Why I'm No Metrosexual | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm No Metrosexual

kyrobeshay.com

93 pointsziyadb104 comments

And to add to the confusion, why are there different sized tiles?

Why on earth would that be confusing? When I see a double door next to a normal sized door I don't freak out and try to break down the wall instead.

I get the point being made in the article, but I don't quite buy it. I don't think that people understand they can press app icons on the iPhone because they have raised shadows around them, I think they press them because they are visually eyecatching and surrounded by areas that are not. There are many different visual cues out there, and people adapt to new ones all the time.

Honestly, consistency is a much prized and proven way to help users navigate an interface. If they see things where and how they expect, they can navigate through easier, find buttons and actions easier, etc.. It's also prized in design and aesthetics. Designers (and even the Android design site) recommend designing to a grid to get a uniform, nice looking appearance. So altering the size of the tiles is considered bad from a UI and appearance perspective.

Funny, because Windows Phone 7 had very static tile sizes (there was one double-width one), wheras 8 allows a large variety of sizes.

They do still fit a consistent grid, though- they're all half or double size another. Android widgets, by comparison, can often be very weird dimensions, and have very different designs that look ugly when combined.

Consistency is not just to avoid confusion and make things easier. Inconsistency is a direct source for irritation and annoyance. Its very easy to see if you give a computer worker a different keyboard setup (that is, other than qwerty or even just a slightly modified version). It drives people nut!

But why are the titles different sizes? There may be no reason beyond aesthetics, but that's his point: differing sizes often conveys information, and even if it does not, it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.

And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that. Is one the emergency exit? Is one the freight-entrance?

Tiles are different sizes depending on their intended use. App tiles on Win8 are active - i.e. the app can render new information to them. A newsreader app can tell you most recent headlines at a glance (without having to launch the app), your email app can tell you number of unread messages, weather can display current conditions without forcing you to launch.

Larger tiles are used by apps that need to convey more information - your email app that just shows an unread count probably doesn't need more than the standard 1x1 tile, your newsreader might want a 2x1 to have room for headlines.

I'm not a huge fan of Metro, though I have been actively devving for Win8 for a few weeks. I don't think this is really a problem - all of this stuff is pretty obvious to users.

Except that they don't really obey those rules you laid out.

Minesweeper and Solitaire are double-width tiles, for instance. Why? Because MS wanted them to be. I haven't found another reason.

So why would developers choose to have their tiles smaller than everyone else's? Even MS didn't choose that.

My experience has been that "Windows 8 Apps" default to the 2x1 tile size and all "pre-Windows 8 Apps" default to the 1x1 tile size that displays their "desktop icon".

So the rule could be: "All apps start at 2x1 if they have a 2x1 tile designed, otherwise they start at 1x1"

The good news is that you can resize tiles to your heart's content:

http://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/how-to-resize-grou...

>And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that.

Wow. Wait until you see your first revolving door.

You're being glib, but the main entrance to my building has a revolving door in the middle, and double doors on either side of it. The preference for us is to use the revolving door because it's more energy efficient. So, yes, there are situations like this in the wild, and there usually is a "why" behind it.

There is a "why": the tiles are different sizes because I made them that way, based on how I use my phone. The tile sizes in WP8 are user-customizable. Examples from my phone:

- My email tiles are the smallest (1x) size because they still show unseen count at that size (also shown on the lock screen), which is the only "live" information I care about for them. At 4x they will show the name of the email account (which I don't need, since I can tell by the icon) and at 8x they show the subject line of the most recently received email, which I don't personally care for.

- Same goes for my phone and messaging tiles, as well as IE and maps, which have no live functionality

- I use a 4x tile for my calendar for two reasons: 1) I've put it in the top corner of the screen, and 4x makes it easier to reach if I want to open the calendar app, and 2) at 4x it shows the day, date and next calendar appointment (also shown on the lock screen, but I like it here as well).

- The pinned-contact tile for my wife is 4x because the vast majority of communication I do on the phone is with her, and because I like seeing her picture there. Plus, at 4x, it shows Facebook status updates and sometimes other stuff.

- I keep the Weather Channel tile at 4x because it shows today's forecast.

- Pinned websites are all 1x, because they don't update and I can tell from even small icons what they are.

- A few other apps that I use (I personally don't use a lot of apps except the stock ones) are pinned at 1x, since they don't have any live functionality I really care for.

I've always thought the "live tile" idea was a bit oversold since in the majority of cases I don't really find it useful (I don't really count things like email unseen counts as live tiles - even if WP8 didn't have live tiles I would still expect that information to be there, like it is in iOS), but the new WP8 ads about being able to really make it "your" phone definitely ring true. If I had other apps, workflows or priorities it would look completely different.

disclosure: works for MSFT.

That's fine, but it's a different use-case than when a user is presented with tiles that they did not size themselves.

And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I would wonder why that was set up like that.

Because more people or larger objects use the double door. In both cases, it has nothing to do with you as user using the door, so you're wasting brain cycles thinking about it. It's a door. Walk through it.

it takes effort on our part to realize that size differences does not imply functionality difference.

No it doesn't. Size may imply significance difference (which is the "why" you're looking for) but I can't think of many cases where it implies functionality difference. A double door serves the same purpose as a single one.

Trying to figure out if there is significance in the door sizes is not a conscious thing - and it is important to do this sort of thing in the background, unless you want to be to be the one who trips the fire alarm.

But fire doors are the size of normal doors. They just tend to have giant warning signs on them, are sometimes painted red and tend to have "push bars" instead of handles.

Door size has very little to do with fire door "affordance".

...and in your example, you said a normal sized door next to double-doors. Yes, there are other signals indicating emergency exits. But I was assuming, from your example, that the only piece of information we had was the door size. My point was that most people would then look for other signals to indicate what was going on - such as giant warning signs and push-bars.

I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules" were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out.

I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe, etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the iPad were intuitive right off the bat.

To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but terrible UI.

The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.

anecdotally, my mom really likes Windows RT. Watching her use the traditional start menu, or attempting to navigate Windows Explorer to find something is an exercise in pain. She, honestly, really enjoys the full screen start menu -- easier to find the app she wants to start --, the WinRT full screen apps -- doesn't have to remember/think about window/application life cycle management. It pretty much works the way that she wanted Windows XP to work in the first place.

When I use Windows 8, on the other hand, I spend 99% of my time on the desktop, and the transition to a full screen start menu/screen is pretty jarring. But, honestly, as far as the new UI paradigms go, its not that much of a mess... Try watching a Windows user try to use a OSX for the first time. Or vice versa. Or a mac user trying to use KDE.

I think the real world analogy of the OP is a bit flawed. Babies don't instinctually know how to open a door, that is not something we are genetically programmed for. They learn by watching other people do it, and you learn by trying. There is a low penalty for trying to failing to open a door correctly -- sometimes you push instead of pull -- and that is the point of a good user interface. Does Windows 8 succeed at that? Perhaps, but its not a disaster.

A disaster would be a door that killed you if you tried to open it incorrectly.

>I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked like Windows 7

Really? I suppose you could have difficulty with it, but the "Desktop" tile is quite clearly visible...

A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.

I agree that it's a tradeoff.

Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen.

I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me.

That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.

I think the issue is that one shouldn't go too far in the direction of skeumorphism or too far away from it. Most people are comfortable with some level of skeumorphism because it can be a powerful usability enhancement. As I type this I'm looking at the "add comment" button below here on Hacker News, and wouldn't you know it, it's got a slight gradient giving it a bevel, suggesting it's occupying 3-dimensional space and can be pushed like a button.

Of course this can be taken too far. When too many skeumorphic accents are added to a design it can cause it to be rigid and noisy. As the OP mentions, if you go too far from skeumorphism you run contrary to how the human brain works. My favorite user interface designs usually have a very tasteful and well placed set of skeumorphic elements with an overall minimalist design. Tactile, not tacky.

The author doesn't get it. A lot of the way users know what to click is based on consistency. If it's a tile on the start screen you can click it. Want to print? It's always in the same place? Want to share? Same place. Want to close an app? Always the same way? Want to see more options for an app? The same way.

Now within the app one could argue there is a stronger need for affordances, but even there I've yet to encounter a single problem in my use of several Win8 apps.

I find the Win8 interface a lot more intuitive than the OSX interface. But I'm sure others would find the opposite. I suspect a lot depends on your starting point and your predisposition. My four year son figured out most of the Win8 interface in about 5 minutes (literally... at the MS store he was flying through the UI much better than I'd ever seen him with Win7 and a mouse).

On my iPad, my 2-year old is able to unlock the screen, go to Home in case any app is active and then open his favorite 2 apps (a simple game for toddlers and a painting app).

That's not saying much though, he just did what all kids do ... tried things out and quickly memorized what worked and it was easy and fun for him to do so because of the touch-screen. He also taught me some shortcuts I had no idea were available, like how to do multitasking by switching between active apps or how to split the on-screen keyword into 2 smaller pieces :-)

In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is, because all that really says about an interface is that it can be learned by trial and error by kinds. Regular WIMP interfaces are indeed not intuitive for kids because the interface is often exposed through hierarchical menus that can't be explored by children who can't read.

In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how intuitive an interface is,

That seems like a great benchmark to me. If trial and error gives feedback that allows you to qiuckly learn the UI then that's pretty useful.

At the end of the day a lot of usability is about two things:

1. Consistency 2. Familiarity

If trial and error is effective then consistency is in place. Skeumorphism is about taking familiarity of the real world and applying it to the digital world. And this actually has some use, in particular for UI that users won't interact with much. There's no chance for users to be become familiar with that UI. But for UI that is always there, skeumorphism becomes limiting and can become unusable when you really want to extend beyond what you see in the real world.

Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should optimize for it, not just the physical world." Is Metro perfect? No. But I think it has the right idea to figure out what works on computers/tablets/phones first. Don't be encumbered by trying to map to physical objects. People will spend so much time with the digital objects that they may spend 10m doing trial and error the first time, but shortly the digital world will be just as familiar as the physical world. Lets not waste the opportunity to introduce the right interactions.

So I guess you've never seen a child being able to program the clock on a god-awful VCR from the late-eighties / early ninties.

I was that kid, when no other member of the family could and let me tell you, it had nothing to do with (1) consistency and (2) familiarity. What's "familiar" to a small child anyway? The notion is preposterous.

No, the issue has more to do with the fact that the organization of these interfaces on mobile-devices tends to be flat (rather than hierarchical), so the probability of hitting something that triggers an action of interest is really high, versus searching in a menu with sub-menus, an action for which you need to be able to read and with transitions that are not animated and thus boring.

As I was trying to say, using a child as a benchmark for usability is a poor benchmark, because if you look carefully a child does not care for neither consistency or familiarity.

> Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should optimize for it, not just the physical world."

IMHO, Metro only says "let's differentiate from iOS and Android", but that's just an opinion.

That's a lot of buildup just to say you feel the interface to be unintuitive.

We know how to interact with different items because of experience and common signals -- not all door handles are alike, but different interpretations of the 2 major types (knob and lever) are similar enough to visually signal to us their probable use-case (opening a portal in the wall).

Similarly, I could go on about how the "stop, wait, go lights" at the top of windows in OSX are counterintuitive because they are in the same location as their Windows counterpart, but have different functions. It's not intuitive because the same visual signals provide different outcomes.

Exactly how I felt, not to say that it wasn't well written, but it sure takes long to get to the point of this article.

Why the need to use "Metrosexual" reference? A little sensationalist isn't it?

Very sensational. I dislike these kind of posts that get to the frontpage because of their title, rather than the actual content :( If the content is good enough, please put something related to that in the title.

Agreed. This has nothing to do with the term "metrosexual".

"Metrosexual is a neologism, derived from metropolitan and heterosexual, coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban, post-industrial, capitalist culture) who is especially meticulous about his grooming and appearance" - Source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual

Wikipedia quotes the dictionary incorrectly. It refers to a heterosexual man, yes, but the "-sexual" postfix comes from homosexual. It's meant as a put down to straight guys acting gay.

I'm very well aware of the term and would consider myself a metrosexual in some ways. It was just a play on words.

Yes, but not a very relevant (or clever) one. Just because two words can go together doesn't make it a fit for the article's title. Something about Metropolis would probably have been better, as in, not being a denizen of the city of Metro.

Also, if you actually do consider yourself to be metro, then it's even more out of place.

/begin nerd rage/ For the love of god, why the hell is your font 11px?? What the hell are you thinking??

You know how many people here would have had to zoom in?? Are you new to the internet?? /end nerd rage/

I zoomed. I think your criticism is valid.

11px should be readable by default. If you zoomed you should change your default settings or get your eyes checked.

Edit: I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt see: http://ycombinator.com/news.css

I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt...

The 10pt text here on Hacker News is much bigger than the 11px text on that blog.

My browser allows me to edit the blog's source and reload; 11pt text on there looks fine.

... get your eyes checked

This is a terrible, terrible attitude.

Actually, it's not that uncommon a problem.

I had a user in there mid 50 who kept complaining about the fonts in a custom application. Turns out he was having vision issues and after getting some reading glasses he stopped having any issues.

PS: I have a high resolution screen and changed my default zoom the make the vast majority of websites readable. True, it would be nice if websites stuck with readable percentage based fonts, but until then it's an easy change. And, IMO far more productive than complaining on HN which the author might not even read.

This is for titles.

Bodies and large amounts of text should be 16px.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-co...

If I need to put any amount of effort into reading your site then you are doing it wrong.

Also, open up the dev tools for this article and set the font to 16px. You will see how much better it looks and how easy it is to read.

Nah, I don't buy it. These kinds of things are easily learned. Web links don't have depth and we all learned pretty fast that we can click them (in some instances they don't even have to be underlined)

Most Desktop web browsers provide quite many affordances for links, and do so automatically upon hover: change cursor, underline, pop up link description, show URL in status area.

Touch UIs can't have these "introspective" affordances because hover is not practical in a touch-based UI.

Even with all these affordances, if a Web UI didn't distinguish a link from other content visually, it would make for a difficult interface to traverse.

Very much this, hyperlinks are visually distinct elements in pure HTML and get color and style change (underline) to indicate the link. One of my biggest pet peeves are sites that alter link style in CSS so that it loses those kinds of visual clues and makes it harder to know what can or cannot be clicked.

Depth in this context is relative (affordance is a better term btw). A boldness in a sea of un-bold text is something worth investigating (affords something...), with your mouse, or just your eyes - then you can determine from the text whether you might want to click it or not. This is why it's common to underline links or change colour. You can't make a link the same as normal text and expect a user to learn which words you've used for links.

The point is we already know these things by intuition, we shouldn't have to learn them.

"Don't make me think" - Steve Krug

Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't *ing notice/try/use the action items in the new action bar pattern we're all supposed to be using. This pattern has us place very sparsely decorated icons in the top bar, generally without even text. Tons of users completely miss them vs. big, chrome, 3D styled, pushable-looking buttons on the bottom of an app.

Even worse, the icons aren't supposed to have text and users are supposed to know to long press on them to find out what exactly they do. I've never in my life seen a user do that. I emailed a Google Dev Advocate about all this, asking if they actually had statistics and user studies to back up this new direction they are taking the UI, if it actually helped users in the metrics or was just designers trying to make things look pretty without actually helping. No answer.

100% agree with the icons without labels. Do you have an idea how to solve this?

You can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You can also do this programmatically.

The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there is more room for labeling.

In that case, I'll start thanking God everytime I open my phone that Duarte gets his say and not idiot users.

Nobody is born with the skills to open a door or push a button. I have a <1yr old that still can't do either of those. That is something you learn. Metro is just a different type of UI that you might want to learn.

"Can I click on all those tiles?" - if you try to touch or click them, you will quickly see a 3D effect that mimics that of a push button (tile scales to 97.5% of its size similar to a pushed button). After that you will quickly learn that you can interact with tiles.

But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable.

The author is making the point that Metro has zero visual clues, it's not learnable. You don't know which tiles you can interact with until you try and interact with them.

>But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like something to push. It's learnable.

And there are also plenty of things that looked like buttons when I was little, that I thought you could push. But you couldn't. I don't really buy this argument.

But that then creates an expectation that "anything in a square box can be clicked on" which is going to make life difficult if you want to design an app but now you can't use square boxes for pure information display.

These are called style guidelines and iOS has them too [1]. If you don't adhere to some of them, you won't even get your app in the App Store. So you need to design your app in an "iOS" way, just like here Windows Phone devs should design in a Windows Phone way.

http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/userex...

it's much easier to design an app if you can say "don't bevel anything that isn't a button" rather than "don't put anything in a rectangle that isn't a button".

That's a strawman. No one said: "don't put anything in a rectangle that isn't a button".

if all of the buttons are coloured rectangles, how do you differentiate a non button rectangle?

That depends on what you want to show, of course. What kind of example do you have in mind? What kind of information are you showing?

Here are some examples of non-button rectangles:

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/weather-clock/ec...

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/weather/171f3a75...

The differetiators here seems to be that 1) the rectangle is not a square 2) the rectangle has rounded corners

edit: and I guess 3) the rectangle is not "flat", it has a gradient, 4) it's not colored, it's transparent grey, unlike any clickable rectangle in the system. .... (basically, it's fairly easy to differentiate between a clickable square tile and a pure informational rectangle)

Those UIs look quite cluttered and unclear to me, but I suppose a weather app isn't the best benchmark.

Note that he's referring to Norman's use of the word "affordance," more correctly referred to as "perceived affordance." Both are important concepts in design.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

Another rant about Metro interface. Can we please stop it already, it's just beating a dead horse. Sure, Windows 8 is kind of beta quality, just like Vista was.

On a side note, comparing with door handles is just wrong. We already have a generation who grew up with idea of abstract controls. We have a save button which mostly looks like floppy button. How many 16 year olds know what floppy is?

Not many, and that's a good thing. The floppy icon only didn't represent well the abstract act of saving files. As it turns out it's just plain better present to users a button with the clear text inside, save. Or completely remove it from the UI, and do auto save for users.

On a side note, Windows 8 is beta as were: windows vista, winxp pre sp3, win2k, win millennium, win98, win95, win 3.x, and previous. Microsoft had only two versions of Windows that were really usable, stable, and fast: WinNT 4, and Win7.

I get frustrated when things move from text to icons. E.g. gmail (at least on android). Studies have shown that text buttons like "mark as spam" are more usable; I wish google would listen.

There's very little I like about Metro, but I do like that Microsoft is focusing on the total user experience across all its products. Perhaps they need to divide the company into 3 components — consumer (win metro / tablet / phone), enterprise (win office / office suite / .NET), entertainment (xbox).

I've been a Microsoft fanboy [1] but just find very little about Windows that I love anymore. I understand they are trying to be visually different from OSX, but I'm not sure this is the right direction. OSX hasn't deviated from 'windows-based' app management and Metro makes its history as Windows almost unrecognizable. As a power user with 2 monitors usually running 2x or 4x in split or quad view, I don't see a UI that will be more adaptable for efficiency and multitasking. iOS handles it very poorly.

[1] DOS > Win 3.1 > 95 > 98/ME > NT > 2000 > Windows XP > .. converted to Apple ..

Metro is pulling things in the right direction I think. Hyper-skeumorphism did immense harm in the hands of copy-style designers, allowing them to justify their unoriginality through "I can copy that because it's actually copying a real-life object, you can't be unoriginal if you copy physical reality, all great artists did it" reasoning. It's better to concentrate on the axis between obscene skeumorphism and uberminimalistic full-flatness then to pick on any one of the extremes as they are obviously flawed.

Take for example the whole crop of metro-style Bootstrap themes and pick an UI interaction element like the buttons, to see an example of a scale of designs between decent micro-skeumorphism and full-flatness. This one http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons or this one http://talkslab.github.com/metro-bootstrap/basecss.html#butt... sport full-flat microsft style buttons, with no hints of possible interaction, while others like http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/ show subtle hints of skeumorphism (you can probably google for many other more or less metrofied bootstraps...)

It appears his "thesis" is half way through: "It’s because our eyes know we’re in a 3D world. We can detect light sources, and degrees of shading, and depth. And without any of these, we’d be absolutely lost." My first thought: I'm reading English text, with no shading or depth, and it seems to be a pretty effective form of communication. tldr: the article is hyperbolic garbage.

Our ancestors did not own smartphones, so the broad evolution argument is kind of garbage. User interfaces need to be researched before we can make conclusions on skeuomorphism vs "pure digital".

Furthermore, the author talks about affordances and how Metro has none. This is false. Anything that can be touched on the screen reacts to your touch. For example, if you're scrolling down the main menu and your finger happens to press down on a tile, the tile will be "pushed inwards" at the point of contact (even if you haven't released your finger). It's very subtle, but it definitely lets your subconscious know that in the future, if you would want to press that thing, you can. Now it's not an immediate affordance like a door knob, but a touch screen in itself is an affordance for touching, and once you touch then the other affordances reveal themselves.

This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially true, surely someone has done a study you can link.

Slightly OT: "The Rods... so sensitive that they can be triggered by single photon"

This sort of thing is why I love HN. Irrespective of the topic, there is always some little gem I find somewhere. I was very sceptical of this claim, so I looked it up. Turns out it is possible:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1

Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat Style Reduces Discoverability in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html .

At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles in Touch, Desktop, and Web context.

Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.

Reduced discoverability is the exact issue XBOX Live's interface has had since they updated it -- it's harder to differentiate between content I've paid for, their internal marketing and external advertisements to the point where I deliberately avoid them and just use the XBOX button modal to navigate. There's no rhyme or reason for the element sizing, outside of [apparently] making all of the stuff that's actually relevant to me the smallest.

Is it just me or is the font size on that blog really, really small?

Ah yes, reading about UI design flaws on blog with horrible UI design flaws. The irony... it burns.

Couldn't disagree more. We know that things are clickable when they are verbs or icons that are well-established synonyms for verbs. Gradient isn't a substitute for being explicit.

It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in 2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?

I hope they're that smart. But I have a feeling they're just changing so often because they don't have any confidence in their abilities to design a good UI. On this basis, Metro has a couple of years before we see something completely different.

I haven't used Metro, so I'll wait to judge how usable it is, but I love the fact that they've gone their own way, and not created an iOS/Android lookalike. The blog post feels too negative, and gives the impression that it's written by an older man that dislikes breaking with the norm - though his points are probably valid.

Pretty sure this guy only wrote the article so he could use that great witty zinger of a headline he'd thought up. Not gonna waste my time reading design critique by someone using an 0.002pt font on their blog.

It was 2002 when the last competent UI engineer left Microsoft, none of this is a surprise.

I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did, then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or "authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft.

Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem, and not unlike the sort of thing that pundits have skewered Apple for in the past (the overly-ornate skeuomorphic-esque visual designs of Calendar / Contacts / Game Center, for example).

That being said, I think there's definitely some truth there for a lot of the other Metro hatred. More and more modern iOS apps have a flat UI style that isn't unlike Metro, but you don't see people giving them shit for it.

"I feel that the complete lack of distinction between clickable/tappable tiles and non-interactive ones is a very real problem"

Really? Where is this problem? I know the tiles on my phone can all be tapped, without any exception (WP7).

An example is the "Change PC Settings". Is it a link or just a title? How can you tell? See here: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html

That's not a tile. Also, the first time I saw that text, I knew I could click it. I can't explain how they did it, but somehow being able to click it was just consistent with how everything else works. That's just me though, supposedly this guy tested with 12 people... and yet he conveniently omits the results for this task... oh no wait! "many users in our testing didn't click this command" How much is "many" out of 12?

First time I saw it was with a touchscreen device and I didn't find out that it was touchable until I had googled how to add more users to WinRT device.

Therefore YMMV

EDIT: Negative karma for pointing out an opposite experience with a device?

(wasnt me!)

Our opposite experiences just goes to show that UI qualities are subjective, and until someone releases scientific studies (none of this "many users" crap) that go against Microsoft's own user testing, I don't see why they should ditch their Metro experiment.

There are no non-interactive tiles in Windows 8 or Windows Phone.

I really think that a very simple gradient or a 1 pixel wide white/black(depending on background) border around the edges of all interactable elements would go a long long way to fixing this issue without breaking up the UI too much, it might even expand it because just having that distinction gives you another "word" in your visual vocabulary.

*edit: Changed "buttons" to "elements"

Buttons do have a border. The tiles on the start screen have not. Mostly because they're all tappable (but probably also because the background provides separation and thus a border on its own). There are no non-interactive parts on that screen.

I was thinking the same thing. Its not like iOS or Android handle these things any better. I think this is further proof that usability is something of a snake-oil field past a certain point and that all interfaces are learned.

Now everyone is an expert on UI/UX and the overly-reaching and never quite defined "design." Oh well, whatever sells ad impressions I guess.

Heck, at least Metro doesn't fall for the sin of nostalgia based skeuomorphism and other overdone cliches. Not sure how the market will respond to it, but its a decent attempt from Microsoft.

Just FYI, UX goes way beyond affordances. That aside, there's a reason that most of us advocate various methods of testing as part of the process.

Do you have a rebuttal for the flimsy analysis? I realise it's far less time consuming to just insinuate bias and move on, but if it's that flimsy it shouldn't take you long.

If I'm not mistaken I've read Gruber complain about Apple's products with bad UI/UX before. I'm not sure Apple doing this would change the outcome of the analysis. I also didn't read the article and hear "bad UI === Microsoft".

Years ago Gruber was a trenchant critic[1]. But he got over it[2].

[1]http://daringfireball.net/2003/05/the_problems_with_click-th... [2]http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

By your logic people would be posting about how "Apple shook up the UI pardigm" with it's extreme skeumorphism. They're not - it's being almost universally panned. You live in a fantasy world if you believe Apple gets a from the larger tech and design communities.

I am Android user and I've been criticizing Apple's UIs before.

Personally I find the direction of Android Jelly Bean towards a flatter look to be annoying. It makes sense sometimes, but I surely hope it doesn't go overboard, like Metro does.

Did we read the same article? The stuff about lack of visual clues sounds like substantive criticism to me.

The only tech pundits with any readership I can think of who are not hostile to anything Microsoft are Paul Thurrott and Jeff Atwood.

Paul Thurrott's http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN, you can't submit a link to it, I am guessing due to excessive flagging by HN users with good karma.

And any Jeff Atwood's post on Coding Horror that's positive about Windows 8 gets flagged off the front page just like any other article remotely positive about Microsoft. (Even the announcement of Surface Pro pricing was killed, see [1]).

Coding Horror will probably get hellbanned soon on HN if he keeps up with those kind of posts. That's HN and it's partisan audience at work.

Asking PG about the rampant abuse of flagging on HN elicits no response inspite of getting voted up, maybe he didn't see it because it was flagged too! [1]

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4849814

Paul Thurrott's http://winsupersite.com is hellbanned on HN, you can't submit a link to it

FYI: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4867752

The flip side is that interfaces have tended too much towards faux 3d on a superflat 2d screen and also ignoring that the UI can be "authentically digital" instead of being tied down to analog equivalents. I find the author's analysis very simplistic.

Also, this is just about mostly about the buttons and links which can probably be fixed easily in the future. Metro is much much more than that, Metro also removes a lot of unnecessary chrome like lines around menus etc. and reducing visual clutter which are very important on mobile devices where you're looking for actual information in a pinch on-the-go. The codeword for this is "Content over Chrome".

Android(starting with ICS) also is trending a bit towards Metro in things like the weather app, Google Now and the overall designed aesthetic. https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN...

Anyone see the similarities between this[1] from 20 years ago and the iPhone UI + every other mobile OS including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile < 7, Blackberry, Meego, Firefox OS etc.?

[1] http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF

Here's more information if you're interested in the design philosophy behind Metro written by an actual designer who designed Metro like content for his clients' websites.

The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487

Going full Metro. http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493

Things you ought to know when designing metro screens http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526

Hopefully all this results in better UIs in the future instead of the tired old jaded WIMP interface and Desktop on mobile yet again with some added touch features and I think Microsoft has taken a good first step here to shake things up.

I don't know how Metro looks lately, but when I tested a WinMo 7, the interface gave no clues of what elements are clickable and what elements aren't. So I ended up clicking like an idiot on images and on text, which sometimes triggered a click and sometimes it didn't, depending on how static or not the element was.

You can see this mistake in some Android/iOS apps that come with their own custom designs. For instance Twitter on iOS is friendly and all, but after expanding a tweet, to view the full profile of that user, you have to click on that profile's image, while the profile's name is NOT clickable. I always make the effort of going through "what the hell do I click on? every single time I want to view a profile.

So if this still happens in Metro, with the UI giving no visual clues as to what elements can be touched/clicked or not, then your argument is not really valid, being a poor rationalization. In the real world things that can be acted upon either provide audio, visual or tactile clues (or all of them at once).

Also, I agree that the design in Android Jelly Bean tends towards the same kind of flat look. It looks indeed nicer, but it's not as radical. In general, buttons are still buttons, with the exception of things that are designed to be clicked as an after-thought (e.g. the clock widget's primary function is showing the clock, but it opens the dialog for setting an alarm if you touch it, but that's not the only way of setting an alarm, being just a convenient shortcut). There are some annoyances too, like the phone pad for dialing numbers, which just shows some white numbers on a dark background, something that's annoying me greatly.

Looking at the link http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487 it shows they contrasted Metro with gaudy and awful chrome. I think it is a bit of a straw man in this case. Metro just took a idea and implemented the extreme of it. And extremes don't always work well there needs to be some compromise. This doesn't have to be all 0 or all 1 (all gaudy horrible chrome or completely flat polygons filled with color).

"authentically digital" -- I am all for it except that most people already have some baggage or notions of how interfaces work (both in real world and digital). It also happens that those in digital world mimic those in the real world (buttons have shadows for ex) or some conventions have stuck that have been randomly chosen initially (links are underlined).

Now maybe it is a noble goal to re-educate the user and I can see that. I remember hating Ubuntu's Unity. Now I like. It has re-educated me. But I also happened to like other aspects of Ubuntu and didn't want to switch to an alternative that why I stuck with it. But it seems a lot of people did and a lot of people will also do that to Windows.

The only aspect of W.I.M.P. that exists in iOS is I: icons.

Says the guy with the black and white blog. ZING

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