Here we go, I’ve been frustrated by these long enough that I can’t quietly suffer anymore. Here are things that some PM needs to be kicked in the head for. These only work on Windows, obviously.

1) Hit Windows-F. Up pops Windows Find. Windows Find took a book out of Office’s “Book of Crap” and has some stupid animated character show up to “help” you search. In the default instance it is a dog. The dog walks up and asks you what you want to search for. A cute little animation. A cute little animation that blocks the use of the search menu until the animation is complete. At what point did someone decide the animation was more important than usability? Oh and the best part is when you realize this is why those links don’t work, and you disable the stupid dog, you have to watch a 6 second animated clip of the dog going away before you can use find. Oh man, oh man, I hate that dog.

2) I forgot number 2 because I had to reenable the dog to see how long the dog walking away took, and it pissed me off.

3) Everything has a tooltip. Let me tell you something: tooltips are mostly useless. For example, Communicator (an IM program like AIM) does not need to tell me, if my mouse happens to be over the message pane, that these are the “messages that have been sent and received.” To be honest, anyone who doesn’t realize that’s what is going on probably shouldn’t be on the internet anyway. All the tooltip does is cover up text I may be trying to look at and OH MAN I JUST THOUGHT ABOUT THAT STUPID DOG AGAIN.

Kill the Windows Search Dog