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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

This happens to me every single day on the Windows 10 start menu and on my iPhone using the swipe-down search on the Home screen.

Why in God's green Earth the developers who implemented these don't cache obvious local results (like app names) to quickly return them is beyond me, and why the position of the results has to move after the fact is even more maddening

I typed "Arro" for an app I use last night, it took a moment to show up and when I went to click it, the web results populated so I accidentally clicked on "arroz con gandules". Sounds lovely, but I am certainly not expecting that to be the autocomplete...

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Had the same problem on my iPhone. I turned off Siri for app search (Settings / Siri & Search / Suggestions for Search) and now the results are instant. (And local to my phone, so no internet-sourced results, but I’m fine with that.)

How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing. I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results. Even though I disabled Cortana. Incredible.

Try slowly typing in "Performance" in the Windows 10 start menu and watch the top result flip around pretty much at each key press...

Thank you for the Siri protip, that was one of my biggest frustrations with iOS (that + inability to take scrolling screenshots natively, similarly to how you can on Samsung Galaxy phones). For complete peace, I just wish there was a way to turn off all app suggestions in search at once, instead of flipping that switch in settings for every single app.

> I had to reinstall a computer because some Cortana corruption had made it impossible to launch apps from the Start Menu’s search results.

Microsoft is actually uncoupling Cortana to Windows Search/Start Menu in the next major release, so this should be less of a problem.

How Microsoft managed to ruin the Start Menu, on the other hand, is amazing.

My Windows 10 start menu lags. Press windows key or click on it, no response for a good ten seconds or more.

I have this on my work machine, a previous install, my home machine, a Surface Book, a remote desktop server on Windows 2016.

And yet, I've never seen anyone else talking about it. I can't believe I'm the only one who has this "my start menu has paged out to 5400rpm disk, then powered the disk down" experience.

Same here. Sometimes I’ll click on it a good five or eight times before it comes up. When people say Windows 10 is good, I feel like they’re living in an alternate dimension.

I think you guys are the exceptions to the norm here, and not the norm.

I have too many computers at home, some verrry slow ones, and they all pop up the start menu within a second or two unless I've just booted the PC.

I work with a lot of people who use Windows 10 all day long, and I've never heard one of them ever complain about a slow start menu. Complaints about search results? Absolutely.

I suspect it's something you're installing, and I'm sure you'll deny that (and you very well could be right, I don't know) and these things are time consuming to diagnose, unfortunately.

Any sufficiently popular OS is probably going to suck for ~tens of thousands of users while at least hundreds of thousands more wonder what the fuss is about.

A quick search yielded:

https://www.tenforums.com/performance-maintenance/12860-wind... https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3doydz/windows_1... https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/windows-10-start-men... https://bradshacks.com/fix-start-menu-lag/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-10-second-fix-for-sluggish...

Maybe not the norm, but we're not the only ones. It's obviously an issue that exists.

I think we need a full reset of user expectations. Menus taking 1-2 seconds is not okay!!

Better yet is when you type "Ar" looking for "Arrow" and get

1) Arrow

2) Arboles

3) Area

And then type another 'r' before you realize your result is there ("Arr") and as you go to select "Arrow" the auto-suggest results turn into

1) Array

2) Arrogant

3) Arrow

Like, how does adding the second 'r' make "Array" higher probability than "Arrow"?!

Machine learning

Your not accepting the 1st suggestion (Arrow) when you typed "Ar" decreased the probability that that was the term you intended. The next suggestion factored in that you were probably looking for something else and bumped up other suggestions.

That’s a bad assumption. People often type faster than they can respond to changes on screen. Typing speed & muscle memory means I’m more likely to type “arr” than just “ar”. But I’m also likely to be thrown off by the search reshuffling as it expands.

Once an item matches the search, it should stay in place unless it’s invalidated by further typing. Reshuffling just adds needless friction.

This actually made me laugh with how tone-deaf it appears to be about how users normally interact with a search field. Is this response based on industry "knowledge"? How did this sort of thinking come about?

That would be such a stupid way to implement a search.

When you search you don't type letter by letter and inspect the suggestions after each keystroke. You type many letters and only then you inspect the suggestions/results.

Every time I click the share button in Android, the icons are in completely different order. Not last recently used, not alphabetically. Completely random.

That will teach you to pay attention. Heh!

Lol, I've noticed this as well.

Also it seems to use a very slow random number generator because it always takes a long time to populate the random list.

So stupid.

I can relate to this so much... It's just egregiously bad design

The iPhone search has been driving me crazy as well. Another one that always gets me is pressing a number in the recent calls list just after another call was ended.

You're absolutely right. The recent calls issue happens way too often. Nothing worse than calling your boss at 2am when you meant to call your wife or vice-versa...

This has happened too many times to me.

I often put the phone in my pocket after a call without pressing the sleep button, so the screen stays active, causing me to unknowingly "butt dial" random numbers, sometimes talking to other people while a confused/mischievous person on the call is listening in...

On iOS I randomly get this weird lag when I swipe down and start typing an app name. Sometimes it shows LOCAL apps and sometimes it... doesn't. For a while. WHY, Apple, WHY? You used to "JUST WORK"

On Android, whenever I want to copy something I have to wait a few seconds for the menu to fully load. Otherwise I end up tapping on the wrong icon. Quite irritating.

This is a good argument for empty place holders when loading dynamic content. Although some people don't like them, it is an easy way to prevent UX issues like this.

The solution is not to obey the click of the content change 0.1 seconds before the click.

I disagree. I think having some clicks ignored would be pretty annoying. The solution is to design your UI so that what people want to click on isn't jumping around.

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