Hey Mr. Windows Application Install-Script Developer, can I have a chat with you for a moment?<\/p>\n
Did your team have a graphics designer work on the logo? Do you remember how long it took them? Ages, right?<\/p>\n
I bet they said the time spent on it would be worth it – that the branding would help make your tool recognisable. They may have talked about how quickly people recognise faces, and that using a logo allows you to use that to your advantage.<\/p>\n
Changing topic for a second, have you seen the feature in the Control Panel called “Add or Remove Programs”? Yes! It has been there for a while now, hasn’t it? Windows 95? No, I think you’ll find it even pre-dates that quite a bit. It has been there for a long time; I am sure it is very well known.<\/p>\n
I guess uninstalling has to count as a fairly rare operation, doesn’t it? I mean in comparison to, say, launching the application. (If people even bother to uninstall! It seems to me a lot of people just leave old applications lying around on their copious hard-drives.)<\/p>\n
So, yeah, anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about was the Start Menu. I notice that, in the Install Script, you create your own Start Menu subfolder, and you put two icons in it – the shortcut for the application (with the pretty logo) and a shortcut for the uninstaller.<\/p>\n
When you think about it, the shortcut for the uninstaller is nice-to-have, but it is not really<\/em> necessary, is it? People probably know how to uninstall the application anyway. <\/p>\n Suppose, just for the sake of argument, we dropped the Uninstall shortcut. Well, then the folder would only have one item in it. We don’t really need a folder then, do we? We could put the application shortcut straight under Programs.<\/p>\n Hey! Look what happens when you do that! Sure, you do save one click starting the application (which is far more common than uninstalling), but there’s a more important usability improvement. That pretty logo of yours actually appears in the Start Menu, where the user can learn to recognise it. Now they don’t need to sift through dozens of identical Application Folder icons, reading each one to find the name of your product – or is it the name of your company in the Start Menu? I can never remember at the moment when I am trying to start your app.<\/p>\n I just thought I would mention that. I am really glad we got a chance to have this chat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hey Mr. Windows Application Install-Script Developer, can I have a chat with you for a moment?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[29,25,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-influencing-others","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-software-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}