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

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

#91

Post by midoridensha »

bombcar wrote: post #27
WaxProlix wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XP was fine. 2000 was good. Nobody pines for Windows ME. People said those things and they meant it. Windows 8-11 feel pretty bad, overall. 7 was okay.

XP was fine because you could throw it into 2000 mode, though looking back the fisher-price UI was just the UI. Windows Vista wasn't terrible if you had a beefy machine and well-supported hardware. 7 was basically Vista but with newer machines and better hardware support. 8+ has been meh.

IMO, Vista was actually the best-looking Windows of all time.

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

#92

Post by wilg »

hooby wrote: post #79

I only updated my gaming machine to Windows 11 about two weeks ago (running Mint on my work device) - and it immediately felt rather incomplete/unfinished to me. For example, I am using 7zip for compression. In file explorer I right click a file/directory I want to compress, but the option to compress with 7zip is missing from the context menu. So I choose "more options" at the bottom of the menu, and what I get is t…

Sometimes I have to just right click again which sometimes shows the old context menu instead of the new one? I think? What a wild OS.

(Also, it's wild how much better macOS's .zip file handling is.)

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

#93

Post by emodendroket »

slavik81 wrote: post #70
emodendroket wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still not sure I understand what made that so heretical other than being different. I can't really imagine any scenario where I'd be using the start menu and want to see something else at the same time.

The reason why you need to open the start menu is often on screen, then you hit the Windows key and the context that should be driving your next action is hidden. All it takes is a brief moment of distraction and — if you're like me — you'll completely forget why you opened the menu in the first place. It's like walking into a room and forgetting why you had entered. At that point, maybe you return where you came fro…

What I thought was nice about it was that, if you're primarily a search user, you got a lot more real estate for the search results. I suppose they achieved some of that in the new design and the feedback has been pretty close to unanimous, though.

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

#94

Post by IlGrigiore »

hooby wrote: post #79

I only updated my gaming machine to Windows 11 about two weeks ago (running Mint on my work device) - and it immediately felt rather incomplete/unfinished to me. For example, I am using 7zip for compression. In file explorer I right click a file/directory I want to compress, but the option to compress with 7zip is missing from the context menu. So I choose "more options" at the bottom of the menu, and what I get is t…

The trick is to use shift+right click to access the old context menu. Incidentally, shift+right click also enables to copy the full path to any file in file explorer.

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

#95

Post by flohofwoe »

anaisbetts wrote: post #35
withinrafael wrote: post #21

Harris was chief of the Windows User Experience for Windows 8. He created Windows 8. He created Metro UI. He created the Windows 8 Start screen, charms, allowed ads in its inbox apps (e.g. Weather), etc. Keep that in mind when Harris says things like "the Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of."

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.

It's fair to not take any UX advice from the person responsible for the Win8 start menu serious, that was a much bigger UX turd than Win10 or Win11 could ever hope to be.

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

#96

Post by plaguepilled »

Qahlel wrote: post #88
plaguepilled wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

His personal history contextualises his point, which is distinct from criticising his personal history at broad.

For example, had I said "Barry designed the new start UI. He also has received several speeding tickets" you could make the claim that I am making an ad hominem attack on Barry, since the only reason I would bring up the speeding ticket is to make Barry seem less responsible. His speeding does not affect his ability to design a start menu nor does it influence his design decisions.

However, if I said "Harry has been seen criticising the new start UI for being inconsistent. Harry previously designed the new Settings menu in Windows, which was also inconsistent", there are some important differences to take account of. Specifically, the fact he was involved in the development of another feature in the Windows product, AND it can also be criticised for the same failing that Harry has now applied to the start menu gives us information ABOUT Harry's criticism.

Now we can say "Harry is going to come at this from the perspective of someone on the team" and "Harry has made the same mistake before". Depending on the details of Harry's comment, that could make his comment less trustworthy, but conversely it can also make it more valid.

Calling that an ad hominem is, in my opinion, excessively reductive, and in the case of contextual data being added that is contextually relevant, not appropriate.

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

#97

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Except if one is a developer burned with the whole rewrite in WinRT, in UAP, in UWP, in WinUI,...

Basically better to keep using Forms, WPF and Win32 for sanity, or the Web, thus Windows 11 doesn't matter at all.

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

#98

Post by drewcoo »

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…

Notepad used to really just be a Windows edit control.

And I could swear RaymondC owned it at some point.

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

#99

Post by drewcoo »

locusofself wrote: post #13

I work at Microsoft, it's a great company to work for. But I was bummed when I.T. upgraded my dev machine from Win10 to Win11. I really hope whatever comes next is better.

Well . . . forever ago, devs there managed their own installs. And maybe they had boxes that weren't up to snuff for joining ntdev and maybe they had something so old it was basically a network infection, so MSIT would deal with them.

But anyplace that forces machine config on devs? They don't really want devs. Even Ballmer valued developers (developers . . . developers). And he was a tragically engineering-impaired human being.

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

#100

Post by unwind »

tinco wrote: post #85
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 (categor…

I think that in when using a fixed-width font in a text-only editing program, the assumption is that a tab is "made" (visually) of a number of spaces. That number is a frequent ... debatable setting, in software development teams, but at least it's a number of spaces.

Not being able to visually line up indents made out of spaces vs tabs (in any mix) breaks a very basic usability/interaction pattern, and is really rather bad. :(

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