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Users Decry New Icon Look In Windows 10

Posted by samzenpus on from the no-sir-I-don't-like-it dept.

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.

34 of 516 comments (clear)

  1. If you hate Change so much...... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    why did you vote for Obama? Twice??

    1. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by itzly · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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) ?

    2. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by RabidReindeer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by camg188 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's certainly different, but i don't see the issue.

      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!

    4. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by Chrisq · · Score: 5, Funny

      why did you vote for Obama? Twice??

      Well after the first time we hated the idea of a change

    5. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by Carewolf · · Score: 4, Informative

      They're more in line with current gui design. They want to appear a bit more modern i guess.

      They look like hires versions of early 1990s icons to me, not modern in any way.

    6. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by jbolden · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Yes they are. The new style of design allows for less borders between boxes which makes screens more efficient in how they use space. Being able to visually comprehend more on a screen occupying the same physical space is an upgrade.

      Moreover once you introduce touch and thus have an inaccurate pointing device borderless works far better since you want the pointing device to be closest center not border and except for circles that's not going to be the same thing.

    7. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by organgtool · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The difference, of course, is that you didn't have to constantly interact with the taillights and fins of the car to operate it.

    8. Re:If you hate Change so much...... by nine-times · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

  2. Finally by Kvathe · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  3. Amateurish by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Those icons look like someone's first pixel art experiments. It seems that Microsoft has fired all of its professional graphics artists.

    1. Re:Amateurish by binarylarry · · Score: 4, Funny

      Actually, these icons were designed by Clippy the AI.

      After he was fired from Windows Help Services, he retrained as a UX technologist and has been leading Microsoft's more recent innovations, like the Windows 8 start menu, the ribbon interface and now a complete revamp of the icons used in Windows.

      He's pretty much Microsoft's Jony Ive these days.

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    2. Re:Amateurish by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Those icons look like someone's first pixel art experiments. It seems that Microsoft has fired all of its professional graphics artists.

      The problem is that- in terms of style- either they can't make up their mind what they are, or they're trying to have it both ways.

      They're neither sufficiently clean and flat to match the current style of graphic design (which they went for with Windows 8), but nor do they work particularly well as 3D or prettified icons, or any other style in their own right.

      The end result is that they just look like horribly underdesigned versions of "old school" icon design circa XP to Windows 7. And some (e.g. the warning "!" triangle and error "X" circle) just look badly designed full stop.

      The colours are also far too bright to be used in large, solid blocks like that. It's probably no coincidence that the "flat" trend in general was accompanied by the rising use of *slightly* less fully-saturated colour (see here for an example); not dull by any means, but more tolerable for solid blocks than (e.g.) #FF0000 red etc. (*)

      I grew to hate the use of bland gradients of the previous design trend (early Web 2.0 and later) and the glossy 3D effect started to get overdone (and cheesy) when adopted by every man and his dog. So I'm a fan of the flat look when it works. The problem (which I figured out at the start of the trend) is that if it's not done well, it can easily come across as being simply underdesigned or crude, and as it becomes more widespread it's likely to become adopted by people who can't tell the difference.

      (*) Mind you, that was also a trend elsewhere, e.g. in clothing.

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  4. Ah, Damnit... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

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    1. Re:Ah, Damnit... by operator_error · · Score: 5, Funny

      I predict one day the UX/UI trend will be glossy, even glass-like; what with reflections, highlights, shadows, textures and all.

    2. Re:Ah, Damnit... by Jerry+Atrick · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. If users complain about Windows X icons... by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...there is nothing seriously wrong in that OS (to be fair).

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    1. Re:If users complain about Windows X icons... by Warbothong · · Score: 4, Informative

      It's a classic case of Bike Shedding.

      "These icons look crappy"
      "Thanks for the feedback. What do you think about the switch to user-mode signed driver binaries?"
      "No idea. But these icons look crappy"

  6. Goodbye skeuomorphic... by itsdapead · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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  7. Re:Flat Look may be ugly, but it is useful by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  8. Bad usability, man by Misagon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  9. HiDPI by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  10. Bugs in Win 7 UI by CaptainOfSpray · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

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    1. Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI by dissy · · Score: 4, Informative

      3. Delete a file
      4. Whoa, the file is STILL THERE in the list

      Err, wut?

      I manage around 150 Win7 machines at work, and have 4 of them at home, and never once seen the behavior you are describing.

      Are you sure there isn't more involved with recreating that? Have you seen this on more than one Win7 computer?

      When I use explorer to delete a file, it is removed from the file list and placed in the recycle bin folder for that drive, just as has been the case for some time now.

      If explorer is open to a remote file server it still removes the file from the list when deleted, just skipping the recycle bin part of things.
      (Not to mention my complaint about a confirmation prompt being there when the recycle bin is used and so recovery is possible, and NO confirmation when deleting on a file share despite no recovery of the file being possible by default, which always seemed bas-ackward to me)
      But you didn't mention browsing to a remote file share, the default explorer will open to your homedir or drive root typically on your system drive.

    2. Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Atleast getting the delete file error is quick.

      I continue to be amazed by the slowness of some other common file operations,
      1. Select a lot of files and directories.
      2. Drag them to another folder to start copying.
      3. Wait a few seconds and cancel.
      4. Wait 15 minutes while a window shows "Cancelling...", during which you can't really do anything.

      Why does it take so long to cancel file copying? It has to delete a single (partial) file at most.

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    3. Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      He's right, Explorer doesn't always clear its dir cache correctly. Happens more often to me on network drives than local drives, but when it happens, I can open other Explorer instances, navigate to that dir, and they all think the file is still there too. Prevents me from recursively deleting directories sometimes.

    4. Re:Bugs in Win 7 UI by CreatureComfort · · Score: 4, Informative

      No previous Windows has ever done anything so mindlessly wrong.

      That is just factually incorrect. The list of mindlessly wrong things previous versions of Windows have done is worthy of it's own miniseries.

      `

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  11. So Windows is getting hit with the Ugly Stick by wiredog · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The same one the Mac OS got hit with in the most recent release.

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  12. "a fresh and modern look" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  13. Silliness by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.)

  14. Re:Do it like Linux by jones_supa · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  15. Mac heretic here by Muad'Dave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  16. Visual Studio by BradleyUffner · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  17. Why? by toonces33 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.