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Users Decry New Icon Look In Windows 10
jones_supa writes A lot of people got upset about the flat looks of Modern UI presented in Windows 8. Recent builds of Windows 10 Technical Preview have now started replacing the shell icons, and to some people they are just too much to bear. Basically, Microsoft opted to change the icons in search of a fresh and modern look, but there are plenty of people out there who claim that all these new icons are actually very ugly and the company would better stick to the previous design. To find out what people think about these icons, Softpedia asked its readers to tell their opinion and the messages received in the last couple of days pretty much speak for themselves. There are only few testers who think that these icons look good, but the majority wants Microsoft to change them before the final version of the operating system comes out.
Those icons look like someone's first pixel art experiments. It seems that Microsoft has fired all of its professional graphics artists.
You'll get used to it..
Wouldn't it be easier to get used to the old ones ?
They look like they are from the seventies and using an 8 bit colour pallet.
If this means nothing can ever get changed...
Change just for the sake of it is stupid. Are the new icons in any way better (they let people do their job faster, for example) ?
Hello oblique projection! Here's to the white heat of progress, they've made finally Windows 10 look as graphically sophisticated as Q*bert.
Maybe in another 20 years they'll re-discover perspective.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The biggest problem with the new icons is not lack of beauty but that the overly stylistic design has made them more difficult to visually parse.
The purpose of icons is to make recognition of objects on the screen easier. The use of three dimensions, contrasting edges, shading and shadows are significant visual aids - and those are the things that these new icons lack the most. It takes more than Photoshop skills to earn the title of UX Designer.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
The sooner idiot 'designers' stop using this stupid phrase to try to justify their inability to design properly, the better...
'Flat' UI design is BAD design, plain and simple. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Windows 95 looked much better than windows 8 and leter. Heck, even 3.1 looked better. This seems more like a 1980 design to me: it had to be what they now call "flat" because the hardware could not handle anything better.
The new Windows logo looks like it was made in MS Paint by a child, and these folder icons fit right in to that aesthetic. Good to see Microsoft bringing some visual consistency to their OS.
Security through promiscuity is no better than security through obscurity.
I'd be completely happy with keeping the Windows 7 UI, and just having each Windows release upgrade the guts underneath. And I bet so would 95% of corporations.
I don't understand why Microsoft feels to compelled to tinker with the UI at this point. (Yes I've heard some reasons, I just don't see why they're compelling to Microsoft.)
If this means nothing can ever get changed...
Change just for the sake of it is stupid. Are the new icons in any way better (they let people do their job faster, for example) ?
Change just for the sake of it is marketing. It's the same thing as mutating the taillights (and in the 1950's, fins) of a car just so that everyone will know that you couldn't afford to go out and replace the perfectly good car you already had.
UxStyle can do other styles if you don't like XP.
The key thing is older styles properly emphasise the boundaries between UI elements and the active surfaces of control areas. Something vanilla Modern look if fscking awful at and consequently harder to use.
The issue is that some people like to bitch... a lot... about anything.
From the linked article: "Then, there's pluizebol, who says that, because of the icons, he removed Windows 10 from his computer."
Ridiculous. It would've been easier to change the icons. What next? Don't like a default font or default color scheme? Remove the entire OS!
They still look very unprofessional. Even if they wanted to do Modern UI style icons, they could have done a much better job.
Apple did the same thing with OSX 10.10 / Yosemite. The 'new' icons are flat and just plain nasty. I assume everyone wants to 'streamline the user experience' across phones, tablets, watches, and real computers, but I think pandering to the lowest common denominator is just a bad idea.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Different? They look like something my six year old nephew drew in MS Paint.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
I think you're right...I also think they did a poor job of design. Todays video capabilities are so much more..that they shouldn't look so flat and boring.
I mean, what is good about the changes that they make?
A lot of us use our computers for work - they aren't playthings, and we aren't using the machine for entertainment. So when Microsoft randomly changes the UI on a whim, all it creates for me is aggravation with no upside.
NOT because it's good
NOT because it's intuitive
because designers told us it's good so most idiots say "this is in, it's good"
It's as bad as fucking fashion, for fucks, fucking sakes.
I'm SO over it, websites, phone apps, now phone OS's - everything is going SINGLE colour FLAT, no shading, NO DIVIDING LINES (ARGH) just complete white space (or any other colour)
The new dialler on the Samsung iteration of Lollipop is disgusting. All the numbers are just on one big flat shaded mess.
Forget about what's "cool" forget about aesthetics, tell me which one of these looks easier to hit the fucking numbers on?
http://www.sammobile.com/wp-co...
It's 19'th level, fucking desk smashingly frustrating. I'm a NERD, I'm a GEEK, I'm a fucking IT guy, I WANT TO DO THINGS AS FAST AS HUMANLY FUCKING POSSIBLE. The only thing holding me back should be my fingers, my computer or my device. I should not be sitting there mentally processing shit because it's obfuscated with poor design.
The textless icon 'fad' (which saves them translation costs) is probably the worst part. It's full spec kitten stamping insanity. I don't give 2 fucks if the wifi icon is ubiquitous, they have now dozens if not hundreds of icons for applications across the world on iOS, android, windows which are fucking meaningless and we're meant to know what they do.
"Well just press them to learn once" NO - a, that could be a bad thing I don't want to do and b, EVERY time I see the icon, I wonder "is that?...." I shouldn't think that. I should see the text too. The more I can instantly relate to the better.
I even think (despite it likely being ugly) that we should be consider using colours more.
Wouldn't it be nice if the 'send' button was always not only a "play" looking icon on my Android device, but it was LABELLED "send" and it was ALWAYS green.
Delete / trash icon? Always a trash bin, ALWAYS labelled with text, ALWAYS red? That's THREE fast things which will help me very very (very!) quickly identify what i want to click.
I tire so much of the 0.4'th of a second it takes my brain to 'double check' if I'm going to press the right thing. Those 0.4'ths wouldn't exist if this shit was done properly.
I apologise for ranting but this stuff is BAD, it's UGLY and it's SHIT and I'm ultra sick of it. It's hipster, flat, bland, wank for the sake of wank and it's costing me time.
One more thing, I no longer work in IT support. It was hard enough as it is when I did it, I couldn't begin to empathise enough with some poor piece of shit helpdesk guy now, who not only has to do that work but tell them "no click the icon that looks like an old cupboard but with 2 circular dials on it, no it's up the top right, no there's no colour, no there's no label, yeah it looks like........" for fucks sake.
Madness, utter madness.
LABEL things
put COLOUR on things
USE DIVIDING LINES - 1 pixel thick lines to separate sections ain't gonna kill anyone
If you work in the UI / UX industry and support this stuff. Kill yourself
No, I mean it, actually kill yourself, you're a scourge on technology.
The difference, of course, is that you didn't have to constantly interact with the taillights and fins of the car to operate it.
I just want to interject an opposing point of view here. It's very easy to think that icons don't matter, and that the only thing that matters is some kind of 'objective functionality'. Like, "Windows boots up, it runs the things I want, it has the features I want, therefore icons are irrelevant." I can think of few reasons, off the top of my head, why we shouldn't be so dismissive of design.
First, design matters for the sake of clarity. In the example of icons, you want to make sure that it's clear which image is an icon, and which is some other design element. Which images are clickable? What does that image represent? Those questions are important for UI design. Further, it's important that icons are distinguishable from each other.
As much as possible, you want icons to provide a cue to the user as to what will happen when you click on that icon. If you're going to have one icon for a folder that contains music, and another for a folder that contains images, you don't want them to look close enough that they can be confused. Going further down the line of thinking, if you're going to use the "folder" metaphor, then you probably want to make all 'folders' have folder icons, and have no applications have icons that look like folders. Consistency is also very important in making a UI intuitive and usable.
But all of that is still a bit in the realm of 'practical' and 'functional', and I'd want to make an additional argument that it matters whether a UI is 'pretty'. In short, you have people sitting in a chair looking at these images for 8-12 hours per day, and design aspects of the interface have to have a psychological impact on a person. It would be subtle, in that I would bet small changes have essentially no effect, but still important, in that I would bet that a drastic change in UI 'prettiness' could have a major impact on a person's mood and even productivity over time.
No, I think people are wanting "something different" more so than "flat look".
Because you know what the biggest complaint about iOS 6 was? The UI was "dated" and "looked the same".
It never was about usability - it's people thinking that something that looks different is a good thing - that every year things must look different and things must be better because of it.
If you don't change your look, people think you're dated and "not innovating".
Basically it's change for the sake of change. Because otherwise people don't think anything's changed.