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.
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.
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.
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.
...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!
(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 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.
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-...
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.