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Comment by sickcodebruh | Hacker News Reader

Re: usability of the Start Menu...

When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.

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One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff.

I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I'd propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools.

I'd also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu.

Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.

I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.

> I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.

Many already do such things (most Desktop Environments provide a shell with some kind of software category menu).

Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft. Also applies to c:\Program Files and the registry.

I can't remember the rationale, but it does make it hard to find things.

One possible rationale: companies tend to specialize in one specific software domain, so you would end up with your graphic design software under Adobe folder, your Quake games grouped under idSoftware, and your databases grouped under Oracle.

The rationale was that on Windows 3.1, the company would put all of their stuff, not just the program executable, in the Program Group.

So not only would you have the program, but you'd also have the readme and the uninstaller and anything else that goes along with the program.

When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft wanted to hide all of that. The new guideline was to just put the program in the root level of the Programs menu, leave the uninstaller up to the new Add/Remove Programs control panel, and if you want the readme or whatever, go hunt for it yourself. But unfortunately most developers ignored it. They continued building Windows 3.1-style Program Groups the same way they always did.

And, yes, the Programs menu used the same backend as Program Manager. What appeared in one appeared in the other.

> Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft.

That was part of the Windows 3.1 guidelines. On Windows 95, Microsoft's guidelines specified that your applications were to appear as single icons under the Programs menu. Unfortunately, most almost all developers ignored that and continued doing things the Win3.1 way.

KDE already does this.

Screenshot from my system: https://i.imgur.com/csWWl9Y.png

And this is on Arch, which means that almost all software is unmodified from upstream.

That's exactly the sort of top level I want! I once suggested that GNOME games be broken down into categories but I quickly encountered a bunch of resistance. Granted, I probably wasn't addressing the right people anyway.

On the other hand, it requires the user to read minds and figure out how the developer might have classified the application. If I'm looking for After Effects, should I look under Graphics or Multimedia? Or maybe Utilities?

I agree that using Company Name as the top level folder might be the worst option. If I'm looking for some random utility app I downloaded and installed, why should I have to first remember what the name of the company was who made it?

First the categories need be a bit more distinct. Also, a program might be allowed in more than one category. In a commercial case I could see stupid companies stuffing their app in as many menus as possible.

XFCE (arch also) also does this, and I find that it a great experience that whenever a program is installed I can find it immediately in the category that makes sense.

> Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.

The concern is namespace conflicts. Users may be surprised to find a program has 'changed' when in fact another user installed a similarly named program.

Gnome 2 did this (and Mate still does), but I actually find it more confusing.

It's sometimes not obvious which category a program belongs to, so you have to meticulously search all categories that could apply. And you'd only to that if you don't exactly remember the program name in the first place, otherwise you would have had quicker ways to launch it.

Here the old windows way offers more 'breadcrumbs' to find something.

I thought that Win7 had a good solution to that, with typing immediately doing a search within the start menu. Then, Win8 made it also search for files, destroying any utility of the search. If you want people to have muscle memory (e.g. WinKey + moz + enter to start Mozilla Firefox), then having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.

> having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.

There's no reason search has to do this, though. Spotlight (the macOS version of this) is able to find results pretty much instantly, and it doesn't show any results until it's searched everything, so the top result never changes. I really don't understand why Windows hasn't been able to do the same thing (and if anything, the win10 search is worse).

> it doesn't show any results until it's searched everything, so the top result never changes

I don't see how that follows. If it also searches files, the top result can change if any indexed file changes, which would still break the app launching scenario.

Or is it always showing apps on top?

Is this case, they are referring to consistent display of results within a single search, not the consistency of several search results using the same search terms. Progressive searches that display results as they are found have a nasty habit of changing which result is currently underneath your mouse, right when you are about to click it.

Yup. Mobile Twitter is horrible in this regard. Search for something, it comes up first or second, wonderful; tap i- DAMMIT WHY DID YOU REPLACE IT WITH AN UNRELATED HASHTAG!?!

Result: search, wait 10 seconds for the damn UI to stabilize, tap the result and NOPE, THERE COMES ANOTHER LATE RESPONSE MESSING IT UP AGAIN.

I wish Firefox would do this too. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pressed return just as Firefox changes the ordering of the items in the search bar suggestions. Very fustrating as I’ve since learnt to wait for Firefox to complete its suggestion process before hitting return.

Win7's built in menu search was great. Win8 technically had similar functionality but it was awful for all the reasons you mention (lag, poor search capability) plus it took over your whole screen in a horrible, visually jarring flash making it very unpleasant to use. Win10's is halfway between the two, but close enough to Win7's that I actually use it now instead of just using Launchy and pretending the Windows menu doesn't exist, like I do on Win8.

Edit: While we're talking about laggy keyboard interfaces, AAARGH the Win10 logon screen is awful. You have to hit a key, then wait for the screen to load and be shown on the screen, before you start typing your PIN, or it'll eat the first character of your PIN going from "press any key to log on" to "enter your pin". What the hell is so hard about understanding that keyboard interfaces shouldn't be laggy even if graphics don't quite keep up? Electric typewriters from 1990 got this right!

> One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff.

It was even worse than that. The app name usually was a subfolder too. It went like: 'Start -> Programs -> Adobe -> Photoshop -> Launch Photoshop' (Plus 'Open Readme' and 'Uninstall' and whatnot)

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