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Design evolution of the Windows control panel

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Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#41

Post by whywhywhywhy »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #13
nwah1 wrote: post #10

Left off Windows 11. The new one is the most logical one yet. Don't like that much about Windows 11, but the control panel is improved.

Are there still two separate ones? A "modern" one and a "classic" one? What frustrates me about Windows 10 is that each one has settings which are exclusive to it, so you always need both, and never know where to look.

There always will be because if you removed it people would freak out. Even though there are barely any settings left that you need to go there for.

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#43

Post by pmontra »

tech-historian wrote: post #6

Hey, my son and I run this site. Cool to see it here. Thanks for stopping by!

Well done. To improve on it you should add screenshots of the internal dialogs. I'm always pissed off by those non resizable windows that never changed since 20+ years ago. They were large enough back then but they require a magnifying lens on our screens now. And not being able to read all the content of text input boxes because they are too narrow? It's a common problem in many MicroSoft programs. The inner dialogs of Task Scheduler are the ones I'm running into more often.

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#44

Post by ale42 »

Try _editing_ an existing WiFi Enterprise profile with Windows 10? Looks like they dropped all links to arrive to the right windows in the classic control panel, and there's no way of doing that with the horrible minimalistic modern UI that has less settings than you can find on a usual smartphone...

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#45

Post by clavicat »

The control panel was solved, so to speak, once they added a search interface. It doesn’t matter how complicated the hierarchy of modules is if what you want is only a search away.

Only Microsoft could unsolve a solved problem by segregating the settings into two paradigms, neither of which is a superset of the other. Even the duplicated functionalities are not equivalent—the list of programs you can uninstall with the new UI is not the same as old UI.

No sane person would ever intend to engineer this outcome, but it’s what we get. Very strange how that can happen.

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#46

Post by mattlondon »

atoav wrote: post #39
beardedscotsman wrote: post #36

I was involved in part with the Windows 8 control panel refresh. What a nightmare it was working with that team. There was just no care for actually improving user experience, everything was shoehorned into the modern ui mainly as a push for ARM windows devices which were so slow they just never took off. MS wanted to force an enclosed ecosystem like apple iOS, but just didn’t have the hardware to make it happen. I r…

> only 0.005% of users ever used Bluetooth speakers successfully? How many tried? This can btw. be an issue with telemetry: if people don't manage to do something, maybe you will never know.

This is where a "funnel" approach can be useful. E.g. you want to measure people on their way to feature X, so you measure the steps before feature X too and see how far down the funnel people get.

When you start to see people going in loops or doing the same things over and over but not quite reaching the destination, then you know you have UX issues.

Of course this is good only for "near misses" - you may have users who don't even know where to start - that is harder to identify.

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#47

Post by pjerem »

tech-historian wrote: post #6

Hey, my son and I run this site. Cool to see it here. Thanks for stopping by!

Ho, I just thought it was some sort of random blog post then I saw your comment.

Great website ! Thank you for the memories.

May I suggest you to add links to archive.org downloads where the software you show is available ?

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#48

Post by jcelerier »

atoav wrote: post #39
beardedscotsman wrote: post #36

I was involved in part with the Windows 8 control panel refresh. What a nightmare it was working with that team. There was just no care for actually improving user experience, everything was shoehorned into the modern ui mainly as a push for ARM windows devices which were so slow they just never took off. MS wanted to force an enclosed ecosystem like apple iOS, but just didn’t have the hardware to make it happen. I r…

> only 0.005% of users ever used Bluetooth speakers successfully? How many tried? This can btw. be an issue with telemetry: if people don't manage to do something, maybe you will never know.

Anecdotally, I don't remember ever meeting anyone who even talked about entertaining the thought of using Bluetooth speakers on win32

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#49

Post by bob1029 »

clavicat wrote: post #45

The control panel was solved, so to speak, once they added a search interface. It doesn’t matter how complicated the hierarchy of modules is if what you want is only a search away. Only Microsoft could unsolve a solved problem by segregating the settings into two paradigms, neither of which is a superset of the other. Even the duplicated functionalities are not equivalent—the list of programs you can uninstall with t…

This is what happens when you have too many chefs in the same design kitchen.

Microsoft really could use some product/UX zealot in the driver seat for a while.

They should also work on reducing the latency of their products in general... Everything feels like laggy trash now. Someone should do a study on stress levels between windows XP and windows 11 user groups for basic daily office tasks and then throw it into the boardroom.

Re: Design evolution of the Windows control panel

#50

Post by Aeolun »

voidfunc wrote: post #14
gjvc wrote: post #2

Windows 2000 was clearly the peak in this article, and (as a whole system) it did feel like it at the time. (I do wish it had included ClearType though...)

While I agree, Id also argue virtually every posters opinion on HN about design of the Windows CP is useless. Most of us are power users and it we are not power users we are incredibly opinionated about some UX stuff.

I like PC’s for power users. If we dumb down the PC, the people using it get dumber too.

But I don’t know. 7 year old me could figure out the classic control panel. I don’t think it was that hard.

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