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Windows 10 Start Menu Wins IDSA Design Award
jones_supa writes: Despite some criticism, it turns out that the design of the Windows 10 Start Menu isn't bad at all, as a designer organization has recently decided to give Microsoft its own Digital Design 2015 award for the feature. In a description on their website, IDSA (Industry Designers Society of America) explains that the design of the new menu makes it easy to access files across platforms, as it comes brings together PCs, tablets, and phones. More, the Start Screen and the Start Menu look similar, so it's easy to adapt to the interface that suits best to your device. There are plenty of Start Menu customization options and if you have a look in the Settings screen, you will find plenty of choices to tweak the default look and feel. Live tiles can be removed completely as well.
Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If they fix the UI, then they fix 90% of the problems they had selling Windows 8. I don't know what IT departments opinions are of the spyware features in the OS. I'm sure they can find a way to configure it to their liking. Does a uniform UI across all devices translate into sales of tablets and mobile devices however? I am skeptical. The iOS and Android trains left the station a long time ago.
I'm getting REALLY tired of "designers" making pointless, needless and often-as-not counterproductive changes to user interfaces. I'm particularly sick of the game of hide the menu which is particularly in vogue lately. Good design is about making things useful first and beautiful second and it seems we have a lot of self anointed UX "experts" who have that backwards. We seem to have too many art school graduates claiming to be "designers" even though they clearly have no particular skill at user interface design.
Didn't I read a couple of days ago that start 10 was downloaded by gazillions because win 10's start menu is crap, not tried it, not going to. just saying.
http://chimpbox.us
It's nice that Microsoft is finally considering good GUI design.
Just because some design association threw a meaningless award at Microsoft's way-too-late attempt to fix their stupid decisions in Windows 8 doesn't mean they are "finally considering good GUI design". Let's see how good it is when the General Public gets their hands on it. Their recent track record has been less than brilliant to say the least so I'm pretty confident they haven't had some sort of design epiphany. Basically it looks to me that they got their ass handed to them over Windows 8 and they're scrambling to fix something that they never should have broken in the first place.
amen. And if anyone has followed the tutorials about disabling Cortana to get rid of the "all your keypresses are sent to Bing for.. processing", you'll find that it still sends all your data to Bing anyway.
You have to block it in the firewall to get the behaviour what normal people would expect.
Some of these awards are just for the institution granting them making money. I guess there is a logo associated with their award, and a company that wants to sport it in their products have to pay a fee. There were so much critique about the look and feel of Windows 8 that Microsoft must be eager to associate their brand with such an award. If I was an institution that granted awards, I would have seen the opportunity.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
I find them annoying as hell, and utterly pointless.
But given that Microsoft has tried this live content crap several times before, and had to pull them precisely because they were security exploits ... I was surprised to see them be such a prominent feature of Windows 8.
Not only do I think the widgetification of the desktop is annoying as hell, and nothing I want, I fail to see something which they've deprecated (in XP, Vista, and I believe Windows 7) as a security risk should be deemed safer now. It's a widget with access to the internet, what could possibly go wrong?
I just assume building things which gives 3rd parties the ability to live update crap on my desktop is going to be insecure.
That, and I don't want a screen full of blinking and flashing crap in front of me. Hiding that god awful screen was one of the first things I did on my Windows 8.1 box.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Its not really about you now is it?
Where as as soon as I finished installing windows 10 I typed "Why is windows 10 so ugly" into google. Perhaps I really am getting old but this is how I use my desktop and start menu. I put short cuts to the programs I use all the time on my desktop. I put shortcuts in the task bar to programs I use continuously. And I use the start menu to browse everything else. I find the windows 10 start menu unintuitive. But perhaps that is because I haven't used windows 8 at all so I missed a generation of training.
The other thing I was a little confused about is the app store thing. If I install the VLC app from the app store wtf am I actually getting? I'm assuming I'm getting some random winRT thing and not "proper" VLC. But there is nothing there that explains it. God damn I'm getting old.
The issue is people want different things.
Wrong. The problem is that Microsoft tried to cram a touch based interface onto a keyboard/mouse based system where it was wildly inappropriate. It has nothing to do with expectations and EVERYTHING to do with usability. Age and experience of the user is irrelevant to the problem. I'm perfectly comfortable getting used to a new interface despite being relatively older but Windows 8 just makes NO sense on a PC. All the interface conventions are for a touch based tablet which does not and never will work well with a mouse/keyboard.
In the end it's about sales, and "new and pretty" sells, and the changes aren't all that big of a leap for the younger crowd. It is what it is, adapter or die.
Microsoft gets virtually all their Windows sales through OEM channels where there is minimal or no choice in operating system. This wasn't users wanting new and pretty, it was Microsoft trying to integrate two different interfaces so they could get in the game for tablets and mobile devices. And they blew it. They didn't allow for the fact that the requirements of a PC are different than those of a tablet. Any system that wants to have both touch and keyboard/mouse input will need to be designed with that in mind from the ground up. You cannot take one or the other and cram them together. Microsoft didn't learn their lesson from their earlier attempts for tablet PCs where they attempted to put some touch features on a bog standard PC. Windows XP wasn't designed for that. Then they went 100% to the other extreme with Windows 8 and took a tablet interface and tried to cram it onto a PC which (predictably) didn't work either.
Are you saying that because there are alternatives, that the interface sucks? Maybe it's just that people have different preferences. Linux distros often (or used to) come with 4 or 5 different window managers, and all were extremely different in how they went about managing the UI. When this happens in Linux, it's awesome, look at all the choice we have. When this happens in Windows, it's because Microsoft is stupid, and the interface they created sucks.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.