Microsoft job posting suggests a major user interface update expected in 2021
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well. The best thing you could do is revert most of the last 10 years of "innovation" and then leave them alone forever. Stop reinventing stuff that has worked well for decades.
Designers aren't doing subsystem deep-dives, they're just implementing subsets of existing wholly inadequate GUIs using new widgets. Conversely, systems people who understand the un-GUIed subsystems aren't doing design work to better expose them, or expose them at all. It's an unproductive and frustrating stalemate.
Example: "delete file" on Windows. Windows has relatively aggressive file locking, but if you try to delete a file that's open, it just errors out, it doesn't tell you what's using the file and give you the option to (force) quit it.
See also: networking, disk management, permissions, sound, preferences, ipc, etc. There are a hundred of these "just needs a bit of work" UI verticals, but designers keep trying to solve these problems with themes and functionality subsets, which are doomed to fail because the underlying issue is a lack of expressiveness in the existing UI, not an excess of it. Meanwhile, systems people live with "just use CLI / sysinternals / wireshark / nmap" like it isn't an issue that bog-standard tasks still require arcane tools in 2020 (arcane by the standards of typical users).
But this is how it works, which is UX. UI is more about how it looks and how it's interacted with.
But I think they could have fixed that without messing the whole UI up.
I disagree. To various degrees, the last "15 years of [desktop] UI innovation" have been trying to push trendy touch UI concepts into places where they don't belong.
What I think they are pursuing is how to monetize Windows. They tried it in Windows 10 with some start menu shenanigans, but people hated it and you can find tons of articles about how to hack Windows to get rid of that shit. So this role’s job will be to find a design that supports monetization without pissing off users.
...interesting... my experience with Win10 search is the complete opposite, it's so broken that I'm really not sure why there is a search feature in Windows10 in the first place. The only way to "fix it" is to install an alternative start menu (like OpenShell) which has a search box which actually works (somewhat, but better than the default search).
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
No, it's brilliant, in principle. See: spotlight on Mac OS X.
The problem is that Windows Search just doesn't work. I install apps, it can't find them unless they have a start menu enry. I save documents, it can't find them. It does find plenty of irrelevant websites and spurious results from caches, but it misses files sitting directly in my documents folder. Sometimes it returns a result from a partial name hit but when I accidentally type the next character (correctly!) the hit disappears, and it doesn't come back when I remove the offending correct character. It's a mess.
I used to supplement Windows Search with launchy, but then launchy started bugging out. Now I use keypirinha, which intentionally configures bad defaults to encourage you to learn its config file format. Mega cringe. Once you do, though, it does actually work.
Desktop search is fine and useful for consumers. For someone who uses a machine 8 hours a day, Windows 2000 was great.
Problem is that it often doesn’t work. I can type in “calc” and get a list of web links instead of the calculator app. The search box in explorer also sometimes finds things and sometimes doesn’t without any rhyme or reason (at least none that I can figure out).
However, Search Everything is the absolute best search tool for Windows, regardless of version.
Windows 10 search is the most hilariously broken search engine I think I have ever used!
And there's still a lot of work to be done on the desktop gui. For example, adapting to multimonitor scaling differences.
And the year of the linux desktop will only arrive if we can achieve hw 2d+3d acceleration on an open hardware graphics platform.
I never use tablet mode even though I have a few windows detachable devices.
All they need to fix it is to realize that windows isn't a mobile is. And that windows users keep their important stuff in the desktop.
In tablet mode, desktop is hidden and you'd would have to jump through hoops to access it.
It seems windows cannot distinguish between a touch screen tap and a mouse. Because long pressing on desktop randomly shows a touch optimized context menu or the normal one designed for mouse.
Honestly, fuck Windows for being such an utter pile of shit.
They don't need a UI re-design. They need a fucking working operating system.
There was a time where opening the control panel gave you a view of all subsystems. I hardly remember it anymore. A faint memory.
The contents are also in alphabetical order. That's good, too, it's something the user is likely to expect.
Within the columns, the contents are not organized alphabetically! Instead the alphabetical ordering completely ignores the very clear column structure. Who does this?!
I hate Microsoft Windows with a passion but I have to stick to it because of work reasons
Oh, see, I thought this was going to end differently. Like how you typed in "Bluetooth settings" and Windows decided to bring up a web page with instructions on how to change the Bluetooth settings on Windows 10, instead of showing the g-ddamned applet.
Because that's how it seems to work on my machine most of the time.
Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.
The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.
1. Hit Windows key and type name of the app. 2. Hit backspace until the app tops the result list instead of web results.
Does this make any sense? Nope...
What Microsoft almost certainly will do is yet another pass at launchers and window widgets, leaving its three-decades-deep sediment of system functionality largely untouched.
And another for sound settings etc. It's like every setting has this evil twin which is there only to deceive you.
Why? Whose idea was this? To what end? I would really like to know the answers to these questions.
(read: touchscreens I don't use)
Surfaces, touchscreen laptops, and convertibles are all pretty popular.
Every screen I have is a touch screen. Laptops, all-in-ones, external screens, on Windows and Linux.
I couldn't agree more. Your points are exactly why I've remained a happy Linux Mint user for nearly a decade. I don't dread OS or desktop environment updates, precisely because I know my chosen desktop environment will mostly remain the same (if not exactly the same).
What Microsoft really need is a Window strategy. Where is it heading. Its source of revenue in the future. Its longtime programming framework, library, API Strategy etc....
I believe they have WinUI 3.0 now? What happened to WPF, UWP and WinForms? And they are moving all of the Outlook Apps to Electron for cross platform development. [1] And just look at .Net. Have they finally settled on .Net Core now?
May be because I am on Mac so I am confused. It is not Apple are perfect, but looking from the outside either Microsoft doesn't have a clue or they just dont care.
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-to-replace-its-many-...
But what does bug me is when the refreshes are half baked. Either refresh everything visible and hide the old one entirely behind some obscure command if it must remain, or don't refresh at all.
I don't have a problem with changing things if it replaces all the functionality.
It is trying to do to must "automatically" for you instead of just letting you control the system.
It works, but navigation is confusing, the experience switching between different paradigms is jarring, you can't search for things from the top level and find it in the control panel and so on. They have eft it at 60% finished instead of the 95% or 99% that would make it actually usable.
> The Windows Core User Experiences team builds interfaces for Windows and Surface Hub customers around the world, and we’re looking for a collaborative, inclusive and customer obsessed engineer to help us build the future of Windows Experiences!
> On this team, you’ll orchestrate and deliver experiences that ensure Windows is a great user experience for our customers.
> You will have the opportunity to build delightful, polished, experiences for Windows as well as for our Surface Hub product line. You will play a key role in open-ended explorations, prototyping and identifying business opportunities for Windows experiences. We're looking for collaborative engineers to bring their passion, drive and technical acumen to help us accomplish these goals.
> We have a wide spectrum of fantastic opportunities to further advance your career and expand your skillset – from building UI using the latest cutting-edge XAML technologies, designing new APIs in conjunction with the our platform team partners, to interfacing with hardware teams to build the essential platform and infrastructure in our OS - as well as working directly with our customers to understand their needs and deliver magical software that exceeds their expectations!
How do they get from that to "This UI refresh will reportedly include an overhaul to the Start Menu, Action Center and some in-box/bundled Microsoft apps" is my question?
Sounds like a normal job ad for any UI or design related engineer.
They reported it. It's now reportedly. And all other sites can also mention "reportedly" as well now too.
The article states your post is the job posting after it was edited. The original had the text:
"On this team, you'll work with our key platform, Surface, and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is BACK and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers"
Windows 3.11 is due for a fashionable return!
Keyword here is visual. Every one I just looked at revamped all the things you claim is a large jump. Given that every previous one seemed to make those changes, I think a large jump would be to conclude this one will not.
The link says it was posted on Jan 4
The Windows UI has been inconsistent and weird since Windows 2000 (or XP if you turned off the Sesame Street theme).
Very true. Windows 95 and then 2000 showed some real efforts to get good and consistent usability. They threw that all away with Windows 8 and Metro.
Not that I don’t trust MS’s recent design direction, but I have to wonder if such a major overhaul is warranted.
This is by far the most Microsoft comment ever.
(And in fact, the latter is probably worse for completing the migration!)
They have been working on this now for 8 years without much progress. For any serious work you still to know if the setting is in the old control panel or the new. I don’t think they are even trying to clean up.
Pretty much everything is in the Settings app now, though it was missing a whole lot of stuff back at launch years ago. Every single setting is searchable, which I find to be a vast, vast improvement.
I wonder if anybody back in the Windows 8 days was even able to estimate how much work all this means. Many of the control panel applets have been there for ages so they must have lot of legacy stuff inside them. Also the modern UI is totally different experience, so they likely ended up rewriting a big part of code.
While I find Windows 10 usable and attractive, I find it still has a lot of clunkiness that needs work.
Of course not. You simply re-design every few years.
The re-design will be supported by evidence like "its cleaner" and "it increases visual clarity" or "it unifies our brand", because phrases like that mean nothing but who would ever vote against cleaning something up?
For this reason they need to change it. So we have a reason to use it.
Way back in the Windows 3.11 days and also in the Win 95 days and to some extent the Windows XP days they gave people a good reason to use it. With 3.11 it was more to do with the apps that came along for the ride, with 95 it was neat touches like the context menu and DirectX, with XP it was because it wasn't a DOS system in disguise any more.
In the next iteration they have plenty of opportunities to get it right. Lots of historical design decisions were taken because of reasons that no longer matter. They can just do it right rather than due to a half baked whim.
An overhaul is warranted, to bring people back to using it.
I've used Linux distros my whole life but I feel confident saying Linux desktop has surpassed Windows in usability.
I occasionally interact with Windows for family members and it always amazes me how wrong things are.
AaronFriel you can only pause for a few weeks and you need to keep doing that in perpetuity. That said, its not so much impossible to work around, its just annoying and feels like an encroachment. If I want to run my PC as a server with near 100% uptime then just let me do it.
moksly, an enterprise license is for 500+ employees and will have a cost to match that.
I wasn't onsite to pause it myself.
I don't recall if we found a workaround, or were able to get someone in the office to do the reboots.
Your statement about getting bit by Windows policies only spurs more questions on. What on earth is going on that you need someone physically present "to do the reboots", and why don't you have any remote administration tooling, and why are you using Windows client OS boxes, and...
Should I send you my card, or use my (still active, I think) partner status to sell you some server or LTSC licenses? Put you in touch with a managed service provider?
It seems to me no different than writing that you installed say, Ubuntu Desktop or MacOS in the office, set up your company's webapp or some critical software to start after user login, neglected to set up any remote administration software, and then when it reboots to install security updates it's the software's fault? There were a lot of ways things went wrong before the reboot.
That one has to do this is galling. The availability of a product SKU to work around the "evergreen" nature of Windows 10 doesn't eliminate my distaste for it.
The factory I know using CNC machines bought them many moons ago, for a fixed payment (the old fashioned way), from a small business. They don't have any kind of subscription, they are fully offline, and they won't go anywhere near any kind of network. I don't really see recent Microsoft product lines delivering what's required in these scenarios.
Arguably this is more of a use-case for Windows Embedded, but that has its own licensing challenges. Ultimately the small system integrators will end up shipping with Ubuntu if Microsoft makes it too hard to build products around the Windows ecosystem, as it will save them time, money, effort and support costs.
It's not burdensome or expensive to deal with. (I'm not a reseller, so it affords no advantage for me-- kickbacks, etc. I just like knowing that expensive server software licenses can be moved to new hosts, etc.)
The minimum volume license buy is 5 licenses. Any good reseller will sell you 1 copy of LTSC and 4 of the cheapest SKU in the catalog (usually $5-10 / ea) to get your volume license contract started. After that you can purchase piecemeal for 2 years before you need to fulfill the minimum purchase again. The licenses themselves are perpetual.
I don't like it, but it's not too hard to do either. The trick is finding a reseller who will leave you alone after the purchase (no sales calls, etc).
Windows 7 is no longer supported and you now have devices not receiving security updates that are (if they're getting updates) connected to the internet.
We don't have any sort of contractual set-up with the company using the CNC machine, they just brought it to us and said "fix".
According to that company though, the machine is disconnected most of the time, only being connected occasionally to update the CNC software.
Edit: And yes, I'm well aware Win7 isn't supported. However, as it is almost always offline, working is better than not working.
All of that being said, I may be interested in getting a few if you can sell not in bulk.
Just call CDW or one of the major manufacturers - Dell, HP Enterprise, etc. They can all sell you windows 10 LTSC volume licenses.
I think 200$ a license is a bit out of range for me anyways.
One of the first things you see is "Windows 10 is a service" when you install it. That's always been it's premise since it was released. They aren't hiding that detail.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/update/w...
On-prem/on-pc is also harder to debug and support, and harder to keep customers on the latest release, so you have to maintain more releases.
Overall cloud makes sense from a business perspective because it's cheaper and takes less effort, so you can dedicate your developers to add valueable features to your software instead of dealing with customer specific situations.
For a vendor, creating, maintaining and supporting on-prem software is more expensive than cloud software, which means it will have a higher price. Don't see users willing to pay a higher price, if it's not considered important.
I've basically demoted my Windows 10 box to headless status. If I want to do anything I either use Remote Desktop or Steam Streaming to access it.
Interestingly OS X also has plenty of Cloud services, but Apple seems to have at least figured out how to sell them in a less intrusive manner while letting you feel like you're still in control of the machine. Just little things like you setup a local account and then Apple sells you on "Hey want to link your iCloud so you can remote wipe this machine if it is stolen?" vs forcing you to lie about internet connectivity so Windows 10 gives you the local account option.
Agree with Apple except that we learned it constantly streams your activity to their servers now (things like when you open an app).
Back to Microsoft - the smack in the face for me is that OneDrive/their servers is listed as the top choice when saving files in Office. You cannot remove it/demote it in any way even when disabling OneDrive as a connected service. Its more obnoxious/a direction I dont like that they are headed towards than a crippling thing I cant work around.
I like to think that Microsoft employees mostly realize how stupid stuff like this is, and intentionally leave loopholes like that until forced to "fix" it.
To my surprise (still), I've lived in Linux comfortably for years now. It's, hands down, a superior OS for programming (unless you're married to Visual Studio [the IDE, not Code]), but being able to live in it otherwise so well is still surprising, from gaming to interpolation on videos with mpv + SVP (which, pretty strangely, is free for Linux but costed me a subscription on Windows! https://www.svp-team.com/get/). FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) has a clone suite of Microsoft Office that works with all the formats (plus, Microsoft Office is on the web now, anyway, right?), and preferring roguelike and indie games (which are reliably native) over AAA games enough to make do with running the odd AAA on Proton when available has been key for me. If I was really into AAA games or doing audio editing or something, I'd probably've gone back and made do with WSL2.
To save you time if you try switching, the best distro for a Windows refugee (or non-server, end user generally, in my strong opinion) is Manjaro with KDE. KDE's the most featureful, powerful, and Windows-like DE, and Manjaro's most Windows 10-like in that you're getting new updates all the time, indefinitely, which are pretty close to bleeding edge but held back for a margin of safety (as opposed to Ubuntu, where you're stuck with old stuff unless you mess with PPAs or install the new version of the OS every few years -- however, in edge cases like CUDA development, you might want to have older packages, since Ubuntu kind of dictates the pacing of outside development given its marketshare). It also benefits from the insanely-detailed Arch Wiki (since it's Arch-based) and has the AUR, which has every package ever, and it has GUI tools for kernel rollbacks and driver stuff, AND the Manjaro forums are amazingly helpful.
I use local myself but I think its decently useful stuff to most people.
I'd love that offering in a slightly different sense.
I do most of my personal compute intensive work on AWS these days. If I am processing a bunch of old files into a different format, or archiving old photos, I might spin up a many cored instance and parallalize it to turn a day's processing into an hour (mostly the code, and a few minutes of compute). And I store old junk in AWS for at least an order of magnitude less than dropbox or google drive can get me. I had a personal project where the naive thing to do involved a massive matrix multiply, so I saved myself a ton of time by spinning up a machine with half a terabyte of RAM and did it naively, saving myself an enormous amount of time trying to do something clever.
At this point, for my own machine, I'd love something that amounts to a big battery with a wifi connection (and maybe a teeny tiny cpu somewhere in it). For workloads that can be done over SSH, it's all I need. If the rest of my needs could be met that way, I'd love it. It would be great to just have a remote desktop I can spin up in AWS, changing the size and specs as I want. Basically stadio/geforce now for everything.
I expect as internet becomes more reliable, this will be a thing. Sadly, instead of being able to install windows or OS X on an EC2 instance with an image that I can pass around wherever, moving to GCP or nvidia whenever I decide to, it'll probably be a locked down offering like some services we are starting to see today :(
(Note, this actually happened a while back)
I am genuinely hoping for more pen & touch-screen focused accomodations too. The keyboard/mouse experience for windows is already decent enough, but these new input devices need help. This is especially true with the ipad pro becoming more of a general purpose computing device.
Lastly, I hope windows puts more care into revamping curation of various app/program stores/managers. Chocolatey is great, but is a pain to use and isn't as widely supported. The windows store has a few gems in what is a sea f spam apps.
Lastly Lastly, better native tiling, search and workspace management please. (I know powertoys exists, but why not integrate it directly)
How often has an optional change become the only option after awhile?
That the message pump of the explorer windows stop because a server in another country is down must be a design that is extremely hard to change in windows explorer - because they have surely seen this problem.
but then you have another problem: if the system load is high (eg. hard drive is busy), then context menu items would randomly disappear. That's arguably worse than before, because it happens randomly.
>or show a spinner
you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_wait_cursor
Edit: this thread is full of Linux stans (I use Linux too!) calling Windows a POS... I don't see how that is helpful or relevant to anything. Windows is actually...very good. It has some problems, but uh, using Linux and even MacOS, every OS has its share of problems/difficulties.
Right now you can't blindly mouse up and over in Microsoft Edge to get to the leftmost tab since that space is reserved for the browser window and clicking it will un-maximize the window or minimize it when you click again expecting to arrive at your email.
I'd also like to be able to open Internet Explorer when I open the start menu, type in "internet explorer" and click the listing with the IE logo marked "Internet Explorer" Around half the time this opens Microsoft Edge.
This is probably asking for too much though.
The upside I see with this PM-driven UI churn is that Linux desktop might be worthwhile for more users.
"Well most of our users aren't using those settings, why bother putting in dev time to update them. Lets just push out the main UI update as an MVP then come back later* and update the more obscure settings."
*Narrator: "they didn't"
I know you weren't referring to Narrator the screen reader here, but I can't resist. While I was on the Windows accessibility team, which owns Narrator, we actually did phase out the old Narrator settings UI in favor of the new, UWP-based one.
Call me cynical but I doubt they will be "optional" for long. At launch perhaps, but Microsoft has tended to transition the "optional" into the "default" then into the "only" version in the past.
the internals of the OS are also problematic
on top of that UWP/XAML story is not really that good when you compare to SwiftUI on macOS
the whole macOS experience is what they should AIM for
but that means giving up on all the legacy bits that keep stacking up since forever..
Windows need a massive spring cleanup, i'd say a reboot, but i'm not sure the people are microsoft are this courageous, i have the feeling they are just lazy
I'm not against the new Settings dialog but I don't see why anything that works needs to be removed.
https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2019/10/02/intro...
Does it run your apps? Is the window management bearable? Are things running fast and responsive? Those are my concerns.
I think one area for productivity improvement is to make it easier to split screen between apps. Of course it’s doable already, but could be better and easier.
You are boring and have developed no imagination in 30 years.
Product manager/Program manager next it seems...
my only use for windows is for gaming use cases, otherwise I stick with linux