But... don't the control panel windows have more functionality (and usability) in practice?
I still go to "Sounds" even on Windows 10/11 because it's easier to read and seems to have more functionality.
I still go to "Sounds" even on Windows 10/11 because it's easier to read and seems to have more functionality.
The new pages seem designed by someone who only knew how to build a vertical layout and just stacked all controls without a care for the user. I am also amused how the modern window takes a good second plus to paint.
It's a much more elegant solution than multiple windows in Windows!
windows now: "we hope your prompt engineering is strong, that is our only interface"
Yeah I can do lots of stuff with powershell but lots of time I just want to run app wiz.cpl because new one doesn’t show all stuff that is installed. Let alone network settings new screens being useless.
The UX designers don't care for it to be actually usable, they just want the standard UX/UI ideas of whitespace and stuff looking good without thoughts how the features are actually used.
The number of pixels is increased since the days of Windows 3.1. Even notepad needs a couple of seconds to draw its empty window on a new mashine. /s
Yes, and they're not alone even in the FOSS world (cough ...Gnome... cough).
My take on this is that someone decided that everything must either run on a cellphone or conform to its UI, therefore GUIs are slowly moving to the mobile touch screen model, which translates into leaving lots of unused space because of the bigger size of finger tips compared to mouse pointers that could trigger errors with smaller and more dense controls, and of course less controls because smaller screens with comparable resolution to much larger monitors would make them much harder to operate.
I can understand the reason, however all comes from the 1st mistake which is the attempt to unify everything to a mobile UI, probably to save on development time. It's unnecessary and it's wrong.
thank you, I needed a good belly laugh!
Windows 95 was built in 3 years and its user interface is still superior to anything they've come up since then - instant redraws, buttons respond to clicks, information was laid out as needed, not to look good in a theoretical sense, etc.
I would say your comment makes more sense for Windows 2000.
windows '98 - even on a semi decent machine - was fast
On a CPU system fast enough to render it within a frame, you could switch that animation off. I think it was mostly there to preserve UI compatibility with potatoes.
Maybe if you ran Windows 95 on a 386 with 4MB of RAM.
Work is macbook, but I hate macOS settings and everything as well. Can't easily configure mouse acceleration or disable it is crazy to me.
On personal I use WSL for dev, but maybe I should just dualboot Linux.
The mouse feels perfect on Windows/Linux, but it's off in my Macbook. Sometimes also loses bluetooth connectivity, where it kind of starts to skip and/or stops working completely. And I have to take the bluetooth usb, put it back in for it to work normally again.
Maybe I should try another mouse, if you have any recommendations for a similar, ergonomic wireless one. Definitely don't want the magic mouse.
Ergonomically I think the Logitech one is perfect for me.
But the mindset lives on.
Sorry, what the hell is this? Do engineers at Microsoft actually think this is sensible, usable and accessible?
If engineer keeps pushing back, it is bad performance review and "hard to work with".
A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.
A/B test the new Settings panel:
If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.
User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.
Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.
Also another common flaw I notice with some redesigns or things in general is that when the features, e.g. config settings were initially released, there was very thorough understanding and need for that feature and whoever put it there knew the technical implications and why it is needed, and they put it there in such a way that it's reasonably easy to use and makes sense with other things.
However when redesigning, you are going to be exposed to all those features and nuances at once. And you won't have a good understanding of everything at all and all the little details and implications. And you might want to start with some sort of feel, framework and design to handle all of that. But then you are going to approach those features from an aspect where you have to take the features and make them adapt to the design as opposed to considering what makes sense specifically for that feature. And you won't have good understanding of the features, so either you are reducing the scope a lot or also just implement features incorrectly or in a poor way, not working well together with some other features, etc.
You might be into something though.
Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.
It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.
What's really needed is internal pushback against UI changes without user studies to back them up as well as a willingness to listen to user complaints and not just brush them off as "people complain no matter what change is make hurdurdur". Perhaps also an understanding that even neutral changes (as far as usability is concerned) have a negative cost to users.
Now I'm imagining a kind of spreadsheet-based hell where the UI is one enormous vertically scrollable grid of cells that are sometimes labels and sometimes inputs and sometimes buttons...
I feel like I caught a glimpse of it once or twice in the VB5 / Java Swing days.
I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored until it bothers me with a popup that is slightly to fast to interact with.
I belive a complicated ui should have a kind of blog where you can find all the nonsense going doen in chronological order with tags and categories.
Bluetooth & devices > Printers & Scanners > pick any printer > Open print queue. The Print Queue can also then jump between printers.
And you don't need to go into the Settings app to change sound devices. Click the Sound icon in the taskbar, click the icon to the right of the slider with what looks like little sliders and an arrow, choose your device. But even then its pretty easy using the full Settings app. System > Sound > click the circle next to the device you want to change to the default. I don't get how that's materially worse than Control Panel > Sound > Right click > Set as Default Device.
The os should know when new screens are attached or removed and take logical action.
If you have 2 cars in your driveway you have to chose. If one is removed, which one do you use?
Putting things under system or behind a vague icon is not instantly obvious. If i did that i would sell nothing.
That 3 things combined in one icon is wrong is already obvious where you refer to it as the sound icon. The convention is for the banana icon to open the banana menu. You switch to the banana mind set and learn new banana features.
E.g. on the legacy "Sounds" none of the per app mixing, device pairing, or new filters like toggling global mono mixing are there. Some power user things are also just easier, like adjusting the non-primary sound device volume doesn't require going into the device properties and flipping to the tab for each device you want to change the volume of - it's more combined.
On the flipside the legacy "Sounds" disabled devices didn't clutter the view and there are advanced options not present in the new sections. It's also much more space efficient... though sometimes to its detriment in that the windows can't be made larger and it relies a lot on modals which can be easy to misplace and get confused on (but also useful in that they can let you see more of the information without having to flip back to other screens).
That repeats for me about everywhere. Either alone I'd probably be more than happy to use at this point but that there are two places to go each offering not quite the same set of features is the real pain point.
Meanwhile in the old devices and printers control panel it was just right click -> set as default printer
Not only that but many pieces of the Fisher Price Settings interface still redirect to the Control Panel to get you whatever setting you're after that isn't supported.
Hopefully this means they actually completed porting it all over, rather than just destroying huge swathes of functionality. Given Microsoft's track record... 60/40.
In an ideal world, they would fix this problem by making bigger mouse cursors automatically use some proper non-centered text selection cursor, but I don't have much hope for that. I guess there will be some way through the registry in any case. Maybe we'll see alternative control panels with more features?
Their continued push to enshittify something that the world has come to know as standard was actually the final straw for me moving to Linux full time. I just thought that if I'm gonna be changing it might as well be something that isn't going to show me ads and farm me for data.