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Comment by adamwong246 | Hacker News Reader

Never understood the fixation with the start menu. You start up metro and you are greeted with all those tiles- that is the new Start Menu. Why is that so confusing?

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Its not so much confusing as it is useless and annoying. It's just a really inefficient and wasteful design for a desktop OS. Basically, most windows users really liked the windows 7 start menu, and they replaced it with something that has no tangible upside and a lot of downsides.

I think this concern could be addressed. Simply scale down the tiles, which is the greatest unused aspect of metro. Those tiles can be big and touchable in a touch device and small and efficient on a non-touch device.

It's still full-screen and lacks any of the visual context of the desktop. Something like GNOME3's fullscreen Activities screen is better; when you open it up, it has little mini-screenshots of all your open windows, and you're not losing things like the taskbar (because it doesn't have one). You still have the top bar, which ties it into the system.

Opening the Windows 8 Start screen loses all the visual context - your taskbar disappears, your windows disappear, there's nothing to tie it into the desktop, it feels like an entirely different system from the one you were using a second ago. And that's before the fact that how you interact with it is entirely different from how you interact with a desktop app, which is the final wedge.

But that's a failure of the split-experience, not metro itself.

Sure, but they can't drop support for everything built over the past couple of decades just to have a new interface, so it is the fault of introducing Metro into Windows 8. To get around the problem, they could've had plenty of integration from the start - having the taskbar throughout Metro would be a brilliant start, and something familiar.

Luckily, they're integrating Metro into the desktop properly now, so the entire system will be usable.

Tiles can be resized to be small, medium, large, and x-large sizes.

Actually it's a terribly efficient design. The usability studies that involved eye-tracking showed that when the start menu is open, users gaze is purely focused on the start menu, not other objects on the desktop. If this is the case, then why not use the whole screen as your start menu? Now you can show many more apps, search results, and allow users to spatially group apps and folders to their liking.

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.

Where I'm looking and what I'm thinking are different things. I used to use the start menu out of muscle memory like a zombie, it was subconscious. A full screen experience is jarring

So with the old start menu, users were looking at the start menu when they opened it. That makes perfect sense -- why else would you open the start menu if you didn't want to look at it? However, it also took up a smaller section of the screen, so you could more readily find what you are looking at. With the Metro screen, I have to play Where's Waldo whenever I want to find an app (I have the same problem with Gnome 3 shell, trying to find an app icon in that massive wasteland).

But that's just me -- I also didn't like the sliding start menu design either (Windows 7, KDE 4), where submenus open in the same space as the folder icons -- I'd rather, when clicking on a submenu, have it open into new screen real estate like any of the traditional menus.

So your problem isn't with the small-start screen vs big screen, but with the density of information? With the Metro Start Screen you can customize apps, folders, and their sizes to your liking, or just type what application you want and hit enter to launch it.

How can you more readily find something in a smaller space? And the new start menu is much easier to organize then the old start menu.

Look at the window on the far left of your task bar, and tell me if you can read the system clock while looking at it. Now tell me if you can make out what the window directly next to it on the taskbar is while still looking at the first one. Peripheral vision is a limitation.

>How can you more readily find something in a smaller space?

Is this a serious question?

Yeah. By default, the Win7 start menu shows 10 most recent apps, then if you click "all programs" it shows a couple dozen little icons (about 1/3 of my menu) at once. If you have to scroll around to find little things, it takes longer than just looking at a single static page of larger icons.

Well I use the start menu quit often, but almost never the "all programs", maybe I'm not the one.

Also I think the "start menu" argument encompass in reality the whole concept of Metro against traditional desktop UI.

If you don't remember the XP/Vista classic start menu, it's a linear list that expands to the height of the screen (and it takes multiple columns if the height isn't sufficient); no scrolling, no (or limited) two-dimensional scan. Even better, the list can be sorted for fast searching.

It's a good question because there are a handful of variables at play. Size of the window, density of objects, the layout of objects, the ordering of objects, etc.

Peripheral vision.

This http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/mrseb-... is much easier to browse with peripheral vision.

Ok, so the larger icons make them easier to see out of the corner of your eye, but they are further away, making them harder. But I can see how it can go either way depending on your vision, and if you wear glasses, etc. But after looking at this screen, I'm a bit lost. The icon on the left column, third down -- I'm not sure what that one does (looks like maybe Skype? And the 4 additional boxes embedded in it, are linked to those contacts pictured?) -- same with the icon next to it wit hthe guy's picture . And the one toward the top with the two squirrels looking at each other?

I'm really hoping that this all makes sense once you start using it, as I'm going to have to make a decision on what to upgrade my parents' computer to (Win 7 or Win 8) -- I don't want to confuse them.

The one in the left column is your Contacts. The individual photos are just photos - they all go the the same place when you click anywhere on the button. The guy's photo says "Photos" on it. It just goes to your photos list when you click it, not to that particular photo. And the squirrels open the Bing app. Bing makes a big deal about their daily photo, I guess the app icon updates each day to match.

Edit: I agree it looks crazy, but at least it behaves consistently!

Ah, my bad -- the picture was scaled down, and I didn't click to make it full size. I see label text now. Although part of the word "photos" is washed out against the background. If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, it might be helpful to use a font with a contrasting outline color around it to prevent this washout effect.

Try to find a needle in a pincushion. Then try to find a needle in a haystack.

It's more like "try to find the needle in a pincushion" became "try to find the spear in the haystack", since icons/tiles can be much larger if you want.

A spear in a haystack is still harder to find than a needle in a pincushion.

It's also about poor consideration of the varying circumstances of real world use. Ideas about a full screen start menu that work well in small form factors can't just be assumed to work on a desktop display. I think the new start menu is great on a small touchscreen device like a tablet, but my workstation has a pair of 30'' monitors and it's ridiculous.

Using the whole screen is one of those things that sounds more efficient in theory, but with large monitors there's a lot of scanning you have to do. With the menu I can scan top to bottom in an alphabetical way -- very quick to do. With tiles I have to scan in two dimensions, and there's no particular order to them so I can't just skim over any of them.

It's not the exact same thing, but it reminds me of the weird misadventure they made in Office 2000 where they would hide infrequently used menu items. It sounded good in theory, I mean, less menu items should mean less confusion right? But in practice the main response was "where the hell did that thing I was looking for go?" and "why does my menu keep changing?"

The users can dictate the ordering of apps and folders on the Metro Start Screen. Not only that, users can incorporate spatial organization to make apps even easier to scan and find quickly. You could argue that this is a better design. However, all designs have pros and cons and are not necessarily best for all use cases.

As to your second point, I think the question is how do you improve your UI without breaking previous mental models/behavior?

20 years ago people were still using Program Manager instead of a start menu to launch applications... which was typically maximised to full screen, with spatially grouped apps in child windows.

The more things change, eh?

My father-in-law resorted to navigating to Program Files to launch programs. Clearly there are some serious usability to discoverability problems if a normal user can figure that out but can't figure out the start menu.

The main complaint I think is the context switch. You go from desktop-world to metro-land and back again.

I think the new update will go a LONG way to reduce (or eliminate) these problems. The other major enhancement in my opinion is they made the taskbar accessible from metro apps.

Yeah. 2 totally different experiences in one OS? That reeks of design-by-committee.

You can now set the Metro background to the same background as the desktop. It's a small detail that has made the experience much less jarring for me.

My issues:

1) It's not that great for mouse/keyboard.

2) Having both Metro and Classic feels very disjointed. You get thrown into either depending on which application you open.

#2 has been my biggest issue with Win8 since beta. One of the first things I noticed was how weird it felt constantly switching between the two UIs. I could probably adapt to a metro-only UI (Lord knows I'd throw a fit along the way and it would take forever), but there is ZERO incentive to use it when the classic UI is there.

I actually like "Metro Start Menu" better than "Start Menu" for the keyboard. Put simply, "Start Menu" is a tree. Lots of diving into nodes and scrolling up and down. Conceptually convenient and easy with a mouse, but the 2D grid in Metro is more convenient with just a keyboard.

The up/down (navigate vertically in a list) and left/right (enter/leave submenus) arrow keys (which worked on the tree going back to Win95) were hard? Conceptually grouping applications/utilities (sometimes across different task groups) is easier in a 2D tiled environment? Searching obviates discoverability? Sorry, but I don't buy any of it. It was not difficult to drive with the keyboard before and it's no easier now - but a lot has been lost in the transition.

I never used the word "hard". I know that the arrow keys can be used to navigate the start menu (how else would I navigate the start menu using the keyboard? Which is clearly what I am talking about), but it has always been more keystrokes to get around the tree-menu than to get around Metro's homescreen.

Is 10 keystrokes instead of 5 keystrokes "hard"? Of course not. I'm not a paraplegic. Notice I used the word "convenient".

For me, there's no sense of order to the tiles - it's like walking into a cluttered room. Sure - you'd get used to where things were, but the initial reaction for me was of shock.

I actually like this. By removing the tree structure of the traditional menu, you allow the machine to do it's best to populate the screen with tiles it predicts are useful. Instead of forcing everything into a specific box, let the OS conform to the users history.

What? It never did that when I used it.

Sorry forgot to mention that idea is a hypothetical use case.

This was a sizeable failure when they hid menu items in Office based on predictions on what the user wanted.

And I'll add that it drove me nuts to see random, popcorn-like activity amongst the tiles.

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."

As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes you don't want a thousand, you only want one or two.

Personally, I feel overloaded with the full screen start menu. Many times I have gone to the start menu and then just reflexively hit Win + D immediately. Some times I completely forget what I wanted and have to return to context to figure out what I wanted.

Fortunately, I don't use Windows that much so I just cope with it when I do but I always dread booting it. I don't use it because I want it. And I swear I gave it more than an honest chance. For months, I told myself that it wasn't bad and I just needed to get used to it. I wanted to like it because it was an exciting new interface, but it couldn't be done.

I can't stand it.

It's not confusing. It's unnecessary and difficult to navigate with a mouse.

Also very annoying to be thrown out of your app when you just want to run a calculator or something small. Even more annoying when that calculator has to run full screen (or you have to waste time snapping it to some side).

I haven't actually used Windows 8 because I've heard it's so terrible. What I don't understand is this:

> In the future, all of Microsoft’s Universal Windows apps will also run in a window.

What does this mean? Are you telling me that every program I run in Windows 8 is full screen? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The OS is called WINDOWS.

Every Metro app is full-screen, every normal Windows app runs in the desktop. It's remarkably annoying to have both paradigms forced on you.

When I want a calculator, I type:

Windows Key -> "calc" -> Enter

Viola, the classic Windows calculator.

Even easier: use the url bar as a calculator. Google has handled math as a seach for a while now, and it's pretty good [1]. No need to leave the browser.

[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=y%3Dx%5E2&oq=y%3Dx%5E2

Sure, but one is not always in the browser ;)

True, while metro is really quite nice on a tablet, it is downright terrible with a mouse. I think this could be relieved by scaling down all the tiles on a mouse-and-keyboard setup.

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.

People like the start menu over a tile based system full screen solution. Apple tried to do the same thing with launchpad, i have yet to see anyone use it.

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