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Comment by nchlswu | Hacker News Reader

Not to take away from the work, but am I missing something? This strikes me as primarily being a visual design or what some people call a theme.

This is a great visual design. It's cohesive and incorporates zune/metro very well. I particularly like how the focus window is highlighted and everything else fades a little. However, I think this redesign (and Metro itself) also highlights how minimalism isn't necessarily the best trend to follow - at least not to the extremes. I see a design that's somewhat flat and we may perceive differently if the background was a solid colour.

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I love visual design exercises like this, but it's one thing to throw it out there and a completely separate (10000x harder) feat to actually have this implemented. If you usability test this interface, it's going to fail all over the place. Remember, Windows is probably the only piece of software with EVERY SINGLE segment of users.

http://cdn.robszumski.com/share/file-copy.png The file copy window that's tacked on to the explorer window contains way too much information. A skilled but non-technical user is going to see "164 MB/s" and "72%". Where's the time left? You have to remember, people don't read -- at all, ever.

"Hey user, how do you tell when this is done?" "Funny you mention that, I never have any idea. I know that the percent is there in the squiggly bar, but what does that mean? Each week my podcasts seem to take different amounts of time to copy, but I never really know."

http://cdn.robszumski.com/share/copy-worst-case.png "Sometimes I can't even read the number because the line goes straight through it." Obviously this could be designed in a much better way, but when you look at these perfect screenshots it's impossible to see how it would act. This is where designers make their money for the company.

There are a lot of people in the comments of the article saying the author should be hired by Microsoft. I don't think that's going to happen.

While it's too early to say what will be in the final build, that is one que he seemed to have taken from the MSDN Windows 8 blog, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/08/23/improving-our-...

I also call foul on the mock-up you posted with the unreadable text. This is a problem commonly solved in all form of design work by putting a stroke on text that's not on a solid background color. Your mock-up there is more straw-man than informed counter-oint.

But I agree with your broader point that this would be given poor marks in a usability study. For one, the dozen shades of grey, seemingly a go-to favorite for designers, strikes me as quite un-functional.

Usability issues aside, the UI is so flat and, in places, so low-contrast, there's a large segment of the population that wouldn't be able to see it, let alone use it.

That won't be a major problem provided there is an easy way to change to e theme that gives better contrast/readability.

They don't need the default UI to acceptably cover 100% of their market if it can do a better job for 95% of people with a switch that does a better job for the other 5%.

I don't quite understand the benefit of a transfer speed vs. progress percentage plot. Transfer speed should be viewed as a function of time.

>I love visual design exercises like this, but it's one thing to throw it out there and a completely separate (10000x harder) feat to actually have this implemented. If you usability test this interface, it's going to fail all over the place. Remember, Windows is probably the only piece of software with EVERY SINGLE segment of users.

100% agree. I love looking at these visual designs, but most of the time they weren't done with real usability concerns in mind.

When it comes to commenters saying the author should be hired by Microsoft, something like that would definitely almost never happen in this industry but it seems like some shops really embrace the handing off the design reigns to graphic designers. Google and RIM have both shifted the direction of their UI approach to departments with visual design backgrounds and less usability, human factors or research driven design backgrounds. There's been a lot of attention directed at Google and I'm curious of RIM's choices pan out, as The Astonishing Tribe appears to have full reigns of RIM's BB UI.

> am I missing something? This strikes me as primarily being a visual design or what some people call a theme.

Looks like it's a little more than a theme, maybe a theme for a shell replacement? Like what desktop modders used to do with LiteStep* back in the day.

Very attractive, I would add -- minimalistic, clean, perhaps a little soulless. I'd use it, though, as others commented, the lack of contrast might get a little taxing in the long run, hard to say.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep

Agreed. I like this visually, but the title is misleading.

I don't see a new "UI Concept" here.

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