A lifetime of weird issues: VSCode and more

Upleveling my gripes + making better software

People who read my blogs know that I'll write mostly about things not working: painful Bluetooth protocols, awkward APIs, and inconvenient programs. That's good, but what advice would I give someone who's looking for a plan to improve, say, VSCode for C# developers.

Count up friction points, and reduce them

A classic PM thing is to make up a metric, measure it, do some work, and declare success. And hopefully measure again, so there's before and after numbers, but weirdly, that's not valued as much as you might think.

So what are the obvious friction points for VS Code? And for reference, here's the start-up screen for my VS Code. Look at all those projects!

The "Recent" list isn't actually my recent files. There's four things listed (blinky, ConstantHtmlTraffic, GenerateWiFiQrCode, and AstronomyOnThePersonalComputer. But in reality, the last files I edited was a set of Markdown files.

The Icons on the left are random, not planned. I have a longer gripe about not meeting the Windows design language, but the icons are particularly bad. Why is the "file" icon marked as "explorer"? Why is the universal "settings" gear marked as "options"? Why is there a "command palette" and yet there's also a "tasks" which isn't a set of my tasks; it's some other commands.

The POV of the app isn't very clear. The original POV was simple: it's an editor. Now it's morphed into a container of random stuff. 

Forward and back aren't consistent. For example, go to the welcome screen, and then run Github. The welcome screen is replaced by a big GitHub screen, but the "back" button doesn't take me back.

 Friction when figuring out a next step due to tone: The explorer in-line help says: "You haven't opened a folder" which feels accusatory instead of helpful. I've opened plenty of folders in my life including folders for VS Code. I just don't have one open right now. There's a fun old anecdote from the early days of computers. The IBM engineers had a hot new (and very expensive) computer with a light marked "idle". Watson had them change it to "ready". "Idle" means that a very expensive computer is wasting money; "Ready" means that an expensive computer is ready to get to work.

Friction because extra steps are demanded but not required: The button "Clone Repository" says "Clone a repository once the Git extension is activated". But in fact, the programmer need do nothing at this point.

Random UX is harder to puzzle out. The button "Clone Repository", when clicked, instantly jumps to a random-feeling part of the screen (it overlays on top of the search bar)

Friction in decoding what dialog boxes mean: The clone repo text box (sorry, there's no better name for it) says I can "pick a repository source". AFAICT, this is then tied to the second item in the fake dialog box, where I get clone from GitHub, but only if I log in. Which is weird, because I'm already logged into GitHub

Friction in cloning the repo. After cloning a repo, I'm asked if I want to open it. That's weird; it's hard to imagine a work flow where opening the repo I just cloned isn't the right choice. 

Friction in open folder. Clicking Open Folder after cloning a repo doesn't go to the folder I just opened. A common practice in Windows is for dialogs to remember previous uses.

Builds are flaky. I asked Chat how to build one of my projects. The resulting command was incorrect (it referenced a non-existing directory hierarchy for the csproj file). When the command was provided with a correct csproj file, it didn't build. The same project builds perfectly in Visual Studio.

Frenetic UX increased anxiety without providing value. When running a build command, the terminal frantically updates a clock every tenth of a second. As an example of the opposite way of life, I present my "Low Distraction Work Timer" that's designed to be entirely non-frenetic.

Added friction from the non-standard UX. VS Code doesn't follow any of the modern Windows UX principles here. It's not effortless or calm, or notably personal (in particular it loves to turn on dark mode even though I've never turned on dark mode on anything, ever). It's not familiar, it's not complete + coherent, or any of the other principles. 

 Solution! How to make it better!

Inspired by the Quick Settings Metric.

The best way to figure out what's wrong with VS Code (or any platform) is to design some simple work flows and use the Quick Settings Metric methodology: write down every single "decision" a user would have to make.

Some example workflows include:

1. Clone a C# project, find a line of code, set a breakpoint, and debug it
2. Create a WinUI3 C# project, add the latest WebView2, and make a one-page UX with a textblock title, a variable-size webview with a button to go to a single hardwired site with a custom User-Agent, and a scrolling textblock to track the webview navigation. Verify that the user-agent is correct. 
3. Create a Blazor web page ...
4. Create a command-line app ...

 Part of the Quick Settings Metric is that the harder the "decision" the user has to make, the more points it costs. Clicking an OK button is relatively cheap; selecting from a list is more, and making the user type something in is even more. For VS Code, telling the user to "log in" but they have to type in their MSA is more expensive than the better solution of allowing users to select from their already-in-use MSA.