Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LarryDarrell | Hacker News Reader

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I would love to see a similar paper by the Windows 11 design team. The 95 group seemed to be very responsive to how users were using or failing to use the OS. I've been on Win11 for a few months, and I'm confused who these changes are for. It could be that the Eternal September means things have to be dumbed down and locked down, catering to the least capable users. Or maybe design decisions are being made at a higher level for inscrutable business reasons. Either way, I'm feeling left behind.

I think there's a tension between Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users that the Windows Team has decided to just ignore. Or they have decided that Desktop users are not important. I spent extra for a widescreen monitor that would give me more vertical pixels. What does Windows think I want to do with these pixels? Use them to display a big, honkin' new Taskbar, apparently. Why did they take away the option to make it thinner? Why is "Every user must have a Big Fat Taskbar" the hill they want to die on? And the modern-ish design language feels like it was designed to waste space and hide information. I have a huge screen, I don't want a 3+ click minimum to get to any setting.

Third-party bloatware, permanent rounded corners for some reason, the take-it-or-I-dare-you-to-switch-to-Linux attitude does not give me warm fuzzy fealings. I would switch to linux, but I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.

For now, I'm still able to cobble together the tools that make Windows a mostly-pleasant Desktop experience. I use Directory Opus, Open Shell (with ExplorerPatcher for Win11), Everything Search, and some registry edits to do things like bring the normal Context Menu back.

> Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users

The crazy thing is that Windows touch-screen users are a tiny minority of all Windows users, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Yet a lot of the design compromises since Windows 8 making things worse for non-touch users are made for the single reason of catering to touch screens.

As a surface user, I must say windows 11 definitely has gotten -worse- for tablet usage too. 10 had a special "tablet mode" that did things like automatically keeping all app windows fullscreen, like a tiling window manager, and giving you a friendlier to touch start menu but 11 dropped the tablet mode. I ended up installing linux with Gnome and a tiler extension once I read that my particular tablet was compatible and I'm much happier for it.

The design compromises have become really hard to justify even when you're coming from the point of view of the minority among us who use hybrid devices. It's difficult to tell who Windows 11 is for. They want to imitate the macOS dock but even macOS has less limitations, you can drag and drop a document onto the dock, you can drag a folder and have a peek in the inside of the folder when you click it, you can't do that with the 11 taskbar, which only accepts software shortcuts. The windows 11 taskbar is an abomination and the worst piece of UI I have ever used in my life.

It was possible to add documents, folders etc to "quick launch" which was introduced to windows 9x along with Internet Explorer's active desktop. It's just amazing how the modern windows UI has become inferior to decades old tools.

One of my theories is that organizationally and culturally they are still mourning the loss of the Windows Phone.

Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. As long as Microsoft hardware, along with the marketing, remains touch-focused, they can hardly change their UI design trajectory. Yet the vision of Windows as a touch-heavy user interface remains a wishful-thinking fantasy, and works against what used to make Windows a productive UI. It’s really a tragedy.

>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware.

What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nominally the same man-machine interface, are somewhat differentiated.

Why is MS so hellbent on making Windows a jack of all trades?

A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.

IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.

>If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.

No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).

Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.

I always remember this post when reading complaints about Windows design https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307

This is not exactly the document you’re asking for, but I think the clearest explanation of the origin of modern Microsoft flatness back in the Windows Phone 7 days is “How print design is the future of interaction” (2011) [1], by the late Mike Kruzeniski.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120314071640/http://kruzeniski..., seemingly missed by HN at the time in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3301723 (6 points, 0 comments).

The argument seems to be about visual design, which is just one facet of UI design. And one thing the argument is missing is that a clear distinction between content and UI controls is critical for usability.

> I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.

I'm in the same boat. Do you get to design your WPF UIs, or are they dictated to you by a UX designer? I hate the UIs I have to develop. I would never use them, but some PM insists they are good design, citing metrics from a broken feedback system that's been gamed to give PMs promotions over honest feedback. The designers don't use the software they are designing, but insist it is good design. Heck they are designing Windows software, using a Mac. Most users are held hostage. I'm convinced if there were actual competition these products would all fail.

We get to design the UI ourselves, but we use MahApps[1] to make WPF look Metro-ish (which sort of pushes you into a certain direction). Our product is for engineers and scientists who tend to be very opinionated. We do our best, but we end up redesigning based on feedback now and then. We don't have many users, so we don't mind bending over backwards for them.

I will say that the constant feedback is how that they love how "modern" our application looks compared to our main competitor. So I try to never ignore the power of that perception, even if it is just a bias.

[1]https://github.com/MahApps

It is kind of crazy that Microsoft collects more Telemetry data than ever, yet their software and interfaces are more broken than ever.

That's not crazy. It's because UI improvement is no more than an excuse. The telemetry is really just for targeted marketing. Click fast, click slow, show us who you are, we'll sell you a car.

Why the taskbar groups same programs (you can still turn it off) but then does not allow you to have them ungrouped completely - and shown in the order you opened them.

They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?

Or for that matter, why they removed the option to show the text labels, which is even more important once you have more than a single file open.

They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?

Treat everyone like an idiot and they'll become idiots.

Idiots are more likely to be persuaded in the "right" direction and milked for profit.

Some of those idiots then get jobs designing UI, and the cycle repeats.

...or at least that's my theory of what's happening.

> and shown in the order you opened them.

They know better. They really like to rearange windows in the win 10 taskbar. My thoughts always get to their mothers. Having to use this (insert profanity here) 8 hours a day is too much.

Some changes are really cool, but then marred by bizarre UX decisions that make absolutely zero sense to me and make things everything more tedious and difficult and I'm wondering how they're making these decisions. It's not being made by somebody who actually cares about Windows users.

There have been several times when windows made changes to accommodate hardware that didn't catch up as fast as expected. With windows 11 it feels like they're trying to design an os for the hardware of yesteryear instead.

If win11 were running on a surface duo or similar device it might make sense but on the desktop they should be embarrassed by the amount of software and tweaks people use just to make their software usable.

> Eternal September

Now there’s a term I haven’t heard in aeons…

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