Windows 11 screenshots leak, show new Start menu and more
theverge.com
theverge.com
Rounding corners and harmonizing colors is nice but it's not what I care about. I wish they'd demonstrate their awesome design skills by working out a reasonably intuitive UX to do nested sorting. And do so without losing any existing functionality.
Another example is Firefox. Almost every UX change in the past two years has made the browser noticeably worse and requires serious users to hack CSS under the hood to fix. They keep taking things away and rearranging deck chairs while not adding obviously missing functionality like a non-right-click menu UX to manage sidebar lists.
This is why I enjoy owning my own small software business. I can just build something great at the start, and sell it forever, without needing to worry about continuous improvement nonsense.
I use Linux 98% of the time so this particular assault on people's workflow doesn't affect me but I can hardly get around phone and browser updates (though recently I've found Vivaldi quite pleasant)
Instead of making the click target extend to the corner, MS chose to move the cursor a few pixels when a click happens in that little corner.
Microsoft just stinks at this, its all over Windows 10 as well with windows that are almost maximized to full screen, but for the top row. So if you click to the top right of the screen you close the window behind the one you wanted to close.
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/fitts-l...
If it's on the far left, the target area is infinitely large on both axes, just throw your mouse somewhere down left and you'll land on target 100% of the time.
From Win95 to Gnome to KDE - they never became better. Just more colorful and more resource hungry. The new Firefox is a total shitshow. Windows 8 was a disaster (and 10 didn't get much better). What is wrong with having windows title bars which clearly show where the focus is? Why does everything has to be white?
From Windows 11 I expect the worst and I'm sure I will still be disappointed.
> Why does everything has to be white? Possibly for higher contrast > outdoor use > portable/touchscreen devices
That’s a personal opinion — I for one appreciate the improved information hierarchy.
Yes of course, what are you expecting here? Do you think the UI designers of Firefox or Windows make their decisions based only on scientifically approved facts?
They probably have "UI scientists" who analyze and tell how to make the perfect UI but next year they are replaced by new experts and then we have to deal with the next best UI-trends.
> improved information hierarchy
What do you mean?
Oh boy does Explorer look like a mess. I see that I still can't edit the sidebar to contain the items I want.
And that help icon is still present. I wonder if anyone ever actually clicked that.
Explorer is the least offensive part of Windows 10 IMO.
You say that as if it's a good thing. In my opinion an overhaul of Explorer is long overdue.
I just did. Guess what happened: It opened Edge and searched "help for windows explorer" in Bing!
[0]: https://twitter.com/goranmoomin/status/1404856884767592451
(I work at MS but not on Windows and I haven't tried 11 at all.)
I really doubt that, Explorer is a big application with a ton of extensibility and features that apps rely on.
I really hope that _replacement_ will be as feature complete and useful via keyboard as the current explorer. UWP UI components tend to be unnavigable via keyboard.
For example I really like old Win32 listview behaviour to just type in the item name to select it.
As unpopular as it was, I like the Win8? start menu for letting me neatly lay out and categorize all my frequently used programs using my full screen real estate.
Now they’re turning it into a single app list that utilizes only 15% of my screen real estate, and is now fully redundant with my task bar in function and utility. A horizontal iPhone Home Screen sitting on my desktop.
I can’t fathom the reasoning behind this.
But yes, by now, the Start Menu of Windows 10 is the best of all Start Menus of all Windows versions. There're a few features that I miss from the old times (like the full "All Apps" list not supporting subfolders, or lack of the "tiny icon with long text" size), but overall it's never been better, especially for crazy people like me with hundreds of apps.
It'd be really stupid of Microsoft to replace something as massive as this, which has been improved over many years, with a joke of UI with more "breathing space".
I suspect that by the time this reaches "release" status, it will have had some feedback incorporated and a few small changes made as token gestures. Whoever designed this will allow nothing more than that, and they'll get their stupid, undeserved raise, and then things will calm down for a while, and sane changes will again be made.
we don't see that. we see wild changes which break large portions of spatial and muscle memory, over and over and over again.
we would stop seeing changes pretty soon if we measured and tested and honed in on the ideal UI for a given site or tool. changes happen MORE frequently and are more disruptive than ever, it seems.
Some apps may override system chrome with pretty rounded nonsense and not bother with implementing non-rounded maximized state, or mess with proper maximization of windows, or you may install bad non-Microsoft skins. These are app-specific problems though, Microsoft can't do anything about it.
If someone can get the designers to understand that Windows doesn't run primarily on touch devices, that would be great.
Not only whitespace, but also look at the size of the search, and path!
By the way, let's further destroy any remaining metaphors. The Start Menu shouldn't be connected to the Start button. There should be no indication whether clicking a button does something or surfaces more actions. And let's also force the user to assume the boundaries of a scroll page and make them scroll for no reason.
That's my rant, and here's an opinion of mine:
It's true some programmers don't care about UI but it's also true that some do. They are the ones most qualified to be designing these sorts of interfaces as there are typically parallels between abstractions in the code and abstractions in the UI. What I see over and over these days, at multiple companies, is a designer/etc. type gets involved, thinks about a concept in a very local context, and comes up with something that looks good there. If they don't trim the fat I'm convinced we're witnessing the death of Windows. But what will replace it?
Apple used to make fun of it
I've looked a good bit and not really found a fix for this blatant usability issue (I think it's worse with DisplayPort?).
Dell has some app that will remember which screen stuff is on and move it back, but it doesn't work very well, and it's jarring, and so on.
I wish the people building systems and interfaces really used them.
Maybe they should go all the way and make windows a layer on top of Linux.
I'd actually love if more OSes standardized around capability-based apis, like fuchsia.
We have seen them attempt to ease some of the pain with COM and .NET, but under the hood the old APIs always live - many remaining bug compatible to keep existing apps working.
Also as a user of WSL, it's great, but I think it's goal was to keep people on their platform, which I think has worked out pretty well.
And extremely buggy as well!
I think there would be a future for a better system interface that has all upsides of the win32 api, and none of the downsides.
Plus we don't need the POSIXfication of Windows, WSL is there for those dev that buy Apple laptops instead of supporting GNU/Linux OEMs, so that they buy Windows laptops instead.
They'd said Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows; a "forever" Windows that would slowly evolve over time. So when I heard about Windows 11, I was a little excited, imaging some pretty big changes to the internals - not yet another pointless exercise of moving things around and changing the colours. How does this need to be a whole new version?!
I wanted to hear about proper innovation, like a new database-based file system that actually made it out of PoC, an increase in performance and reduction in size because of dropping decades old legacy stuff, some kind of magical performance boost for Hyper-V virtualisation, some kind of actual package management, maybe new improvements to WSL. Maybe even (gasp), Start-menu search that actually works.
I dunno, something big.
Instead, we get yet.another.boring.ui.tweaking. And another outing for Widgets - nobody wanted them before, but maybe now they might? Right?!
I can only hope there is some actual substance to Windows 11 that's going to be announced later. Because as of now, I see nothing even slightly compelling, and nothing that couldn't have shipped as an incremental upgrade. Given the big reveal is planned for the 24th of this month, I suspect any hope is futile though.
I just want a simple OS that includes the essentials and gets out of my way. Every "app" and feature (like the stupid weather in the taskbar thing they just launched) should be opt-in and turned off by default. Damn, I really miss the simplicity and usability of Windows 2000.
I’m tired of things just getting changed by undisciplined designers. The other day, my Google Meet updated. I mentioned it and people asked how it was different. All I could say was I didn’t really know, it just looks different with different buttons, placement, and style. I needed to relearn where stuff was. What a pointless change.
I'm no UI/UX expert, but it's perfectly possible that the new layout is more intuitive to NEW users (I don't actually know, just consider that angle).
And that's not a bad thing either, making computing more accessible to significantly more non-tech people at the cost of slightly annoying experienced/power users is okay.
The mix of Win32 and newer framework whatever it is called is still there.
And only just yesterday I was complaining [1] about PC ecosystem and Windows software. Needless to say it was controversial on HN with lots of upvote and downvote occurring.
How are the PC industry going to compete with Apple's ARM Mac once they drop down to iPad Air pricing level? And with the current state of Apple this is a very scary thought.
Also, there just isn’t anything attractive to me about the space-wasting layout of Ribbon in Explorer windows and I hope there are plans to fix it. (It’s still there in these screenshots.) It is easily one of the lowest content-to-chrome ratios I have seen.
I'm certain they are losing a descent market share to Mac and Linux as is, especially their developers who are now creating applications for other operating systems and not just Windows. In a short time they've adopted containers, WSL, a new terminal with Linux-like functionality, etc.
I wonder if you can still replace the entire shell on Windows? I haven't done that for over a decade.
A chef who worked this way might “improve” bouillabaisse by adding ice cream to it.