Desktop Neo – rethinking the desktop interface for productivity

In many ways, it owes more to the Metro interface than it does OS X or iOS, for better or worse.

4 critiques is not bad for a student/internship piece. Most students simultaneously do not have deep knowledge of prior work and are also (one of) strong designer or prototyper or researcher because those things simply take time/experience to get.

His bar to me seems like "entry-level position, 12 years JavaScript experience required" but for UX/UI

This is really important. It's 2016, search is easy, and I shouldn't have to hunt around because I don't know whether you stuck your options dialog under File, Edit, or Tools. I appreciate Ubuntu for implementing this OS-wide with Unity's HUD feature.

There are a lot of attempts to redesign the desktop or do some clever thing to increase productivity but all of them tend to forget the fundamentals of interacting with the computer. The forget why what we have is successful and seem unclear as to what they are trying to move towards as an improvement.

That probably seems like a bold statement so lets look at a few things.

Lets look at why something like paper is still around. Do we care that one piece of paper might hide behind another in a stack of papers on a desk, is that a terminal failure of the medium? I'd say no. Just like windows hiding others, it's not a fundamental issue that needs solving.

Why else might paper be successful? I'd suggest it's not the paper itself, it the way we interact with paper. We don't use our hands to mark the paper, we use tools, we use pens, brushes, pencils, chalks and all manor of things. Paper is a tool that allows us to get the best from a range of our 'marking' tools.

Like wise, if we are to interact via touch with the desktop, it stands to reason that to get the best from the experience we need to have a range of tactile tools to do so. We need our keyboard, our mice, our touch pads, touch screens and stylus'. Concomitantly, we need our desktops to allow us to get the most out of these interaction tools.

To my mind, the problem with the desktop isn't that it needs a fundamentally more restrictive use pattern, it needs a better use of the available control mechanisms.

Let's think about why Vim is so enduring and successful. Vim only does one thing, manipulates text and it's got a mode of operation totally alien to many who've used a text editor. Yet for decades now it's what many gravitate towards as the pinnacle of interacting with text on a computer (shout out to Emacs folks, this is just an example!).

Vims's method of operation seeks to ruthlessly release the power of the keyboard to offer huge benefits in terms of productivity and manipulation.

What is your design seeking to ruthlessly release from the power of our interactive devices? Why are our existing tools better for interacting with your design than a traditional desktop? what power are you releasing from them?

All of this is to say that whilst you may redesign the desktop and have clever (and useful) schemes to increase productivity, these designs don't pay enough attention to the things we use to interact with the computer, and so don't offer true lasting benefit and therefore don't catch on or endure.

If you redesign the way the desktop works, you need to either re-imagine the tools we use to interact with it or take measures, without pity or care for convention, to release the power of the existing ones.

Apple's done an interesting job in this area in it's move to bring touch gestures into the control of the desktop, but I'd don't think it's hardly been a fully realised opportunity.