The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward

It is poor design by having that be the form of which quick access to settings is provided. The tray icon paradigm simply invites clutter.

It's no different than building up the option flags in a bash or powershell one liner. It's the direct graphical translation even.

I used to repeat that line too, 25 years ago when I was still on Windows 3.x, but it's gotten a little old since then.

Imagine taking a role on the Windows Desktop Experience Team while caring so little about how the operating system functions that you don't even bother to use it as your main workstation.

This is the company where the phrase "eating your own dog food" originated, by the way.

1 Those people are paid, as a dev I am paid to use JS and PHP , I am not crying here because poor me I can't use my favorite language Prolog or Lisp so why a designer should cry if he does not work on his preferred shit. They can use Linux or OSX at home.

2 this designers call themselves UX people. This means they don't work with images of GUIs , they should in fact use the product as an user would use. Ex: you are a UX dev for the Word product but you always use Word with a document of 1 page length, then you would never feel the pains your users that have documents of 50+ , 100+ pages feel. As a dev and UX designers you should use the product you create.

3 If you are a designer in the sense you create logos and icons then probably is fine you don't use the product, though if you are a web designer and really love fucking with fonts and fonts color PLEASE borrow a regular laptop from a friend and check your website in it, your cool fonts might look different on a different machine and maybe you also will be reminded that not everyone has high definition laptop screens.

If they're building software for Windows??? Duh, WTF else are they supposed to look at? "Hey, my mockups of our Windows-only software look great on my Mac, so what's the problem?" is about the stupidest thing that designer could possibly say.

And if what they're designing is not just software for Windows, but Windows itself, it's ten times worse. Which is what's under discussion here.

> Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem.

Yeah, that might be a fascinating hypothetical to discuss some other time, but this discussion is about the problem of designers "so passionate about UX" that they insist on making stuff look "good" at the cost of usability and consistency being given all the institutional power to break it despite the n-user-years problems this causes. The exact opposite of what you are imagining.

Ever saw airplane controls? They are ugly, and UX people have to design them too, to enable pilots to act in emergencies, to highlighr issues before emergency even happens, etc.

You are conflating visual design and UX, which is common.

The former draw pretty pictures and they can fuck off to MacOS, nobody cares.

UX is about structure: where should we put the delete button? How many clicks does it take to access your files?

And Fischer-Price was also functional, you just got extra colors.

I use 3 monitors for both, and frequently multi task and the extra click on Mac infuriates me.

MS - and especially Windows - has always seemed to me a company that takes smart people and makes them do really stupid things. The product culture seems incredibly broken.

It's never been great. But in the past usable versions like XP and 7 would fall out. 8 set a new baseline for idiocracy and user hostility. I see no evidence things have gotten better since.

I suppose - as per earlier comments here - if the culture is top-down design by people who don't even use the product and are trying to Make a Statement for career reasons, the future isn't encouraging.

The real question is what kind of management allows something so obviously nonsensical to happen.

Edit: it seems to depend on the kind of button(?)

The center of window management in macOS I'd say is easy access to Mission Control (prev. Exposé). All Macs come with either a huge, multi-touch trackpad or a Magic Mouse with gestures to trigger it. I sometimes use my Macbook with a "normal" mouse— I've mapped all extra buttons to trigger Mission Control commands otherwise I wouldn't be able to effectively navigate my way around.

Moreover, full-screen windows are automatically made their own desktop, so one switches between these windows using desktop switching. I actually am just now remembering that the Dock supports window switching with a ctrl-click: I completely forgot since I only use it for rudimentary app switching and for windows it's all Mission Control and desktops.

This, is context at the OS-level and hardware levels, but of course there's also the user base and what they're used to after years of using their computers.

Arrogance is not doing any or ongoing competitive analysis.

I'm still dismayed that in Windows 10 you still basically have 2 separate UI/UX experiences to configure the damn OS.

Pretend everything else about the iPhone happened; The charisma and leadership of Steve Jobs, the brilliant marketing, the countless number of talented software engineers, but instead the device basically looks like a blackberry.

Physical keyboard, plastic case, More or less a knock off aesthetically.

We're deep in counterfactual territory but I think it can be argued that this imagined iphone with a very conventional aesthetic would have done effectively just as well. It still connects to iTunes and hooks up to your Mac, having all the same technical features and functionality.

The point is people see something successful, then they assign one of the attributes as the driver of the success and there seems to be very little reflection of the two core questions: (1) is it true? (2) is it generalizable to other companies?

And let's say it is. Are you really going to make something that's more iPhoney than an iPhone? More macosy then macos?

So even conceding those two points, which I think are utterly contestable, It still doesn't make any sense. Maybe that's why it's never worked. Maybe. Who knows?

iPhone was ways ahead in usability compared to everything else back then.

For all the faults of Apple, they needed to define how smartphones look like and act. Mobile OSes were horrible pain to use. People tolerated that because there was nothing else out there.

Let me describe you what the phones scene was looking like just before iphone was released. They were fine for making phone calls, sending texts/e-mails (in blackberry case), and taking an occasional photo if you had a high end Nokia. That's it. The phones had very long lists of features nobody actually used. Yes they had rudimenatry browers, but why browse if the pages look nothing like the real ones and it was extremely expensive outside of being connected to wifi.

When iphone was released it was very obvious that it was on a completely different level to what we had until then. Yes, one could argue that it was missing some minor functionalities like SMS character counter which was very standard. But the first time you see it, when you saw that the screen can be smooth scrolled, that you use fingers completely naturally to do any kind of actions (vs styluses which were crap), when you see that everything is presented clearly and nicely, that the screen is nice and bright, and GUI easy to use, it seemed like the device came from the future. In many ways it was like a pocket computer.

I got the second batch of first iphone (the one which could be unlocked by some means so I could use it in my country) and showed it to my friends at college who all had high-end phones. You should have seen their faces. They had no idea what they were looking at. And no, they never watched Jobs's presentation or anything. Most of them didn't even know who he was, or were exposed to any kind of Apple marketing. Actually it was the reverse, Nokia and similar were established brands. The phone was judged on its own and it was almost magical to us.

And I still didn't come to the best thing about it.

It brought internet to your pocket. Not only the browser would render the pages like they've looked on your computer, but it was very usable which was unseen before. Have you actually tried to browse internet on a Nokia phone at that time? It was complete shit. That pinch to zoom/in out was actually revolutionary as well.

The second part of the revolution was people actually wanted to use the phone to browse the internet, so Apple and users both put pressure on the ISPs to lower the prices of cellular data. And believe it or not, they did. They lowered the prices so much to make it from one of the most expensive resources in the world to the cheapest. That alone is groundbreaking.

The third part, even though it happened some very short years after that, was that it enabled programs which were actually usable paving way to the whole mobile app ecosystem which we have now. How many people were writing software for a living on a mobile device before iphone? How many do you think are doing it now? The iphone kickstarted the whole industry.

And all of this was actually made possible by excellent software and hardware design (not fashion, they are usually diametrically opposite!). Nothing of this would happen if it wasn't for that design. If iphone was just another N95, nothing would have happened whatever people thought of Apple marketing. Nothing would have happened if the browser was difficult to use, the UI lagging, or needed a stylus to use. It all had to come together for it work. And they've managed to pull it off spectacularly. It makes it very easy to argue that the most important Jobs' legacy is the iPhone.

They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment.

"Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users.

If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".

A random example: Macs these days use screens with a brightness response Gamma curve of 1.8 and PCs use 2.2. Macs use a color gamut of DisplayP3 by default now, which has different color primaries than the PC sRGB standard.

Why does this matter? Because two shades that are easily distinguishable when physically viewed on a Mac may not be easily distinguishable on PC! Colors wills shift, and even 50% grey is represented differently. The same JPG or PNG file from a design will look different on a PC even if it has an identical monitor as a Mac!

Similarly, font weight, anti-aliasing, and kerning are very different on the two platforms. Any text design done on one has to be adapted for the other. It's not just the default fonts! The same font at the same size will look very visibly different.

Did I mention default fonts? Only Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier are common between the two platforms. All of those are physically different fonts that look different even if transported to the other platform.

Etc, etc, etc...

You should give it a shot!

Not that this is exclusive to Microsoft. Every large company I've worked for has had some variation of that phrase.

I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.

Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…

but KDE is slightly better, at least in these aspects I care about, of course it looks disgusting, but you don't need third party tools to disable taskbar grouping and that's a big thing

KDE started in 1996, but I remember running one of the first alphas in 1997 (Alpha 2?) and being relieved that Linux had finally something that somewhat resembled the Windows 95 UI. Before that people were primarily running tvm or fvwm (CDE was still closed-source), which was fine for Unix-heads, but nowhere close to the gold standard that the Windows 95, NT 4, or macOS classic were.

(Ps. fvwm95 was released pretty soon after Windows 95, but only had the look of Windows 95, not really the usability.)

I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.

Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times.

Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity.

I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.

Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/) but i'd also like to suggest LibreOffice (https://www.libreoffice.org/) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus.

If you don't have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor's and master's thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary.

That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That's why some Office clones, like WPS Office (https://www.wps.com/office/linux/) and FreeOffice (https://www.freeoffice.com/en/) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.

I do think the categorization takes a little getting used to but once you do it’s fairly trivial.

It’s also important to recognize the horizontal categorizations within each ribbon, something that can easily be missed until you know about it.

I think anything that changes nothing is more willing to have faithful users but changes can be good if done in a utilitarian way considering different types of users.

Designers deserve to be laughed out of the room; developers don't.

___

[1]: Until they get their shit in order, designers can kiss my ass for their pretentious "UX" claptrap. The actual experience is only max-half interface, min-half functionality. Where the latter is provided by lowly coders.

Off topic, but Microsoft can even bypass Steam and use their own (terrible) Microsoft Store and Xbox apps on Windows as they have hard to resist exclusive content. Just like Epic Games did with their store. Platforms, not services!

The ship has long sailed after they killed their addon ecosystem by killing XUL addons. The quality and feature-sets of addons took as much a nosedive as their user-share.

Since then, they were keen on continuing this trajectory, and introduced multiple UX/UI regressions that alienated all (most?) of their power users, sometimes even disallowing fixes through about:config.

That .gov analytics site that was posted here yesterday showed Firefox setting at 2.4%, which is just about right for all the string of horrible decisions they've made.

The horse is dead, Jim. And, unlike an old movie or a videogame, almost no one is going to have nostalgia feelings for a web browser.

Yes I know there is talk about privacy and security issues with telemetry, and I don't necessarily like it myself, but if we don't vote with our data then the developers of these systems won't recognise what we use and we will lose it.

Probably not the most popular view around here but if companies use these metrics to decide what is important then maybe we should contribute some data.

Delay is perceptible at around 10ms, and considered tolerable for generic apps (not realtime games, obviously) to about 100ms, and that's been established for quite a long time. 200ms is...too much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrome_OS

Chrome OS is built on top of the Linux kernel. Originally based on Ubuntu, its base was changed to Gentoo Linux in February 2010.

My argument is simply this, people can be biased, it's worth it to consider it. That's it. You interpreted as an attack.

I criticize no one. I usually am very amicable on my replies but you literally came at me with a knife calling my argument nonsense. If your response was more mature then mine would be less harsh.

Also why does my argument need data? I made no such claim that the windows UI is better. My claim is that it could be better and that people are biased. The whole point is for people to examine their own biases, and reconsider this thread from a context where you are aware of your own biases.

Looks like for your situation your biases are so ingrained you took it as an attack on your identity. For you the windows UI has to be shit... Otherwise your foundational identity of Microsoft as a corporate clown/villain crumbles.

Objectively, Your argument needs data. You make an extraordinary claim. Give data or your argument is nonsensical.

Additionally: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/job/1196136/Senior-UX-Re...

Check the job description. It implies Microsoft is data driven in their UX research. The incentive exists as this is a multi billion dollar product. It is very very reasonable to say that every UI change Microsoft proposes requires data given that they hire "researchers" for this.

I'm also guessing that Microsoft is aware that there will be backlash against UI changes. It happens every time. What also happens is the animosity against these changes dies down with time. Microsoft of course very likely makes these changes fully aware of this pattern of human behavior.

Next time read it first before replying. It's not mandatory to read everything here on an HN thread but it's common courtesy that you read it all before you reply. Otherwise you'd be wasting my (and your own) time.

>Don't take "my understanding" as "I have no idea what I'm talking about."

No I didn't. I took it as you didn't read the article. Which I'm right.

>I think I've read it before as this was my point above:

Agreed. And this point is valid. It supports your assertion. However this does not mean you can dismiss all other assertions, especially the main assertion of the article. Sensation transference. The article brings both points up to be fair and balanced.

The possibility of sensation transference remains open just as the "sickly-sweet threshold." We would need a systematic test to prove it either way. Until then sensation transference remains an open possibility for affecting the opinions of people judging both Windows and New Coke.

I think it would be wise to be aware that none of us our purely rational creatures, and that things that we're sure about should be judged with a healthy amount of skepticism as that judgement is heavily influenced by unknown biases.

Being a software developer doesn't give you some kind of magical brain that makes you better at using a GUI. This is part of what I don't like about our field. The arrogance. As if all other users are 90 year old grandmas who's never touched a computer before.

>Once you are aware of "Fitts' law" and "Chesterson's Fence" it is easy to see the new design as amateur hour.

These "laws" aren't really laws that are data driven. Maybe they are data driven in principle but the windows GUI changes very very likely were made using custom data driven conclusions that can very well go around these "laws." Still it is actually by far much more likely for these laws to simply be "coined" by some random person based off of anecdotal experience.

You should know software developers fall for "laws" all the time. These are not "laws" proven they are just strange anecdotal principles that sound good in theory but are not proven in practice. https://reflectoring.io/laws-and-principles-of-software-deve...

The stupid part is that one of these "laws" is called a "theorem." It shows that many software developers have little understanding between the difference between science and logic. None of those laws in software or design are based off of any sort of science at all (aka not data driven), nor are they based off of logic. They are based off of anecdotal observations, and anecdotal observations are beaten and overridden by logic and science every time. Which, I'm pretty sure, is what Microsoft did here (though without any actual evidence this is just an educated guess on how they approach UI/UX research).

Show me those studies. I can assure you, that the laws and principles of software development aren't based off of ANY studies. SOLID? No studies. Just an acronym to make it sound better.

Therefore, if software is like this... I highly doubt that these principles in Design were developed out of science at all. Like software they must be anecdotal observations. But happy to be proven wrong.

You could provide me with studies done after these principles were "coined" but that's not what I'm looking for (less convincing). I would want proof that these principles were "developed" based off of analytics.

No I'm saying a the random UX researcher likely does research and analytics on a very narrow and exact use case of windows. Those laws your bring up, (if scientifically valid at all) likely refer to an extreme generality. It's like saying all men are taller than women. The generality is true but there are many, many exceptions and corner cases. These laws obviously don't refer to windows, they refer to everything and as a result are only generally right, and not exactly right about everything.