Metro breakdown: Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain | Hacker News Reader

Metro breakdown: Windows 8 UI is little gain for lots of pain

theregister.co.uk

7 pointsmeow8 comments

This article is spot on. I love the metro UI but in its current form it's not quite ready for the desktop. Some things that were easy to accomplish before are now made more difficult. The removal of the start button is one. Having to click the corner of the screen to access the Start Screen is frustrating. The target to click is essentially smaller which requires more precision and effort to hit.

Closing apps is also more difficult. On the desktop you just click the big red button and the window disappears but in metro you're required to click the top of the screen and drag the app to the bottom of the screen. It's a lot more work and it's frustrating.

The interesting thing about all these frustrations on the PC is that on a tablet they'd be great! Metro is a great tablet UI. It's optimized for touch. This is clear so why force it onto the desktop? This clearly demonstrates the difference between Microsoft and Apple's philosophy on user experience. Microsoft is cannibalizing the desktop user experience to realize a utopian vision of one OS to run on all devices. If Windows 8 on tablets is a massive success then maybe to MIcrosoft that would have made it all worthwhile. People could always go back to windows 7 on the desktop if they prefer to. Maybe this is Microsoft realizing that we are indeed in a Post-PC era and it needs to succeed in this space at all costs!

- Just press the Win key on the keyboard. - Move to upper left, in list of apps right click and select close.

"The target to click is essentially smaller which requires more precision and effort to hit."

It's actually the opposite, the virtual target area extends beyond the screen to the bottom and left and that area has no boundaries. In other words, you can move your cursor in the right direction and if you keep moving you are guaranteed to hit that area. Experienced users will just 'flick' their cursor in the general direction knowing they are going to hit it.

While I don't agree with the tone of the article, it matches my overall experience using Windows 8. In particular, the screenshot of the homepage is quite revealing. A lot of these positive reviews are based on MS marketing videos and someone messing around with it for 30 minutes. But anyone who has tried using it for a few days as their sole OS runs into a lot of issues that can't simply be explained by "beta". There are systemic design issues with Win8 where some "bugs" are by design.

I can't see Win8 being ready before the end of the year…

It looks like I'll be sticking with Windows 7. The Metro interface is not worth the pain, especially if you don't even have a machine with a touchscreen already, which obviously most won't. There's no point in using Windows 8 on a PC/laptop other than slowing yourself down and getting frustrated with it.

I don't see the issue?

If you want the classic windows desktop experience, it's right there, isn't it? You have no one forcing you to use Metro if you don't like it.

In windows 8 the system is 'abstracted' behind metro. You can't access the system using conventional means, you have to launch applications from metro (unless you use the desktop or pin them to the status bar), and have to search in metro to access system configuration. In fact, it wouldn't be incorrect to say metro is the new start dialogue, since it binds to the windows key. This is as of the consumer preview, but it could change for the final release.

The 'integration', if you can call it that, is definitely no where near what it could be (task switching in metro and classic desktop are two different systems). They also introduce many new interactions for metro, that even I didn't know about till people told me (hot spot in top right, right click to access IE 10 metro controls). Of course, most touch based systems have these kinds of problems, but the question is will they be consistent across metro.

So really the best description of the system is Windows 7 with a new start dialogue that takes up the whole screen, can start applications itself, and even has its own task switching; all with some added sugar to the rest of the OS.

Someone will bring back an aftermarket progman.exe (application icons in a window on the desktop, kids) and find a way to block all the Metro triggers from the registry.

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