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Beautiful Windows 8 concept

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Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#31

Post by weego »

ScottWhigham wrote: post #30

This is one of those situations where the UI is gorgeous but the UX is awful for a certain demographic. And that's nothing against the designer - he created a UI design, not a UX model, and I think he did a good job on it. From a UX perspective, however, this is just going to be awful for anyone who is a power user or who is concerned with productivity. I'm both and, if I was forced into using something like that for…

I was going to say almost the same thing.

This is what a designer thinks looks good but there is no solution to any problems here, just more problems that aren't obvious in a single screen-shot. It's the same problem as when as web developer gets the signed off design and realises that the whole design falls apart when any number of variable elements go in because the designer narrowed in on making a flat image look good rather than exploring every possible outcome of that UI.

The biggest initial problem is exploration and sign-posting (making discovery of user objectives easier either explicitly or subtly). The is no room for sign-posting because everything is flat and white.

Also the contrast looks good in a flat image, but would drive people nuts after a while (and would break most contrast requirements for accessibility).

Don't get me wrong, it's lovely... but no one will ever produce a commercial OS UI like this.

Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#33

Post by georgespencer »

Beautiful design, horrible UX. (I know, I know. Suddenly everyone on HN is a UX designer. But hear me out.)

I count eight distinct types of system font in there, all denoting different data/functionality. Semiotically there are no signifiers other than the size, weight and position of the text. It's the closest thing you can get to mystery meat navigation whilst still providing words.

Look at current incarnations of Windows Explorer that people are familiar with. There is a very clearly delineated sidebar and "address bar" at the top. (The web changed the way that people interact with computers. Many people's first and only experience with computer applications is a web browser, and unfortunately for many of them it will have been Internet Explorer.)

By removing the lines of demarkation between UI elements, instead of downgrading the system interface it's been upgraded. Everything in the Windows Explorer pane is on equal footing.

The out of focus windows would get old pretty quickly too. If you're working on two things side by side your eyes have to switch between one in-focus and one out-of-focus window. Unless there's a way to dynamically switch focus to "on" for multiple windows, but then that would get messy quite quickly when you can't tell whether something is in the background or foreground, active or inactive. Yuck.

The dock at the bottom looks nice, but the challenge is that you're reliant on icon designers adhering to very specific standards or the whole thing will look crazy.

Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#34

Post by molmalo »

axefrog wrote: post #7

Really nice, though it begs the question; seeing as you can't meaningfully affect Windows 8's design without joining Microsoft on the relevant team(s), why not apply your design skills to the Linux desktop, either Gnome or KDE (I don't know which is more popular as I'm not really a Linux user). Improving the Linux GUI's presentation is always a good thing in terms of improving end-user adoption.

This GNOME theme looks very nice and minimalist too..

"Full flat GTK3 theme": http://lgsalvati.deviantart.com/art/Full-flat-GTK3-theme-255...

Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#35

Post by molmalo »

georgespencer wrote: post #33

Beautiful design, horrible UX. (I know, I know. Suddenly everyone on HN is a UX designer. But hear me out.) I count eight distinct types of system font in there, all denoting different data/functionality. Semiotically there are no signifiers other than the size, weight and position of the text. It's the closest thing you can get to mystery meat navigation whilst still providing words. Look at current incarnations of…

You are right, Looking good and actually being usable are quite different.

The main problem with this concept, I think, was that the extreme minimalism ended up in a UI that hides too much information.

Even when I love the way it looks like, it feels like I would need to hover everything, just to get more info (and if Win8 aims to touch devices... hover is not good).

And of course, it doesn't look good for multitasking.

Here are some other concept designs from the same time... http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/25/2823647/windows-8-desktop-...

This other example is really interesting, because of the fact that it anticipated extremely well how Windows 8's Explorer looks like today: http://fc03.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/8/b/8b357c7cff026...

http://fc09.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/056/0/b/0bd5349ab72b1...

Compare it to the real thing:

http://blogs.msdn.com/cfs-file.ashx/__key/communityserver-bl...

Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#36

Post by qntm »

Subtract the nice wallpaper and the problems here become much more obvious. It's wrong in exactly the same way that the new Gmail UI is wrong. Too much white space, too little colour, tiny grey abstract buttons without obvious hit boxes. Screen elements are too similar in colour to tell where one ends and another begins, white spacing is inconsistent, the scrollbars are too small to grab and lack up/down buttons, the mouse pointer is almost invisible even when placed over one of the darkest areas of the screen. It looks like there's an assumption that third-party programs (Skype) will create icons and front-ends which use the exact same widgets and icons as the new UI, which most of them obviously will not. There's a similar assumption about third-party web sites: what does it look like when you load up Facebook?

How do I launch Office from this interface? What do the tick marks next to "Homegroup" and "SkyDrive" indicate? What about the 3x3 grid of tiny squares next to "Max" in the Skype window, which is almost impossible to see? Why is the "minimise" icon in the top right of all windows still a thin horizontal bar? Why say "thumbs only" when that's self-evident? What do the red and green squares in the IE tab bar indicate? How do I see which taskbar icon is highlighted if my wallpaper is white? How do I see them at all if my wallpaper is bright orange?

Re: Beautiful Windows 8 concept

#39

Post by tfb »

nelmaven wrote: post #20

It looks too bland but definitely better than what Microsoft decided for Windows 8. The metro UI is just not usable for a normal desktop configuration.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can revert to Windows 7 style for normal desktop use, as Windows 8 is designed for touch screens. Although I heard you can't make the reversion permanent; you have to manually revert after each boot. But that would seem kind of silly to not be able to set the default style, so my sources could be misinformed.
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