Right-click freeze has literally never happened to me. Check that you don't have misbehaving shell extensions: the most common culprit is a program that adds its own item to the right-click menu but doesn't play well with others and winds up hanging when the shell asks it what it wants to do.
This seems like issues that just shouldn't be allowed to happen. An unresponsive extension, a network drive not answering etc should never need to block the UI - yet it always did in Windows. They really really need to make all such things async and simply show the context menus without the extensions, or show a spinner when explorer wants to show a slow network location.
That the message pump of the explorer windows stop because a server in another country is down must be a design that is extremely hard to change in windows explorer - because they have surely seen this problem.
>They really really need to make all such things async and simply show the context menus without the extensions
but then you have another problem: if the system load is high (eg. hard drive is busy), then context menu items would randomly disappear. That's arguably worse than before, because it happens randomly.
>This UI refresh will reportedly include an overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps, and they will be an optional change.
How often has an optional change become the only option after awhile?
Windows just adds this stuff and keeps the old cruft (in some cases it’s necessary because the Win 10 network settings are so awfully lacking you need the legacy option). We now have settings dating back to Win 95 with no uniform guideline concept or lack of vision.
It is my understanding that the biggest issue with Control Panel is 3rd party control panel widgets that would be incompatible with any wholesale changes. That may of course just be the official party line too...
Unlikely to happen soon and also happen all at once. Device manager, Log viewer and a bunch of other system tools basically look the same as they've done since I think the 90s. Nothing wrong with that, the stuff works and changing it will just incur extra costs for everyone involved.
Why? The old control panel is infinitely more useful in most cases than the new one. Just look at Add/Remove programs -- the new one is ridiculous compared to the classic one.
I'm not against the new Settings dialog but I don't see why anything that works needs to be removed.
> The Windows Core User Experiences team builds interfaces for Windows and Surface Hub customers around the world, and we’re looking for a collaborative, inclusive and customer obsessed engineer to help us build the future of Windows Experiences!
> On this team, you’ll orchestrate and deliver experiences that ensure Windows is a great user experience for our customers.
> You will have the opportunity to build delightful, polished, experiences for Windows as well as for our Surface Hub product line. You will play a key role in open-ended explorations, prototyping and identifying business opportunities for Windows experiences. We're looking for collaborative engineers to bring their passion, drive and technical acumen to help us accomplish these goals.
> We have a wide spectrum of fantastic opportunities to further advance your career and expand your skillset – from building UI using the latest cutting-edge XAML technologies, designing new APIs in conjunction with the our platform team partners, to interfacing with hardware teams to build the essential platform and infrastructure in our OS - as well as working directly with our customers to understand their needs and deliver magical software that exceeds their expectations!
How do they get from that to "This UI refresh will reportedly include an overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps" is my question?
Sounds like a normal job ad for any UI or design related engineer.
> Talk about making a news story out of nothing! ....
The article states your post is the job posting after it was edited. The original had the text:
"On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers"
Still, with that (reportedly) missing paragraph, it's still a large jump from vague "sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences" to conclusive "overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps". But hardly the first times news organizations add their own flair to stuff.
What times in the past did Microsoft make a "sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences" that didn't include an "overhaul of the Start Menu, Action center, and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps"?
Keyword here is visual. Every one I just looked at revamped all the things you claim is a large jump. Given that every previous one seemed to make those changes, I think a large jump would be to conclude this one will not.
Thanks for some sanity. This looks like a standard job form. I worked on the Windows Core UX team for a very long time (technically, it was renamed from Core UX to Core Experiences Evolved to Desktop Experience to..... I might have forgotten one, but it was renamed to Core UX shortly before I left), and this could have been the job posting for my team at any point.
While there are things to improve—better UI scaling, type rendering, dark mode, touch compatibility—I personally would like to see a return to simplicity.
The Windows UI has been inconsistent and weird since Windows 2000 (or XP if you turned off the Sesame Street theme).
I'm hoping they finally bring native tabs to their file explorer. It's annoying to have to open multiple windows if you want to browse multiple directories. In addition, I'm hoping for a "column view" like mac has.
Not again. Now, anno 2021, it's so messy with all different UI-kits they've standardized in the past 20+ years that a Linux desktop looks clean in comparison.
UI redesigns of desktop operating systems are usually opposite of exciting these days. You could be damn sure they'll further optimize it for touchscreens no one uses.
Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well. The best thing you could do is revert most of the last 10 years of "innovation" and then leave them alone forever. Stop reinventing stuff that has worked well for decades.
I have often wondered when a UI will be 'settled' and won't need to be updated anymore. But then what will the UI designers do? Idle fingers make new designs?
Desktop UIs are hardly mature, but for the last 15 years UI innovation has been about putting lipstick on a pig rather than deep-diving subsystems and figuring out how to graphically represent and control them.
Designers aren't doing subsystem deep-dives, they're just implementing subsets of existing wholly inadequate GUIs using new widgets. Conversely, systems people who understand the un-GUIed subsystems aren't doing design work to better expose them, or expose them at all. It's an unproductive and frustrating stalemate.
Desktop UIs are mature, and were such by the end of '00s, in the sense that they've made the best use of the keyboard and mouse. Sure, it's okay to add subtle new things, like window snapping on Windows (the thing where you drag it to the edge of the screen) or inertial scrolling on macOS. It's absolutely not okay to take a perfectly functional and polished UI and "refresh" it with disproportional controls and huge fonts because people now carry phones in their pockets. The only good reason for a complete UI redesign is change in the way it's interacted with, for example because some novel kind of input device came about. But then again, the mere existence of touchscreens shouldn't be detrimental to the UX of those who use keyboard and mouse.
You're talking about cross-cutting UI concerns (themes, widgets, window system), which I agree are largely mature, while I'm talking about vertical combinations of specific UIs and subsystems, which aren't mature by a long shot.
Example: "delete file" on Windows. Windows has relatively aggressive file locking, but if you try to delete a file that's open, it just errors out, it doesn't tell you what's using the file and give you the option to (force) quit it.
See also: networking, disk management, permissions, sound, preferences, ipc, etc. There are a hundred of these "just needs a bit of work" UI verticals, but designers keep trying to solve these problems with themes and functionality subsets, which are doomed to fail because the underlying issue is a lack of expressiveness in the existing UI, not an excess of it. Meanwhile, systems people live with "just use CLI / sysinternals / wireshark / nmap" like it isn't an issue that bog-standard tasks still require arcane tools in 2020 (arcane by the standards of typical users).
Yeah, in my Windows days, I remember having a lot of small utilities that filled the gaps of the OS. There was one for deleting files too, I don't remember the name, probably unlocker something — it showed you all currently open descriptors for a file and allowed you to close them. As opposed to macOS, which straight up tells you "this file is being used by X.app, close it to try again" when you try to delete an open file.
But this is how it works, which is UX. UI is more about how it looks and how it's interacted with.
They're actually still pretty archaic but no one's cared to do anything about it for decades so we've all been trained to accept the shortcomings. Stuff like background processes grabbing the focus while I'm typing my password, lame modals with an "OK" button, mysterious delays all the time, etc etc etc.
If you mean pixel density, then sure it can be made scalable by using vector graphics or using several different dpi variants of assets. All without changing visual appearance even. Apple managed to do this exact thing in 2012.
> Desktop UIs are hardly mature, but for the last 15 years UI innovation has been about putting lipstick on a pig rather than deep-diving subsystems and figuring out how to graphically represent and control them.
I disagree. To various degrees, the last "15 years of [desktop] UI innovation" have been trying to push trendy touch UI concepts into places where they don't belong.
I don’t think Microsoft will make the same mistake again by pursuing a touch UI on the desktop. Windows 8 and the Metro UI was a huge waste of time and effort that really harmed Microsoft.
What I think they are pursuing is how to monetize Windows. They tried it in Windows 10 with some start menu shenanigans, but people hated it and you can find tons of articles about how to hack Windows to get rid of that shit. So this role’s job will be to find a design that supports monetization without pissing off users.
have they considered, you know, charging money for the OS? I would be happy to pay a reasonable yearly subscription fee for a telemetry-free windows install.
On the contrary. I think desktop UI design needs lots of improvements. To me the peak was around Windows 7 but that's not "perfect" - it needs more improvements in the same direction. Probably KDE is a small improvement over Windows 7, but of course has some drawbacks by being exclusively on Linux. Still, it's my favorite modern desktop UI.
Windows 10 is much better than Win 7. IMO one reason, desktop search that works. Some may consider the reliance on search a UI failure, but I think it has become the dominant organizational principle. The other being pinned apps to the task bar.
...interesting... my experience with Win10 search is the complete opposite, it's so broken that I'm really not sure why there is a search feature in Windows10 in the first place. The only way to "fix it" is to install an alternative start menu (like OpenShell) which has a search box which actually works (somewhat, but better than the default search).
Yes for example the new Snipping Tool. It is so slow when you click the save button. I just expect instant the save dialog, but there is a small time delay.
It just does not feel good. And yes, all Syytem Menus are a mess and what you want is allways somewhere hidden. No wonder you need a good search on your desktop, because without you wouldn't find anything.
Design is features. The problem is that all designers trip over each other to win the high-visibility low-effort turf of top-level theming, when the work that actually needs to be done involves paying more attention to individual features, where there is actual progress to be made.
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
> Some may consider the reliance on search a UI failure
No, it's brilliant, in principle. See: spotlight on Mac OS X.
The problem is that Windows Search just doesn't work. I install apps, it can't find them unless they have a start menu enry. I save documents, it can't find them. It does find plenty of irrelevant websites and spurious results from caches, but it misses files sitting directly in my documents folder. Sometimes it returns a result from a partial name hit but when I accidentally type the next character (correctly!) the hit disappears, and it doesn't come back when I remove the offending correct character. It's a mess.
I used to supplement Windows Search with launchy, but then launchy started bugging out. Now I use keypirinha, which intentionally configures bad defaults to encourage you to learn its config file format. Mega cringe. Once you do, though, it does actually work.
Interesting. I’ve never had a problem with desktop search in Win10. It’s all I use and it finds pretty much everything I try. I wonder if indexing issues can end up with vastly different experiences for users.
the windows 10 search bar is really good for finding local stuff. it's unfortunate that they decided to use it as another vector for pushing bing and edge. if it would allow me to use the search engine and browser of my choice for web results, it could be an extremely powerful feature. it's definitely a value add for me, but it's frustrating to think about how much was left on the table.
Problem is that it often doesn’t work. I can type in “calc” and get a list of web links instead of the calculator app. The search box in explorer also sometimes finds things and sometimes doesn’t without any rhyme or reason (at least none that I can figure out).
The parent was talking about UI, and he's right, the Win7 Aero and its Start Menu are superior to everything since. They could certainly bring back that UI with better internals, including Search.
However, Search Everything is the absolute best search tool for Windows, regardless of version.
Windows 7 was their last true desktop UI. What came after was the mobile tax, driven by their lust for appstore margins. We had to gradually claw it back since the Windows 8 disaster, but I'm confident they will never give up.
I agree, windows 7 was doen well and it was a successful os. Following that is the distaster of Win 8 and the irrevocable disaster windows 10 is. There really is no hope to get a better version every other 2 iterations of windows
The touch screen UI experience design isn't well thought out.
I never use tablet mode even though I have a few windows detachable devices.
All they need to fix it is to realize that windows isn't a mobile is. And that windows users keep their important stuff in the desktop.
In tablet mode, desktop is hidden and you'd would have to jump through hoops to access it.
It seems windows cannot distinguish between a touch screen tap and a mouse. Because long pressing on desktop randomly shows a touch optimized context menu or the normal one designed for mouse.
Ironically today I tried to pair a Bluetooth device on my wife's Surface Pro 4 and I told her to hit the Windows key and start typing Bluetooth and then select the result for managing bluetooth devices. She opened it up and we were unable to add the Bluetooth device no matter what we did. It was the most frustrating experience I had in months (I am a macOS and Linux user). Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows. One had the old school look, the other had some modern oversized bullshit look. Turns out one of those two worked, the other didn't. Windows search returned the non working one first. In the taskbar was a Bluetooth icon to the other one. WTAF?
Honestly, fuck Windows for being such an utter pile of shit.
They don't need a UI re-design. They need a fucking working operating system.
The Control Panel in "small icons" or "large icons" viewing mode defaults to organizing the contents into columns. That's OK, that's pretty easy to read through.
The contents are also in alphabetical order. That's good, too, it's something the user is likely to expect.
Within the columns, the contents are not organized alphabetically! Instead the alphabetical ordering completely ignores the very clear column structure. Who does this?!
If you’re interested, look up “God Mode” it’s a shortcut that can be created which gives you access to a complete control panel which covers everything.
It seems that God isn't omnipotent. God mode still doesn't allow me to tell my machine that I want to open .jpeg files with the Adobe Photoshop installed on my machine (like I can with .jpg) and not Photoshop Elements available through the Microsoft store). There is no option to search my file system for an arbitrary .exe.
Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows.
Oh, see, I thought this was going to end differently. Like how you typed in "Bluetooth settings" and Windows decided to bring up a web page with instructions on how to change the Bluetooth settings on Windows 10, instead of showing the g-ddamned applet.
Because that's how it seems to work on my machine most of the time.
Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.
WIN+"calc" opened up a Bing search for the term "calc" inside of Edge for me the other day. I imagine in a few more years that will actually be the expected behavior.
I was expecting that the application wouldn't appear at all, whatever they tried.
The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.
What Microsoft should be doing with this "Windows is back" initiative is comprehensively rethinking everything below the launcher and window management level. The visual presentation could follow the very same "fluent" system or whatever it is Microsoft is calling its current design language, but all the stuff from Control Panel to mounting network shares would be harmonized with the same UI metaphors and mental models.
What Microsoft almost certainly will do is yet another pass at launchers and window widgets, leaving its three-decades-deep sediment of system functionality largely untouched.
Couldn't agree more. The pragmatist in me would rather MS understand that people don't want quarter inch drills, they want quarter inch holes, and yet another part of me wonders how they could freshen up the UI. But what I want more than anything else is consistency. Either is fine, but both aren't.
This was somewhat forgivable when Windows 10 came out, you can't do everything at once. But they seem to have completely stopped working on it 5 years ago.
And touchscreen all-in-one desktops. Touchscreen external monitors are not as popular, which is unfortunate since I use them and want higher resolution ones.
Every screen I have is a touch screen. Laptops, all-in-ones, external screens, on Windows and Linux.
Yeah I saw that comment too. We had to search for two weeks to find an affordable non Surface touchscreen because it was my 16 years olds preference for school work.
I get it, laptops with touchscreens exist, but do people actually use them, or do they buy them because it's hard to find a laptop that doesn't have a touchscreen?
Maybe we'll finally get one Settings area again so we don't have stuff like: Search 'mouse' > Click 'Mouse settings' > Don't find any option to change pointer speed > Click the tiny 'Additional mouse options' text > Click 'Pointer Options' > Change the mouse pointer speed.
> UI redesigns of desktop operating systems are usually opposite of exciting these days. ... Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well.
I couldn't agree more. Your points are exactly why I've remained a happy Linux Mint user for nearly a decade. I don't dread OS or desktop environment updates, precisely because I know my chosen desktop environment will mostly remain the same (if not exactly the same).
I'm not sure the version where Excel went from desktop app to rendered monster, but if we could roll that back I'd be most grateful. The number of UX issues that generated surely was predictable.
The Desktop UI paradigm has definitely matured, and requires only some fine tuning here and there. Mostly with graphics and not design.
What Microsoft really need is a Window strategy. Where is it heading. Its source of revenue in the future. Its longtime programming framework, library, API Strategy etc....
I believe they have WinUI 3.0 now? What happened to WPF, UWP and WinForms? And they are moving all of the Outlook Apps to Electron for cross platform development. [1] And just look at .Net. Have they finally settled on .Net Core now?
May be because I am on Mac so I am confused. It is not Apple are perfect, but looking from the outside either Microsoft doesn't have a clue or they just dont care.
They acknowledged that with Project Reunion, where Win32 and UWP are supposed to be merged, but with what is going on, and probably other internal issues, it has been very slow at bringing out that vision.
Hope they aim for consistency in the refresh. I don't mind constant refreshes or redesigns. I don't care that I'm slightly less efficient in the modern settings pages than in the old control panel. I'm happy to lose a bit of efficiency to have a nice design. Just like I want web pages to have a nice design even at a (reasonable) cost of readability or usability.
But what does bug me is when the refreshes are half baked. Either refresh everything visible and hide the old one entirely behind some obscure command if it must remain, or don't refresh at all.
I hate it so much when I want to do some obscure thing on Windows, but when I go to the place you used to be able to do it, it's gone! Replaced with a "modern" control panel which doesn't support that obscure thing. Instead, I have to find my way to the old window via a different route. Eventually the original control panel pops up and I can change that setting.
I don't have a problem with changing things if it replaces all the functionality.
Yep. So it's really not finished. In order to be finished, it obviously has to do everything. Since the old UX must exist forever for compat, I could accept some part of the most extreme settings to be hidden there (After all - in the end we are still resorting to registry edits for anything that isn't in the control panel!) - but the network card settings, audio device settings that are used by almost every user, is still in the old world.
It works, but navigation is confusing, the experience switching between different paradigms is jarring, you can't search for things from the top level and find it in the control panel and so on. They have eft it at 60% finished instead of the 95% or 99% that would make it actually usable.
Complete agreement. It's like having two sons named Daniel. One's handsome and useless, one's smart and useful. Whenever you call for Daniel, the handsome one pushes the smart one down the stairs and gets to you first, when all you needed was the smart one to come here and figure out how to connect your microphone for you.
"This UI refresh will reportedly include an overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps, and they will be an optional change. "
Call me cynical but I doubt they will be "optional" for long. At launch perhaps, but Microsoft has tended to transition the "optional" into the "default" then into the "only" version in the past.
on top of that UWP/XAML story is not really that good when you compare to SwiftUI on macOS
the whole macOS experience is what they should AIM for
but that means giving up on all the legacy bits that keep stacking up since forever..
Windows need a massive spring cleanup, i'd say a reboot, but i'm not sure the people are microsoft are this courageous, i have the feeling they are just lazy
Maybe I’m just coming from a place of ignorance (I haven’t used Windows for years), but why? The Win10 UI looks to me probably the most attractive and usable it’s ever been. Enough so that I’d probably feel comfortable switching to it if I decided the Mac isn’t for me anymore.
Not that I don’t trust MS’s recent design direction, but I have to wonder if such a major overhaul is warranted.
And whatever they miss in the third option they’ll shove it in a fourth one then a subsequent version they’ll do some infuriatinng consolidation between the two that will drive users mad even more, the tutorials will be pointing users to all sort of methods that no longer work. That’s the way Windows’s been. Every other 2 iterations they eventually got it working but the disaster inbetween was the most frustrating experience. No wonder people held onto older version of windows until they no were no longer supported. Upgrading wasn’t worth the wased time most of the time
This is the problem they need to fix. Two different looks, with the modern look removing needed functionality, sacrificing functionality for UI goodness.
“finish migrating the UI; it does not require yet another UI overhaul.”
They have been working on this now for 8 years without much progress. For any serious work you still to know if the setting is in the old control panel or the new. I don’t think they are even trying to clean up.
As of the current release, the only things left in the old Control Panel are things that seem to be adjusted by external programs. For example, the touchpad driver for my laptop exposes itself through a tab on the old Mouse control panel.
Pretty much everything is in the Settings app now, though it was missing a whole lot of stuff back at launch years ago. Every single setting is searchable, which I find to be a vast, vast improvement.
They are moving the functionality to new experience piece by piece.
I wonder if anybody back in the Windows 8 days was even able to estimate how much work all this means. Many of the control panel applets have been there for ages so they must have lot of legacy stuff inside them. Also the modern UI is totally different experience, so they likely ended up rewriting a big part of code.
Because Microsoft has talented engineers who care deeply about their products. But for whatever organizational reason, we have this design-by-committee monster.
Well, if you're a corporation with dozens/hundreds of designers, who did a great job of building an extensible design system, and now any engineer can just take that design system and roll with it, what are you going to do? Fire all those designers?
Of course not. You simply re-design every few years.
The re-design will be supported by evidence like "its cleaner" and "it increases visual clarity" or "it unifies our brand", because phrases like that mean nothing but who would ever vote against cleaning something up?
You are not using it, I am not using it, lots of people never use it.
For this reason they need to change it. So we have a reason to use it.
Way back in the Windows 3.11 days and also in the Win 95 days and to some extent the Windows XP days they gave people a good reason to use it. With 3.11 it was more to do with the apps that came along for the ride, with 95 it was neat touches like the context menu and DirectX, with XP it was because it wasn't a DOS system in disguise any more.
In the next iteration they have plenty of opportunities to get it right. Lots of historical design decisions were taken because of reasons that no longer matter. They can just do it right rather than due to a half baked whim.
An overhaul is warranted, to bring people back to using it.
If you only seen curated screenshots then prepare for disappointment. It is a random hodgepodge of UI/UX design patterns and toolkits. Theres few sane global design default so basically every app is just archane memorization as opposed to just groking the OS/Desktop design principles.
I've used Linux distros my whole life but I feel confident saying Linux desktop has surpassed Windows in usability.
I occasionally interact with Windows for family members and it always amazes me how wrong things are.
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[ 77.7 ms ] story [ 1109 ms ] threadThe upside I see with this PM-driven UI churn is that Linux desktop might be worthwhile for more users.
That the message pump of the explorer windows stop because a server in another country is down must be a design that is extremely hard to change in windows explorer - because they have surely seen this problem.
but then you have another problem: if the system load is high (eg. hard drive is busy), then context menu items would randomly disappear. That's arguably worse than before, because it happens randomly.
>or show a spinner
you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_wait_cursor
How often has an optional change become the only option after awhile?
I'm not against the new Settings dialog but I don't see why anything that works needs to be removed.
> The Windows Core User Experiences team builds interfaces for Windows and Surface Hub customers around the world, and we’re looking for a collaborative, inclusive and customer obsessed engineer to help us build the future of Windows Experiences!
> On this team, you’ll orchestrate and deliver experiences that ensure Windows is a great user experience for our customers.
> You will have the opportunity to build delightful, polished, experiences for Windows as well as for our Surface Hub product line. You will play a key role in open-ended explorations, prototyping and identifying business opportunities for Windows experiences. We're looking for collaborative engineers to bring their passion, drive and technical acumen to help us accomplish these goals.
> We have a wide spectrum of fantastic opportunities to further advance your career and expand your skillset – from building UI using the latest cutting-edge XAML technologies, designing new APIs in conjunction with the our platform team partners, to interfacing with hardware teams to build the essential platform and infrastructure in our OS - as well as working directly with our customers to understand their needs and deliver magical software that exceeds their expectations!
How do they get from that to "This UI refresh will reportedly include an overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps" is my question?
Sounds like a normal job ad for any UI or design related engineer.
They reported it. It's now reportedly. And all other sites can also mention "reportedly" as well now too.
The article states your post is the job posting after it was edited. The original had the text:
"On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers"
Windows 3.11 is due for a fashionable return!
Keyword here is visual. Every one I just looked at revamped all the things you claim is a large jump. Given that every previous one seemed to make those changes, I think a large jump would be to conclude this one will not.
The link says it was posted on Jan 4
The Windows UI has been inconsistent and weird since Windows 2000 (or XP if you turned off the Sesame Street theme).
Very true. Windows 95 and then 2000 showed some real efforts to get good and consistent usability. They threw that all away with Windows 8 and Metro.
Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well. The best thing you could do is revert most of the last 10 years of "innovation" and then leave them alone forever. Stop reinventing stuff that has worked well for decades.
Designers aren't doing subsystem deep-dives, they're just implementing subsets of existing wholly inadequate GUIs using new widgets. Conversely, systems people who understand the un-GUIed subsystems aren't doing design work to better expose them, or expose them at all. It's an unproductive and frustrating stalemate.
Example: "delete file" on Windows. Windows has relatively aggressive file locking, but if you try to delete a file that's open, it just errors out, it doesn't tell you what's using the file and give you the option to (force) quit it.
See also: networking, disk management, permissions, sound, preferences, ipc, etc. There are a hundred of these "just needs a bit of work" UI verticals, but designers keep trying to solve these problems with themes and functionality subsets, which are doomed to fail because the underlying issue is a lack of expressiveness in the existing UI, not an excess of it. Meanwhile, systems people live with "just use CLI / sysinternals / wireshark / nmap" like it isn't an issue that bog-standard tasks still require arcane tools in 2020 (arcane by the standards of typical users).
But this is how it works, which is UX. UI is more about how it looks and how it's interacted with.
But I think they could have fixed that without messing the whole UI up.
I disagree. To various degrees, the last "15 years of [desktop] UI innovation" have been trying to push trendy touch UI concepts into places where they don't belong.
What I think they are pursuing is how to monetize Windows. They tried it in Windows 10 with some start menu shenanigans, but people hated it and you can find tons of articles about how to hack Windows to get rid of that shit. So this role’s job will be to find a design that supports monetization without pissing off users.
...interesting... my experience with Win10 search is the complete opposite, it's so broken that I'm really not sure why there is a search feature in Windows10 in the first place. The only way to "fix it" is to install an alternative start menu (like OpenShell) which has a search box which actually works (somewhat, but better than the default search).
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
No, it's brilliant, in principle. See: spotlight on Mac OS X.
The problem is that Windows Search just doesn't work. I install apps, it can't find them unless they have a start menu enry. I save documents, it can't find them. It does find plenty of irrelevant websites and spurious results from caches, but it misses files sitting directly in my documents folder. Sometimes it returns a result from a partial name hit but when I accidentally type the next character (correctly!) the hit disappears, and it doesn't come back when I remove the offending correct character. It's a mess.
I used to supplement Windows Search with launchy, but then launchy started bugging out. Now I use keypirinha, which intentionally configures bad defaults to encourage you to learn its config file format. Mega cringe. Once you do, though, it does actually work.
Desktop search is fine and useful for consumers. For someone who uses a machine 8 hours a day, Windows 2000 was great.
Problem is that it often doesn’t work. I can type in “calc” and get a list of web links instead of the calculator app. The search box in explorer also sometimes finds things and sometimes doesn’t without any rhyme or reason (at least none that I can figure out).
However, Search Everything is the absolute best search tool for Windows, regardless of version.
Windows 10 search is the most hilariously broken search engine I think I have ever used!
And there's still a lot of work to be done on the desktop gui. For example, adapting to multimonitor scaling differences.
And the year of the linux desktop will only arrive if we can achieve hw 2d+3d acceleration on an open hardware graphics platform.
I never use tablet mode even though I have a few windows detachable devices.
All they need to fix it is to realize that windows isn't a mobile is. And that windows users keep their important stuff in the desktop.
In tablet mode, desktop is hidden and you'd would have to jump through hoops to access it.
It seems windows cannot distinguish between a touch screen tap and a mouse. Because long pressing on desktop randomly shows a touch optimized context menu or the normal one designed for mouse.
Honestly, fuck Windows for being such an utter pile of shit.
They don't need a UI re-design. They need a fucking working operating system.
There was a time where opening the control panel gave you a view of all subsystems. I hardly remember it anymore. A faint memory.
The contents are also in alphabetical order. That's good, too, it's something the user is likely to expect.
Within the columns, the contents are not organized alphabetically! Instead the alphabetical ordering completely ignores the very clear column structure. Who does this?!
I hate Microsoft Windows with a passion but I have to stick to it because of work reasons
Oh, see, I thought this was going to end differently. Like how you typed in "Bluetooth settings" and Windows decided to bring up a web page with instructions on how to change the Bluetooth settings on Windows 10, instead of showing the g-ddamned applet.
Because that's how it seems to work on my machine most of the time.
Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.
The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.
1. Hit Windows key and type name of the app. 2. Hit backspace until the app tops the result list instead of web results.
Does this make any sense? Nope...
What Microsoft almost certainly will do is yet another pass at launchers and window widgets, leaving its three-decades-deep sediment of system functionality largely untouched.
And another for sound settings etc. It's like every setting has this evil twin which is there only to deceive you.
Why? Whose idea was this? To what end? I would really like to know the answers to these questions.
(read: touchscreens I don't use)
Surfaces, touchscreen laptops, and convertibles are all pretty popular.
Every screen I have is a touch screen. Laptops, all-in-ones, external screens, on Windows and Linux.
I couldn't agree more. Your points are exactly why I've remained a happy Linux Mint user for nearly a decade. I don't dread OS or desktop environment updates, precisely because I know my chosen desktop environment will mostly remain the same (if not exactly the same).
What Microsoft really need is a Window strategy. Where is it heading. Its source of revenue in the future. Its longtime programming framework, library, API Strategy etc....
I believe they have WinUI 3.0 now? What happened to WPF, UWP and WinForms? And they are moving all of the Outlook Apps to Electron for cross platform development. [1] And just look at .Net. Have they finally settled on .Net Core now?
May be because I am on Mac so I am confused. It is not Apple are perfect, but looking from the outside either Microsoft doesn't have a clue or they just dont care.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-replace-its-many-...
But what does bug me is when the refreshes are half baked. Either refresh everything visible and hide the old one entirely behind some obscure command if it must remain, or don't refresh at all.
I don't have a problem with changing things if it replaces all the functionality.
It is trying to do to must "automatically" for you instead of just letting you control the system.
It works, but navigation is confusing, the experience switching between different paradigms is jarring, you can't search for things from the top level and find it in the control panel and so on. They have eft it at 60% finished instead of the 95% or 99% that would make it actually usable.
Call me cynical but I doubt they will be "optional" for long. At launch perhaps, but Microsoft has tended to transition the "optional" into the "default" then into the "only" version in the past.
the internals of the OS are also problematic
on top of that UWP/XAML story is not really that good when you compare to SwiftUI on macOS
the whole macOS experience is what they should AIM for
but that means giving up on all the legacy bits that keep stacking up since forever..
Windows need a massive spring cleanup, i'd say a reboot, but i'm not sure the people are microsoft are this courageous, i have the feeling they are just lazy
Not that I don’t trust MS’s recent design direction, but I have to wonder if such a major overhaul is warranted.
This is by far the most Microsoft comment ever.
(And in fact, the latter is probably worse for completing the migration!)
They have been working on this now for 8 years without much progress. For any serious work you still to know if the setting is in the old control panel or the new. I don’t think they are even trying to clean up.
Pretty much everything is in the Settings app now, though it was missing a whole lot of stuff back at launch years ago. Every single setting is searchable, which I find to be a vast, vast improvement.
I wonder if anybody back in the Windows 8 days was even able to estimate how much work all this means. Many of the control panel applets have been there for ages so they must have lot of legacy stuff inside them. Also the modern UI is totally different experience, so they likely ended up rewriting a big part of code.
While I find Windows 10 usable and attractive, I find it still has a lot of clunkiness that needs work.
Of course not. You simply re-design every few years.
The re-design will be supported by evidence like "its cleaner" and "it increases visual clarity" or "it unifies our brand", because phrases like that mean nothing but who would ever vote against cleaning something up?
For this reason they need to change it. So we have a reason to use it.
Way back in the Windows 3.11 days and also in the Win 95 days and to some extent the Windows XP days they gave people a good reason to use it. With 3.11 it was more to do with the apps that came along for the ride, with 95 it was neat touches like the context menu and DirectX, with XP it was because it wasn't a DOS system in disguise any more.
In the next iteration they have plenty of opportunities to get it right. Lots of historical design decisions were taken because of reasons that no longer matter. They can just do it right rather than due to a half baked whim.
An overhaul is warranted, to bring people back to using it.
I've used Linux distros my whole life but I feel confident saying Linux desktop has surpassed Windows in usability.
I occasionally interact with Windows for family members and it always amazes me how wrong things are.
my only use for windows is for gaming use cases, otherwise I stick with linux
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/10/02/intro...
https://twitter.com/randal_olson/status/1344021969096720384