Microsoft Will Soon Bring Back The Start Menu In Windows 8.1

Personally I don't see Metro as a UI failure, my productivity actually increased with metro. I rarely need to use the mouse, which is great.

Also, hitting the windows key to switch screens is not a big deal, my grand parents complain about it a little, but the pains of having to explain finding stuff in the start menu to them and other older relatives has stopped happening.

Additionally with the docking capability of the task bar aka "pin program to task bar" had made the start menu quite redundant since win 7.

Example: how do you restart or shutdown your Windows 8.1 machine when you're on the desktop? Go to the start screen. Click your name, sign out, click the screen so it 'opens', click the power button, click restart or shutdown from the menu.

I don't see MS as humble here at all. They are backtracking because they are forced to backtrack as it is evident that their idea of an OS does not work. But do they backtrack in the right fashion? No. "As little as possible" seems to be the mission statement.

People want the old start menue back. They voice their opinions as "Where is the start button?" To anyone with half a brain it should be clear that they didn't just mean the UI element of that button but the functionality behind it. And as much as I hate Microsoft's shortcomings as of late, I doubt that they really believed "Well, if they just want that button, give them the button but once clicked it'll still do the same shift to metro it did before. That should give people what they want" I doubt anybody could be that dense.

And even this "return of the old start menue" is not what people want. As they still keep on with the Metro part of things.

A simple choice during install. Is all that is needed. "Do you want touch or desktop?" Touch meaning Metro and desktop meaning, well, desktop. Without any metro tile nonsense what-so-ever. Done. All of the issues with Win8 and I mean all of them would be gone. But that doesn't fit with Microsoft's vision of having tiles everywhere. So, by the way they are "fixing" win8 and refusing to acknowledge that metro needs to die, at least on the desktop, I really doubt that "Win9" would be any better.

We finally get off the "every other version of windows is usable" because now, every version of windows will be worse than its predecessor.

http://windowsitpro.com/systems-management/windows-xp-color-...

The Win8 colors look like someone ate a color palette and then barfed it all over the wireframes. It's horrible

Windows 7, Office 2010, etc. "phone home" by default, sending them usage patterns. But power user usually deactivate such intrusive annoyance.

Lessons learned the hard way: Don't rely completely on automatically gathered metrics. Do not piss off the community that develops applications for your platform.

On a 27" desktop? Oh god, Metro is a nightmare. I've been using StartIsBack but I'm glad there'll be a properly sanctioned start menu soon. Hopefully it will lead to greater adoption of Win8, as besides that one major blunder, is not too bad at all!

Side note, anyone know of something like awesome for Mac?

No, but it's a symptom of the worst thing. The worst thing is that Microsoft's UX team failed to realize that "The user's actually only interacting with this one thing right now" does not necessarily imply "This one thing is the only thing that deserves to even be visible right now."

I did a comparison photo (I can't find it any more) with my HP50g help up next to the Windows 8.1 calendar on my 27" display.

Embarrassingly bad.

And I'm on board with that.

It's just that one needs the Start Menu to get those 8 or so buttons into the taskbar in the first place!!!!

"Yes, Mrs. Bathwater? Your baby is...thataway!"

Let that be a warning to all these "data-driven-anything" people.

Casing user opinion is in my opinion a pretty terrible way to do UX. It's an interactive process not a committee one.

I imagine they ignored all the noise by filtering out all comments about issues they already addressed, then looked at how the ribbon ui went down and ended up a superb success.

I support end users. Most wouldn't go into 'all programs' unless directed. None know that panel as the "start menu" any more since they took the word 'start' off it.

It's just not that big of a deal to skip over every other cool thing in 8 to stick on 7.

Personally I want to see windowed metro apps, the start screen maybe the bottom half height/full width of my display (13" 1080p) and a transparent background.

That would be good I think. The corners are a nice idea although i never really use the left one.

Can we all use this effort to cry for a feature that would actually help like say, native virtual desktops in Windows? Wicked useful.

There are still around people running Windows XP because they consider them superior. I never had issues with Vista or 7 (although never used them as a desktop), but Windows 8 are a new low...

LOL, too true. Let's replace Z with a '.com' key since the data tells us people are constantly typing '.com'. We can move Z to be Ctrl-Shift-A.

There isn't any evidence of that. The far more interesting possibility is that the data suggested that they do what they did, but that the data was wrong. An examination of how and why that might be the case would be fascinating.

As opposed to saying "typical Ballmer!"

The backlash came from the fact that it was a change from 20+ years of ingrained behavior, not that it was an inherently poor design. However, you could argue breaking the previous mental model of users will definitely create issues and therefore is a bad design.

I kept trying to find "control panel" to add a second monitor, for example, but one of those tiles spontaneously showed me a video of an fscking carnival in Rio!

Then, another flashed a bikini babe in Miami.

Then, another flashed a severe weather warning on another continent...

It was like being in the control room of a news station! Pretty like a Christmas tree or fireworks, but *first I have to help my girlfriend set up her computer to write her dissertation."

But to me, thats an entirely different concern. It's frustrating that most users, of any platform, will simply scream and give up whenever there's a change in their routine.

Agreed. It's something Spotlight has been incredibly successful at on OS X, and I'm surprised more Mac users don't hit Cmd + Space.

But then again, I'm also not surprised. It seems to me that the vast majority of users prefer a mouse or finger to typing on a keyboard, and when a search bar is not the main feature of an application, it goes unused. I know people who search for "gmail" on the Google homepage rather than clicking the header bar link, because the search bar is so prominently the focus.

Had they not spread settings between 2-3 different places, or left the menus being intuitive to make adjustments to the system, it might have been fine. But there's been several times I've had to resort to the internet to disable "helpful" features (like "power saving" by toggling my wifi on the desktop), and constantly toggling between the menu screen and the webbrowser because the menu ran full screen was rather annoying.

Not a good way to convince me you've made a good menu layout change.

This is a great feature. I think it actually was introduced by quicksilver on mac, though - and has been around for a long time in various linux environments also. Gnome 3 and Unity (much reviled in the 'nix world) suffered similar criticism to Windows 8 in part because they got rid of the traditional start menu.

I use Win+Q for searching (much like I use CMD+space on mac) and never even open the metro interface. I agree with you that the start menu and the idea of running/open are outdated.

As far as I can tell this is "just" another way of pushing Metro. Excuse me: the interface formerly known as Metro.

"Oh, people complained about us forcing Metro. So let's introduce it more gradually!"

Personally I think it might be a good idea. It seems like a reboot of what Microsoft was going for with the Windows Sidebar (or the Start screen, obviously) in a format that actually works with desktop Windows's overall UI paradigm.

The basic premise of W8, if you ignore all the window-management stuff, is that they put your sidebar widgets inside your start menu, and made that your desktop (thus also obviating desktop shortcuts.) They may have implemented it horribly, but if the W8 start screen was the desktop--if your taskbar and windows displayed on top of it--I think it'd be the perfect UX for a desktop.

And the Windows desktop in its current form is awful for touch screens, so it too will die out. Expect similar updates from Apple soon.

I upgraded to 8.1 from Win7 last week. My first experience trying to compare a PDF document with text file in another editor was quite unpleasant (Metro essentially makes apps modal, which is nuts).

You're right. It doesn't matter that I think that. It matters that OSX can get people to convert because Windows is stale and it's desktop doesn't work well.

I didn't say "doesn't work". I said "well". Which is pretty subjective I guess, but I did qualify that it was an opinion so...

OSX has made changes. Some successes, some failures. The only real constant is that it does tend to change (at least to a greater degree than Windows IME).

Sure, MS may have the GM of operating systems on their hands. And there are a lot of GM fans with little Calvin & Hobbes stickers on their vehicles.

That doesn't mean there isn't room for improvement, and I'd be a lot happier as a PC user who only uses it for gaming if I never had to see the Windows Desktop experience again.

But I guess I'll be waiting for SteamOS for that to happen.

I mean, how many Xbox users want their much more Metro-like experience replaced with a standard Windows desktop?

I never argued it wasn't disruptive to goto Metro. As someone who uses BSD (OpenBSD load balancers), Unix (SmartOS VM hosts), OSX, Ubuntu (VMs) and Windows routinely, I just place good, intuitive UX above familiarity. It's the reason why Ubuntu is one of my least favorite distros with their alternative user-space tools and /etc design, and why the Windows Desktop is easily my least favorite GUI environment.