For me, the Win7 start menu was the best. Primarily because of the built-in search, which, while not perfect, makes Win8 search seem broken by comparison. Also I'm probably not a typical user in that don't hunt for the app I want to launch: it's either pinned to the taskbar, something I can quickly search for, or in my PATH to launch from the Run prompt.
In Win8 (prior to 8.1) there wasn't a unified search. I run a lot of programs that aren't "installed", but are just executables in an indexed directory (like small utilities, or putty, etc). These do not show up by "just typing". And in 8.1, "everything" isn't really "everything". It doesn't search within my e-mails, or other programs that used to integrate with the Windows search indexer. It's basically garbage compared to Vista and 7.
That's the point. It's not any better. Everyone saying the Win-Search thing works just fine in Win8 is missing the boat: It ALREADY works fine in Win7 while MetroUI is infinitely worse.
I think the problem is not that the start menu is a fantastic piece of UX (which it clearly is not), it's that Win8 takes away a key method of interacting with the system and replaces it with something worse.
Do something better and there'll be less complaints.
Yep. For example, Alfred on OS X is a fantastic third-party interface addition. The Windows 8 start screen is similar in concept, but it's a pile of crap in comparison: slow, bad search, lacking features, takes over your whole screen, etc.
Isn't the Win8 start screen similar to Launchpad on MacOS? Spotlight is command+space, Win8 search is Win+F. And Unity on Ubuntu does the same thing: a giant screen where you search for the apps you want. Why all this special hate for Metro?
Not really. Launchpad was introduced in 10.7 as an additional way to browse and launch apps, making things more familiar to people who'd only used iOS. The previous methods, like apps in the dock (introduced with OS X) the applications folder (every Mac OS ever) still work fine.
If, at Lion's launch, Apple had said 'we think launchpad is so good we're going to take away all the other ways of launching apps', there would have been a full-scale riot.
The problem with the start menu is that millions of people, people who don't really know much about computers, or want to know much but have to use one anyway, grew up thinking a start menu is what a computer has. It's been there and worked in a similar way since 95 and it's disconcerting to find it's suddenly disappeared.
It's not special hate, I love the design language and it's great to see Microsoft taking the lead in design values - it's just that it is not good enough yet.
The start menu from Windows 98, when they introduced the ability to move and reorder items by drag and drop, is great – assuming you do a bit of manual reorganization of the mess of a structure that application installers create by default. The one-dimensional layout is easier to scan (visually) and easier to aim at with the mouse (since you only have to aim carefully in one dimension), I find, than the two-dimensional designs in XP, Vista and 7.
Windows 7 removed the option for the "classic start menu", so the need for these third-party replacements is nothing new for those of us who preferred it.
Is there any reason it shouldn't be? Yes, I understand how it's not useful for touch interfaces, but why does it have to be? Why do desktops need touch? Why can't tablets have their own, completely separate OS -- or at least their own shell? What advantage does convergence bring?
If they need or not, I think it's not for the OS manufacturer to decide. Desktops ARE coming with touch and so are laptops. Soon enough, all new laptops and desktops WILL have touch. I just went to Walmart tech area and almost all laptops had touch. The ones without touch were in the obscure corner where no one went.
Microsoft can adapt or be eaten. I think they have decided the later.
Now regarding "completely separate OS", impossible to maintain. And "at least their own shell", goes back to desktops/laptops having touch and the old shell not being good for that.
I don't see a problem with their hybrid approach. I enjoy the touch stuff where it fits. I don't see how a SAP or heavy data entry (where a keyboard will make all the difference) will benefit from Metro, so why no keep the desktop there as usual (like they did)?
Desktops with touch are stupid.
My monitor is up in front of my face, and a good distance back on my desk, not down on the front of my desk where my hands are.
I'm not sitting at my computer to give my shoulders a workout. Besides which, any idiot who gets fingerprints all over my nice monitor deserves a slapping, even if its me.
Having touch sized buttons on the screen makes the mouse and keyboard experience worse - everything has to be bigger, with giant borders and separation because your finger is ~100px or more across, and my mouse pointer has a single-pixel click area.
Te problem with the hybrid approach is simply that I, or any anyone like me, can't or won't use touch for our desktop use, so why should a touch oriented UI forcibly impinge upon our experience?
They didn't keep the desktop as it was - they removed the start button and a bunch of context menus and hid them in those ridiculous 'charms' pop-outs. The start screen is an enormous waste of time. If they were optional, or the defaults changed based on whether a touch screen was present it might be different, but they are not optional, or even configurable without third party software.
I'm not saying they can't or shouldn't change things. I think the start menu could have been re-drawn as something visually like a charm menu, fading in from the left edge of the screen, so long as it doesn't take you away from what you are doing it would have been fine.
The new laptops have touch because Microsoft decreed that it should be so. Macs don't have it. ChromeOS devices don't have it. If any manufacturer wants to claim that they take full "advantage" of Windows 8, they have to have touch screens, and having watched people use them, they look like an ergonomic nightmare. Granted, people are actually using them, but my suspicion is that it's because the trackpads on Windows laptops are horrifically bad, and they forgot to bring their mouse to the meeting.
I am extremely skeptical of your "impossible to maintain" argument against separate OSes. Again, Apple seems to do it just fine. I realize I must sound like a total Apple fanboy, but while I'll concede that their innovation has worn thin, the overall usability and design of their core products has remained inoffensive at the very least. The same could not be said for Microsoft's current offerings.
Wasn't it Intel that mandated anything called "ultrabook" should have touch? Of course they could be doing that to work with Microsoft.. buy anyways.
Apple doesn't have touch on its laptops and desktops and a their products can be counted with the fingers we have. Microsoft has always worked with OEMs and has a much more chaotic environment... these partners/OEMs/etc will use, and are using touch,... imagine telling your dad, who owns a laptop with touch, that he should install Windows "Touch" and your grandma with a new ultrabook w/o touch has to use Windows "Original".... it would be a nightmare. Microsoft has, and is trying to, devise a bridge in a single OS.
They screwed up the Start button thing. Have they left it there in the desktop and provided the option to boot directly to it, they would have received much less criticism. They got greedy with the Metro stuff... it should have been a nice "add-on" for traditional desktops/laptops.. not major shell.
They will never drop the Metro interface now. My bet is that they will slowly add things back to the traditional desktop, hoping by this time nobody but the hardcore users will notice... while the masses will swallow the Metro interface.
If the reality of the situation is that consumer devices all have touchscreens because of overzealous OEMs, then affordances should be made for touchscreen interfaces wherever possible. That said, if it's not clear that touch makes sense as the primary input device, more so than the mouse, then the UI should not be designed around it, regardless how many people own a touchscreen that they keep two feet away at eye level.
If, on the other hand, you have a device where touch is the only input that makes sense, then your shell needs to be designed around it. Every aspect of user interaction needs to be reconsidered, because you can't expect your users to run regedit with a touchscreen.
I think you're right that Microsoft won't drop Metro now, but I don't think it's a given that customers will ever adopt it. Windows 7 works fine for everything I use it for, and without architecture-imposed RAM limits, I honestly can't see a time within the next decade that it will stop doing that. I still know people who use Windows XP, 11 years after it was released. The fact is, they all run Firefox and Chrome equally well. Your desktop OS has never mattered less than it does right now.
Three years ago I bought a Macbook Pro, ostensibly for iPhone development. I went in with the assumption that I would still primarily use my Windows desktop, what with the power and the keyboard and the mouse. Within thirty minutes I was signed into my GMail account, browsing my RSS feed, and realized that I had completely migrated my life over to the new machine. In this environment, where switching to Ubuntu requires less of a lifestyle change than Windows 8, why would anyone ever upgrade Windows?
Traditional PCs are coming with touchscreens because Microsoft insisted on shoehorning touch into their desktop interface.
This is not a case of Microsoft being in danger of being left behind, but a repeat of the disaster of XP tablet edition - Microsoft completely failing to understand where touch is and is not appropriate in UI design.
Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations. I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch.. at least the ones aimed at regular consumers (not business people looking for mate screens, or gamers looking for alienware-like stuff).
It's funny if you stay a bit in these areas and notice people immediately touching the screens. I've seen it quite a few times and the comments are all "hmm, no touch".
The whole PC industry is creating this demand for touch out of users' familiarity with them in their mobile phones. I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
>Macs are hardly the recipients of Windows installations.
Um, duh.
> I fail to see your point. Does your local Best Buy store have a non-Mac area? I think you'll have a hard time finding a late generation laptop there that doesn't include touch..
The point is that you're conflating supply of Windows-based touch desktops and laptops for actual demand for those systems.
> I have no use for touch on my laptop but a lot of people I know think it's cool...
And as somebody that deals with end users, I've yet to talk to anyone that didn't ultimately find touch in a laptop/desktop either pointless or outright counterproductive.
It's one of those things that people think is a cool idea until they actually use one for an extended period of time.
The 'Start Button' was in the wrong place during its existence. It should have been at the top left rather than bottom right. The convention being that menus drop down rather than climb up. It went against the 'E' shape of what people scan for on a VDU and the mouse movements to get there were always a bit arcane. Maybe Apple had a patent on it coming from the top left and MicroSoft had to think differently. Windows 8.n presents an opportunity to fix this usability defect but I doubt they will do it.
Pretty much. With Classic Shell I finally have the perfect start menu; a combination of 95, 98, XP and custom traits. I doubt anything Microsoft does will surpass it.
