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Comment by camus2 | Hacker News Reader

makes me wonder,what kind of A/B testing they did before launching W8 at first place, or ModernUI was supposed to replce it, or was it just because some executive decided people did not need a start menu anymore.

Any input on that?

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Microsoft relied too heavily on metrics.

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.

This is a lesson Apple is going to learn the hard way.

Calling the data gathering intrusive is a bit of a stretch. Considerable efforts are made to ensure you're anonymized and personally identifiable information is not gathered. There are people to actively work to ensure you're not "tracked" in any way.

Off-Topic: I'd be interested to see the number of people who turn off the Microsoft CEIP (terrible abbreviation), yet still use a Google id and/or accept DoubleClick cookies.

That's the nice thing about web applications: You can do user tracking without needing them to opt in.

As for me, I trust Microsoft enough that I always opt in. And I've seen a few times that such data is invaluable when making feature or UI decisions.

My guess is the same user testing MS always does: ask the suits if they like it.

Oh, are we already jumping on the bash Microsoft band wagon so soon? You seriously think a company like Microsoft did no usability testing? That'd be quite shocking as Metro itself utilizes a ton of new research on UX and interaction design.

Oh, please. Stop denouncing all criticism as the "bash MS bandwagon." Removing the start menu was a terrible idea that anyone who cared could have predicted - MS screwed up somewhere. But this is no surprise. Their UI design has been consistently poor for decades. Sure maybe they did user studies but their dog ate them. Maybe their initial designs were all so poor that what they rolled out was the best of the bunch. Maybe they had the most amazing UI design but couldn't get it through the office politics. I don't know everything they failed at in their process but it doesn't matter. Whatever it is they are doing doesn't work.

"Removing the start menu was a terrible idea that anyone who cared could have predicted"

Why?

It's a core paradigm of windows for as long as I remember. If you removed the steering wheel from your car do you think drivers would be surprised? Upset? Confused? If you had any common sense and don't have a case of Microsoft stockholm syndrome you would.

Removing the steering wheel (which is used for continuous, delicate control) is much more akin to removing the mouse/keyboard than the Start Menu - and guess what? Lots of computing devices these days are doing that as well.

Removing the start menu is more like changing how the ignition works (hasn't stopped the sale of Priuses) or changing how you shift gears (also has happened plenty of times).

Familiarity is certainly a consideration, but it's not the only consideration, and when you elevate it too highly you get stuck unable to fix anything. Mind you, I'm not saying they didn't - in retrospect - underweight it. There is certainly evidence they did. Though I'm honestly not sure to just what degree the backlash is vocal-minority versus generally felt. In my own (few) experiences with modern Windows systems, I wasn't shocked by the lack of a Start Menu - but my computer hasn't had a start menu for the better part of a decade so I'm obviously highly unrepresentative.

Familiarity, for a start. It was raised during the public preview and beta.

This WAS predicted by many users and blogs prior to the release of Windows 8. Criticisms started a year prior to the official release of Windows 8, with the consumer preview version.

Here's one of the videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4boTbv9_nU

This article was written shortly after the release but it does one of the best jobs of explaining how poor the usability of the OS is. http://www.nngroup.com/articles/windows-8-disappointing-usab...

"This WAS predicted by many users and blogs prior to the release of Windows 8."

There will be people saying negative things about any change. Often they'll be right, whether for the right reasons or the wrong ones. I wasn't asserting that no one predicted it, I was trying to get at why the parent was asserting it was terrible.

I haven't watched the video, but at a skim the article raises quite a few points, most to all of which have nothing to do with the start menu in particular.

As someone who has worked at Microsoft, I can tell you they spend thousands of hours on usability studies and the managers watch. Also there are countless readouts and documents summarizing the findings.

Microsoft spends an incredible amount of resources on usability studies.

Then they should probably ask for that money back.

Those who decided whom to pay to do the studies received exactly what they wanted. The support for their managerial decisions and the proof how smart they are.

Used to work at Microsoft too; the usability findings that agree with the existing strategy were kept, the ones that disagreed were ignored. They weren't taken seriously, and were slathered on after the product was 90% complete.

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