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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.
why did you vote for Obama? Twice??
Microsoft's UI designers will be first up against the wall...
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
I was withholding my opinion until I heard the expert opinions of random Softpedia readers, but now it seems pretty clear that Windows 10 is a bust.
Those icons look like someone's first pixel art experiments. It seems that Microsoft has fired all of its professional graphics artists.
Yeah, they're doubling down on the "modern" look, which essentially translates to "flat and ugly" to me. I sort of knew that going in when I saw the Windows 8 styling hadn't changed. Microsoft's Windows 10 is shaping up to be pretty nice in terms of usability. I've been testing it out, and it's fixed most of the most horrible aspects of Windows 8, by which I mean they've pretty much chopped them out and replaced them with UI systems that actually work on a desktop. It's shaping up to be what Windows 8 should (or could) have been. But damn... it's still as ugly as sin.
I guess they're still trying to prove that they can ignore overwhelming customer feedback in a way that's uniquely suited to mega corporations. Seriously, I can't wait until this design trend ends, and people look back like we now do at 70's fashion trends and say, "Dear God, what were we thinking? We really thought that was cool?"
Also:
Keep in mind that this is still a Technical Preview build and the icons we see here might not make it to the final version of Windows 10
Hahahaha, oh man... that's just adorable. Seriously, they're not going to change them because a few people are bitching about them at this point.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
They look like they are from the seventies and using an 8 bit colour pallet.
In the past MS used http://iconfactory.com/
They did not use internal staff.
But the managers that approve it are to go first.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
...there is nothing seriously wrong in that OS (to be fair).
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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.
You can always turn off the effects for VMs and remote connections. For local use, effects like transparency and whatnot do not introduce any kind of penalty. Even the slowest GPUs (all the way to GMA950) have been able to do it without any perceivable slowdown. Windows is very well optimized in this regard.
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
I guess operating systems acquiring HiDPI support is one of the reasons going for the flat look. Vector graphics are easy to scale. But maybe some genius will eventually come up with a system that both scales well and looks cool. Some might also say that good appearance isn't the be-all and end-all, but we had quite nice thing going on with Aero, so why go backwards in evolution. The window zoom animations look really good in Windows 10 though.
"after releasing Windows 7"
So the bugs in Win 7 UI were actually created by Microsoft people?
1. In Win 7, open Windows Explorer
2. Get a list of files up.
3. Delete a file
4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list
5. Delete it again
6. Whoa, ERROR MESSAGE "file not found" - if so, why is it listed?
That's a fundamental breach of the user paradigm. No previous Windows has ever done anything so mindlessly wrong.
This shit is why I decided to stay with XP till the end, and then moved to Linux Mint Cinnamon. Which was an excellent move - it runs lighter and faster on my hardware than XP ever did, and looks and feels a lot more like the UI that I already knew than Win 7, Win 8, Win 8.1 does.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
The same one the Mac OS got hit with in the most recent release.
Best Slashdot Co
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 icons look unfinished as a set. The image linked to shows some hard drives as flat, and some as the old, 3D shaded variety. The folders have a cutout on the right hand side that seems missing from the music folder, but it's there in the downloads variety. You can't see the cutout for documents and others so it looks out of place.
But the my computer icon. Just look at that for 10 seconds. I hereby rename it to the 'Oh My God computer icon'. It's incredibly awful.
Please, no.
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.)
I'll throw some screenshots here so people can compare easily.
- Windows 3.1
- Windows 95
- Windows 7
- Windows 10 new icons from the article
- Windows 10 new Recycle Bin and Control Panel icons
It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.
There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.
I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."
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.
This happened a few years ago for the iconography in Visual Studio (2010 I believe) too, and the users were up in arms. It took what felt like a tremendous amount coordinated feedback over a very long time to get some very small concessions from Microsoft. If you don't like it you had better start letting them know about it now and en-mass, because this decision will have a LOT of inertia behind it. It won't be easy to get them to change their minds at this point.
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.
With Linux you can customize your UI and just leave it like that. You also have different options for UI. With Windows you get what you get - like it or not.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I think part of the flat icon craze is directly related to touch interfaces. Our mind, like it or not, sees 'bubbly' icons or buttons like the old XP start menu as an item where pressing on the edges is no good, like accidentally pressing the edge of a real-world rounded button and it not fully depressing. In a touch interface, this gives the illusion that the contact area is much smaller than it actually is, and makes for a hesitant approach. 'Flat' icons or targets give the impression that you can register a press on any part of the item. This is important on touch interfaces where tactile feedback is limited and your big fingers block what you're actually pressing.
This becomes quite obvious when looking at some of the old touchscreen keyboard UIs on the early touchscreen-era phones. The start of 'flat' UIs didn't come from windows 8, it came from the touchscreen phone. As someone else mentioned, DPI scaling might also be a factor, but this also came from the DPI race on touchscreen phones.