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I’m joining in the user interface critiques of other nearby blogs, specifically, OddThinking’s Close that window and Girtby’s What does this button do? I decided to document, with painstaking detail, my favourite user interface problem of the last month or so.

This post is also a homage to yesterday’s Doonesbury.

I had been working on a large presentation for a few days when I decided to make a new version for a different audience. I ripped the presentation apart, cutting it down to a fraction of its former size. At one point, deep in the massacre of my original presentation I save, instead of save as, which of course irretrievably plonked the new lighter weight presentation over the top of my original presentation. I had lost a lot of no-doubt valuable work through my ctrl-s reflex. At this point I curse myself for not checking the presentation into the configuration management system, ever. Then I curse the configuration management system for not being smarter than me. Then I curse the flying spaghetti monster. Arr!

But wait! I recently changed from using a hokey scheduled zip script to backup my laptop’s files. I changed to the far more Windows-y Backup utility because it could also save something called my “System State” which might be important to me one day. For all I know it saves “NSW” in a text file each day, but that might be handy. Might be.

As chance would have it, the Backup utility had run the day before my PowerPoint disaster.

Woohoo! There it is. Victory is mine! My file is on that C: backup inside my satirically named “work” folder. Lets navigate down the directory tree to find it. But wait… there is no + sign here! There is no directory tree from which my beloved file may be rescued.

I must have to restore the whole backup set and extract the file I want. Let’s see what happens when I click the checkbox.

Oh no! There is no option to restore just one file! It’s all or nothing.

At this point, I jump onto my Windows 2000 machine and check out how its Backup utility behaves.

From the same backup set, Backup on Windows 2000 shows me a tree view. It gives me little + signs to click on to navigate down to the “work” directory, and I can pick out my lovingly crafted presentation among the other priceless gems in my backup set and restore it to wholesome, freedom-loving, filespace.

What’s going on? Did Microsoft short-change XP users with an inferior version of the Backup utility? What possessed them to remove the ability to restore individual files? Is it punishment for using a desktop theme that makes my XP laptop look like Mac OS X’s red-headed stepchild?

No. It turns out that the + signs are just hidden until you *click on where they should* be, or double-click the folder you want to expand.

The convention of another more frequently used Windows utility called Windows Explorer is to put the + sign on a folder in a tree view *even if it doesn’t know if there are children of that node*. This convention seems to be based on a performance trade-off — when it’s too expensive to descend the tree to find out if there are child nodes, then render a + anyway. I don’t think I’m making stuff up to say that most users *expect* that when they click a + it might go away to reveal an absence of child nodes. When there is no + sign users *expect* that there are *definitely* no children.

Admittedly this is a tiny user interface defect, but it’s inside an application that needs to be friendly and forgiving.