work until I can afford to retire.  

Will some employer look at me and decide I'm too old to bother with?  I worry, even though this hasn't been the case in any of the companies where I have worked. 

Things I used to just accept, I now attribute to age.  Neck aches. Aching knees.  Occasional insomnia. These conditions have been with me for as long as I can remember.  I had knee problems as far back as my teens.  Now I see them as inevitable signs I am falling apart.  

The only real symptom I can attribute to age is the change in my eyesight.  I have at least 6 pairs of reading glasses scattered around the house.  However, until I got Lasik 14 years ago, my eyesight had always been bad.  Just near-sighted instead of far-sighted. 

I am trying to focus on the good things about getting older - I don't care as much whether everyone likes me.  I am (usually) happier than I have ever been.  My accumulated experience comes in handy with home repair, pets, and people. 

Logically, I know my being bothered is ridiculous.  I just can’t seem to stop the feelings. 

My self-confidence is easily affected.

I find it dispiriting how easily my self-confidence can be affected.

My self-confidence is shaky, at best.  I am getting better at believing I am a smart and worthy person.  I have good friends who have better taste than to hang around with a loser.

But it takes so little to make me feel inadequate.

On Friday, the automated testing I had completed for Internet Explorer was not working so well on Firefox. This was expected.  What I didn't not expect was to encounter a message box that I cannot identify.

The test is worthless if I can't identify this message.  And I felt worthless for spending 8 hours investigating this issue and not finding a solution.

This feeling was despite the fact that I have not ever been a Web developer and know nothing about how Firefox is coded.

It is also despite the fact that I have only used the Telerik automation tool for 7 weeks.

And I have never had to identity forms or objects.

So there is no reasonable expectation that I should know how to handle this issue.

But I still felt stupid for not being able to.

No wonder Bogie catches so many pigeons.

These pigeons must be daring each other to be the last to fly away.

Bogie is not exactly hard to see.

  He's less than 6 feet away from them.
  He's big.
  He's mostly bright white.

As a friend of mine suggested - maybe Bogie is a pigeon whisperer.

Taking Bogie to the wash was a bad idea.

My house backs up against a wash.  For non-Arizonans, that's a required, undeveloped area with depressions intended to capture rain runoff.  We don't get much rain, but what we get comes in torrents.  The washes, or retention basins, are there to prevent flooding of streets and houses.

Our wash is bordered with a 2-rail metal fence to keep motorcycles and four-wheelers out. When I had my other dogs, Rags, Peanut, and Angel, we would go out into the wash once a week.  I would let them off-leash and each dog would explore at its own pace.

After Peanut died, Angel didn't want to go to the wash any longer. When I first got Bogie, his leash training was negligible and I couldn't trust him off leash. So we hadn't been out in the wash in over a year.

Someone recommended a long lead leash for Bogie to see how he would react.  It sounded like a good idea. I bought a 50' leash.  Today seemed like a good day to do it.  Angel's knee was recovering nicely. The weather was decent.  I took Bogie on a normal two mile walk to tire him a little.

We were all set.

The walk went well at first.  Bogie was aware he was on a leash and behaved accordingly.  The lead only got caught on a low shrub twice.  And each time Bogie came to the 2-rail fence, he turned away.  He turned away even at a low spot where he could have gotten under without much ducking.

As we got to the end of the metal fence where we would turn back to our house, Bogie decided to crouch and go under the fence.  That's when I realized that a 50 foot lead is not an effective deterrent.  Too much delay.  By the time I stopped him, Bogie was on the wrong side of the fence.

In the Cholla cactus. 

I kept the lead tight as I moved hand over hand toward him.  He didn't want to come back to my side of the fence and fought me.  Which got him into more Cholla. 

When I finally got him to come back to me, I pulled the green, fleshy Cholla pads off right there.  Thankfully I had put on leather gloves so the leash wouldn't hurt my hands.  Some of the spines stuck in my gloves, but that was better than sticking to the skin of my hands.

I took him back to the house, kept him on the leash while I went out to the garage for pliers and to the kitchen for a bowl.  I kept him on the leash so I could prevent him from trying to pull the spines out with his mouth. 

Out to the patio to remove the spines – from all four paws, his right hip, and his tail.  The pliers were useless on the small spines.  I used my fingers. 

He fought me part of the time, but I wouldn't let go of the paw I was holding.  Finally, he gave up and laid down.  Until I switched paws and we struggled again.  And he laid down again.

I ran my hands over his body until I was sure I had all the spines removed.  The last spine was a tiny piece in his tail that took several tries to get.  Not once did he whine or cry. 

I think that is our last visit to the wash.