Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

borncity.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 151 posts

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#81

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

mopsi wrote: post #19
svnpenn wrote: post #6

I work in IT. The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT…

It's very obvious that pages for the Settings app are being written in some very restricting XML or HTML type markup and they're struggling to give any intuitive structure to settings. Everything is in a very basic single-column layout with virtually no graphics to visually guide your eye and combine or separate items. There doesn't even seem to be a generic table widget with sortable columns available.

I wouldn't call XAML restrictive. It's been used with WPF (their previous UI toolkit) with great effect: it can handle very complex interfaces just fine (look at Visual Studio, it's been using WPF since 2010).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Application_Markup_...

The issue is with their newer UI toolkit (WinUI) and the brain-dead design language they've been using along with that.

This famous tirade is as real as it's ever been.

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#82

Post by jiggawatts »

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI.

It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD.

Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned.

They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font!

This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328

Notepad can also no longer open large text files in under a minute, whereas the Electron-based VS Code does it nearly instantly!

Where is Raymond Chen when you need him? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180521-00/?p=98...

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#83

Post by orthoxerox »

pastrami_panda wrote: post #17

Honestly Windows 11 is getting better all the time. It's much cleaner and less cluttered compared to 10 as well. It's not perfect of course, but it's the best one so far imo, and it keeps getting better. I really like the new way to connect and manage Bluetooth devices from the taskbar that was recently added. But then again, it's Windows, so when you look underneath the shiny new surface and realize e.g there's no w…

Can you uncombine taskbar buttons in Win 11 yet?

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#84

Post by yummypaint »

svnpenn wrote: post #25
encryptluks2 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows button and start typing what you're looking for. I don't understand users that still point and click at everything.

ever tried to test microphone volume levels? every fucking time I have to search three different things before I can find it. I try "microphone", "audio", "volume", and its always the last one I try, and I can never remember for the next time. Search is not a good UI, because you never get muscle memory with a search.

Speaking of terrible audio UX, windows constantly breaks hardware settings for multi-channel ADCs by disabling all but one channel (seems to be after most updates). Fixing it requires about a dozen clicks through many esoteric nested menus, including having to click hyperlink style text hidden on the far upper right side of a window away from the buttons. There are several audio settings pages in windows, and some of them offer no path to fixing the setting. If it's possible to reach the necessary page by searching in the start menu i have yet to find it. It's been like this for 2 years. It's astounding that working professionals would pay money for this garbage.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#85

Post by tinco »

jiggawatts wrote: post #82

The biggest travesty IMHO is the updated Notepad that was rewritten using the modern Win UI. It now takes 2 seconds to start on an 8-core computer with a PCIe 4 NVMe SSD. Oh, and a tab indent and four spaces are almost… but not identically aligned. They’re like… one or two pixels off. With a fixed width font! This is just sad: https://paste.pics/aacb91eda1bfb46f968bed2004ad2328 Notepad can also no longer open large t…

4 spaces and tab not being perfectly aligned sounds like a feature, not a bug to me.

In what scenario would you want them to be aligned? Surely any scenario would be improper use?

100% agree with the rest of course, it's always been a shock to me how little love the essential tooling gets in Windows. You'd think with all the budgets and the fat salaries they'd simply have a competent engineer or two on every (category of) tools. But then you hear about stuff like this or the Terminal debacle and it's like they're not even trying.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#86

Post by orthoxerox »

svnpenn wrote: post #6

I work in IT. The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit. It seems like Microsoft almost purposefully took the 10 things you would most often use, and nested them so deep that you cant even memorize how to find them anymore. So you get forced into using the god awful search, which returns results FROM THE GOD DAMN INTERNET. If I am in Windows setting, or hell even on just the normal Start Menu, I DON'T WANT…

> The Windows 10/11 "settings" are a hole pile of shit.

Hear, hear. Every time I want to do something with my networks, I have to guess which settings window I need. Win 10 settings window? Network and Sharing Center? Change adapter settings, aka Network Connections? Hyper-V Manager? Wrong! If you want to make your Hyper-V virtual Ethernet switch a private network, you have to bust out PowerShell!

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#87

Post by azinman2 »

That he’s quoting fitts law to me shows how frozen in time he is. The start menu is something you seldom use; the milliseconds saved in mouse time is effectively irrelevant over time, and completely irrelevant in a touch based system. What’s more important is that people understand what’s happening, the system is simple and self explanatory, and feel happy using it (meaning the UI/UX is attractive and consistent). I’m not saying Windows 11 is any of those things, but Fitts Law is the furthest from their worries. Yet it’s the kind of thing that came out of HCI conferences for years with little lasting translation into the modern era.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#88

Post by Qahlel »

plaguepilled wrote: post #55
anaisbetts wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the article and see what he was complaining about? He typed the word "Chrome" and the top hit was a web search with a bunch of ads on the right-hand sidebar. His complaints were 100% justified and imho correct, and the immediate jump to ad-hominem attacks rather than debating the content of the article seems uncalled for.

His work history, as it relates to the topic being discussed, is an ad hominem now? Lebron James, is that you? Only you could reach like that!

Yes, it does. You are attacking his personal history not to his point.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#89

Post by midoridensha »

wlesieutre wrote: post #18
notRobot wrote: post #3

I would pay so much money to just be able to use Windows 7's UI with Windows 10's performance improvements. Try spinning Windows 7 up in a VM sometime. Using it is such a wonderous experience. It's almost perfect. I miss it so much. To me, Windows 8/8.1/10/11 have all been massive downgrades to different extents.

I thought Windows 8 was pretty good at the time, in hindsight because I had a Surface Pro and that was the computer that it was entirely designed for. Their three-column splitscreen layout was neat, if you could look past only having about 5 of the newfangled-touchscreen-UI-apps worth installing in the entire store. Or if you treated the OS as mostly being a OneNote launcher. These days I'm inclined to agree with you…

Why does customer goodwill matter at all? Even if they make everyone absolutely hate using Windows, what are customers going to do, switch to a different OS? Decades of experience has shown that people will whine and complain endlessly about Windows, that this is the last straw, and how they're going to switch to Linux "real soon now", and they never do.

Re: Microsoft's ex-UI chief is shocked about the Windows 11 start menu

#90

Post by iflp »

nulld3v wrote: post #74
mopsi wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have at least Win 7 start menu on Win 10: https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu It's fast, reliable and highly configurable.

Do you know if there's something similar but for the task bar? I really really hate the stock Windows taskbar. The design? Whatever, I can live with that. But it constantly refuses to unhide, it drives me crazy.

StartAllBack
Post reply on HN