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Comment by noen | Hacker News Reader

It’s yet another effort by Microsoft to make Windows relevant to touch form factors at the expense of productivity, desktop, and keyboard/mouse/touchpad.

It’s astonishing how little (close to zero) human factors research is done, much less sought out or taken into consideration by PM or engineering on the software side of Microsoft.

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Windows 8 had a ton (!) of smart human factors research done, but people gut reacted to all the individually beneficially changes horribly when released all at once (rather than taking some time to try adapting). I almost wonder if Microsoft learned the exact wrong answer from that and decided to ignore their own research more as they stripped out the beneficial improvements from 8 into 10.

I don't doubt they did research but I don't think they were individually beneficial changes. Nielsen Norman critiqued Windows 8 UX changes and found them fundamentally lacking [1]. If this is the outcome of their internal research, maybe they need better research.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usa...

No it didn’t. I worked at Microsoft for 14 years. I know exactly how Windows 8 UX design was designed and built.

There was almost zero HF research, and the brunt of UX research done was trying to justify and fix fundamental issues with an already decided design direction, not to inform a valuable direction in the first place.

The zune HD might have benefitted from those, but windows 8 had very little to none of the good things from the zune hd

That's a weird take on this change. Centering the Start button is less touch friendly. When you're holding a tablet, your fingers are near the sides. The center takes the most effort to get to.

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