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.

Comments

Hmmm

[Hognoxious]

Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.

Re:Hmmm

[rudy_wayne]

Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.

yes, we now have confirmation that the ISDA is a bumch of clueless morons.

The Windows 10 Start Menu is an abomination that has almost none of the functionality of a real Start Menu (ie, Windows 7 and earlier) and all of the bad things of the Windows 8 Start Screen now crammed into a smaller space.

Re:Hmmm

[Ol Olsoc]

Seems about as credible as that thing Homer Simpson won for being fat and falling in a hole.

yes, we now have confirmation that the ISDA is a bumch of clueless morons.

The Windows 10 Start Menu is an abomination that has almost none of the functionality of a real Start Menu (ie, Windows 7 and earlier) and all of the bad things of the Windows 8 Start Screen now crammed into a smaller space.

Bullshit. I haven't had to go to the internet once to find out how to do something on W10, unlike the abomination whack-a- mole administration method of Windows 8. I installed and started using and started supporting all in the same day. Can't ask for much more than that.

And lest ye call me a shill, look up my other posts.

Re:Hmmm

[AmiMoJo]

The Windows 10 start menu is actually okay, once you let go of wanting a carefully organized hierarchical menu structure. I realized that I was wasting time keeping the old Windows 7/XP start menu organized, so I stopped and used search and pinned a few favourite apps.

The old start menu is actually quite a bad UI when you have a lot of applications. The menu gets huge and you have to scan through it or remember where things are with muscle memory. You can organize apps into subfolders, but that just wastes your time and when you update an app it will inevitably re-create its start menu entries at the root again.

On Windows 10 there is an alphabetical list, but it's easier to just use search and pin your favourites as tiles. The old start menu has limited room for favourites and they are a simple vertical list. Windows 10 lets you arrange them in groups on a 2D grid, a bit like how people arrange icons on their desktop. You can now uninstall directly from any app icon too, which saves time looking for the uninstaller or opening the separate installed apps window.

I'm not bothering with Classic Start Menu any more, Windows 10 is fine. You can just remove the live tiles and use it as a launcher, much like a phone with organized home screens, or more commonly by simply hitting the Windows key and typing a couple of characters.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

No, what he is saying, is after 15 years of coasting, waiting for Linux to be anywhere near reasonable for the consumer market to use, Microsoft just got tired of waiting and released W10 to put Linux out of it's misery.
It probably had something to do with systemd.

Re:Hmmm

[Ol Olsoc]

No, what he is saying, is after 15 years of coasting, waiting for Linux to be anywhere near reasonable for the consumer market to use, Microsoft just got tired of waiting and released W10 to put Linux out of it's misery.

It probably had something to do with systemd.

Um - no. I have OS X, Linux, W7 and W10 now.

Have no plans to abandon any of them.

I like the tools that work best - I don't demand only one tool.

Re:Hmmm

[Ol Olsoc]

And yet Android, a Linux OS, is still mega popular. More popular and more used on mobile than Windows ever was on the desktop. This is a post-PC world. Nobody gives a shit about your quaint little desktop computer.

Oh, give it a fucking break.

Do you eat shit anonymous coward? All those flies and dung beetles cannot be wrong. give it a try - it's really popular, so you should do it.

Desktops will always be around for people who actually do work. Not everyone will be a consume stuff only person.

And don't even try the retarded argument that you can serious work on a tablet or phone. You can ride across the country on a tricycle too. Not that anyone would want to do that.

Re:Hmmm

[PRMan]

I've pinned my top 10 apps to the taskbar since Windows XP. And with searching in Windows 7, I've never needed anything else.

Re:Hmmm

[cheater512]

They are printing that slogan on banners as we speak.

Windows 10: Now Workable!

Re:Hmmm

[shutdown -p now]

I may be missing something, but my Win10 start menu still shows folders as, well, folders. Which you can expand if you want to, exactly the way it has been since Vista. It doesn't lump everything that's inside those folders into the top level list. So aside from the tiles (which you can just remove, and then resize the menu to reclaim the wasted space), I don't see what exactly is actually different from Win7, aside from the theming.

UI Designers are the bane of my existence

[szmccauley]

Me: Gnome shell designers, put the fucking Open/Save buttons back at the bottom of the dialog where god intended them to go. God: yeah, what up wit dat? Fuck me. Oh yeah, windoze suck.

Live tiles

[goarilla]

Live tiles can be removed completely as well.

Shouldn't live tiles be removed/disabled by default since they pose a security risk ?

Re:Live tiles

[moronoxyd]

In the same way that Oracle always ticks the little install crapware in your browser checkbox for you when you update Java.

I only update Java by downloading the offline installer. No crapware there.

Re:Live tiles

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:Live tiles

[CastrTroy]

What security risk is that? Is there anything specific that live tiles can do that can't be accomplish while the app is running? Are they any less secure than running native apps? What about native apps that leave an old school notification icon running or native apps that install services?

Re:Live tiles

[gstoddart]

Why wouldn't it be a security risk?

It's a widget which grabs content from the internet. It was insecure when it was "Live Desktop" in XP, it was insecure when it was "Gadgets" in Vista and Windows 7.

Microsoft claims the apps are more secure, but honestly, who really knows?

My assumption is, like all new stuff, it's probably got holes nobody has identified or admitted to knowing about.

They keep trying to have these things, and then they subsequently discover they've got giant security holes in them. I just assume these ones do too.

Re:Live tiles

[shutdown -p now]

You seem to be under the assumption that there's actually some code running behind those tiles. There's not. Unlike Android widgets or Vista/Win7 gadgets, tiles are passive in a sense that they don't pull data, data is pushed onto them. It can be done by a background task within an app (in which case the tile is basically just another rendering surface), or it can be a push notification. Either way, the communication is one-way - the app, directly or indirectly, tells Windows what should be displayed on the tile, but it cannot e.g. capture input from it.

I use Linux but I like Win 10

[kooky45]

The machines I use most are running Linux Mint or Android, but I've updated two Windows 7 desktops to Windows 10 and I like it. The Start menu is especially nice.

Re:I use Linux but I like Win 10

[gregsmac]

Its not really about you now is it?

Re:I use Linux but I like Win 10

[Harlequin80]

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.

Re:I use Linux but I like Win 10

[David_Hart]

If you think installing apps from the store is confusing, try installing the exact same app from the web and the store.

I installed the Kindle app from the store and the Windows Kindle program from the web. They are two completely different apps. The one in the store is build for mobile (i.e. tablets and phones, touch menus, etc.) and the other is built as a desktop app (mouse/keyboard menus, full screen, etc.).

I would recommend that if you have a Windows tablet or touchscreen laptop, and you use touch a lot, that you get the apps from the store. They will work much better with touch.

If you don't want the widgets, prefer mouse/keyboard, and want full functionality, install the desktop application and ignore the store.

The store is really meant for mobile apps...

Finally

[Murdoch5]

It's nice that Microsoft is finally considering good GUI design. Linux has has extremely functional GUI's for years and now it finally seems that for the first time, Microsoft might be following suit, after all if Windows 10 sported Gnome 3, you'd have the single most powerful desktop in the world.

Re:Finally

[Flavianoep]

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.

Fixing 8

[puddingebola]

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.

"Designers" are getting on my nerves

[sjbe]

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.

Alternatively use a third-pary start menu

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't like the start menu and prefer the old Windows 7 style start menu, then there are alternatives.

http://www.classicshell.net/
There are also other alternatives, like Start8 and whatever.

Meaningless award

[sjbe]

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.

Re:Good for them.

[gbjbaanb]

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.

Shit wins awards

[Stormwatch]

This reminds me of how the DualShock won some supposedly important award, even though it's among the worst gamepads ever, and its design issues are glaring for anyone with half a brain.

Design award for something that horrible?

[MacTO]

Place me in a mental institution if you like, but I actually preferred the start screen. At least the start screen acknowledged that the new way of presenting programs as live tiles is hugely space inefficient and needs to take up the entire screen. Indeed, enlarging the start menu was the first thing I did. Then I made the mistake of using all apps. Once again, this is a feature that can use full screen due to the enlarged icons. The problem is that Windows 10 only allows you to enlarge it in one dimension. After a bit more fussing around, I simply gave up.

The new start menu may be great for some people. For me, it felt like a patchwork of features that were poorly thought out. Even though the start screen was much hated, at least it was relatively well thought out. The Windows 7 start menu was well thought out, and had the benefit of well over a decade of refinements. Taking the ideas from two well thought out ideas does not necessarily make a third well thought out idea. On the contrary, it has a huge potential to make a mess. At least Microsoft lived up to that potential.

Re:Design award for something that horrible?

[nine-times]

Even though the start screen was much hated, at least it was relatively well thought out.

I disagree pretty strongly. I mean, you shared your opinion, which is fair, and I'm just giving mine back in return, no disrespect intended.

But first, I find the whole Metro/Modern design to have been a bit misguided. It looked very nice, in my opinion, and it was smart to make bigger buttons that were touch-friendly for Windows tablets, but as many people will argue, I don't think it made sense on the desktop. But that's not really the problem I have with it.

The first problem is the design itself. They've made improvements over the past few years, but especially to start off with, the UI was inconsistent, filled with hidden menus if you performed the correct mouse click in the correct location, or if you hovered in the right place. It was pretty hard to tell which options would be in which menus, and which menus would be triggered by which actions. It was not very intuitive at all, even if you were using a Surface, which is essentially the device it was designed to run on.

And though I have a problem with the menus for being hidden (and seemingly random in terms of which options were in which menus), that's not even my biggest problem with the Start Screen. My single biggest issue is something subtle enough that many technical people overlooked it, because they tend to think in terms of functionality rather than experience: the Start Menu breaks context every time you load it.

Now I don't know if you'll immediately know what I mean there, and even if you do, you might think "That's a silly thing to complain about." It's not a complaint about functionality. It's a complaint about the psychological impact on the user whenever the Start Menu appears on the screen. To simplify (perhaps to oversimplify) we've developed a bunch of spacial metaphors that allow us to navigate our computers, where we treat things like they're physical objects in a physical location. Things are drawn on the screen in a 2D grid, and then we have some additional dimensional information (e.g. some windows are "behind" others, directories are depicted as "folders" and things are shown as being "in" the folder). So we're generally presented with a coherent spacial realm that we're operating within when we are working on our computers. Sometimes we are presented with very different kinds of spacial realms, such as when you load up a full screen game and you're immersed into a 3D world with drastically different physical rules than are present in your normal "desktop" spacial realm.

So that switch between the "desktop world" and the "game world" is a context switch. Your brain has to change its interpretation of what's going on to account for entering into a different spacial realm with different rules. Most of the time, you don't think much about it when you switch contexts, so it doesn't seem like a hard thing to do. You go from typing in a Word processor to talking on the phone to talking with a person in real life to playing a video game, and it all seems pretty simple. It's kind of not, though. These kinds of context switches take a little toll on your brain whenever they happen, and it takes your brain a few seconds or minutes to recover. You usually don't really notice, but think about when you're in the middle of writing a complicated email, and someone interrupts you for a brief conversation-- when you go back to that email, you might take a few seconds or minutes to get back where you were before you can continue. It's not quite an instantaneous process.

So my problem with the Start Screen is that it sets up a change in context every single time you enter it. The existing spacial context of your desktop environment is wiped away and replaced with a different UI context with different rules. If I want to launch a program that's not on my desktop or task bar, I need to switch contexts to launch it, and then switch back to my original context once it's launched. If you're doing this frequently during the day, it can be pretty damned disrupting. It's just a really, really, extremely stupid UI convention, and I don't know how Microsoft thought it wouldn't be a problem.

Once Again, We're Beta Testing for MS

[dcw3]

Since I have several machines to play with at home, I decided to go ahead with the *cough* upgrade *cough* on one of them. Here are the problems I've encountered in just a couple hours of usage.

1. Windows Explorer has been replaced with MS Edge. I often VPN into work, and attempted to do so with Edge, but had no luck. The good news is that Explorer still exists somewhere on the system. From Edge, there's an option to open one of your favorites in Explorer, and I was able to pin explorer to my bottom bar to avoid having to launch edge. MS seems to have hidden Explorer...it doesn't show up in the list of all apps.

2. iPad no longer charges from USB ports. Other devices, like my Garmin GPS watch does. The iPad still syncs up with iTunes, but refuses to charge.

3. My Nvidia graphics driver crashes occasionally, but relaunches. I am running the latest driver, and they claim they're working on it.

Re:Once Again, We're Beta Testing for MS

[rudy_wayne]

Since I have several machines to play with at home, I decided to go ahead with the *cough* upgrade *cough* on one of them. Here are the problems I've encountered in just a couple hours of usage.

1. Windows Explorer has been replaced with MS Edge.

No, you mean Internet Explorer has been replaced with MS Edge. Windows Explorer is the file manager, which has been renamed to File Explorer, and like everything else in Windows 10 they've made a number of stupid, pointless changes that make it just a little worse

The good news is that Explorer still exists somewhere on the system. From Edge, there's an option to open one of your favorites in Explorer, and I was able to pin explorer to my bottom bar to avoid having to launch edge. MS seems to have hidden Explorer...it doesn't show up in the list of all apps.

This is one of the big problems with the Window 8 and 10 UI. Some things don't show up in the list of all apps. So for example, you have to know to navigate your way to [C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer] where you will find Internet Explorer.

Every computer I've used forever has a BIOS setting that tells the computer to always turn on the numlock key at bootup. Windows 10 ignores this and every time you boot you have to remember to manually turn on the numlock. If you use the number pad a lot (I do) it's extremely annoying. There's a registry setting that fixes this, but Jeez, how do you fuck up something that has worked forever.

Overall, Windows 10 is completely pointless. After spending considerable time tweaking and trying to get things into a usable state, I was left with a computer that worked reasonably well (if you are willing to live with all the annoyances) but didn't have one single feature that was better than Windows 7, which has none of the annoyances of W 10.

So I wiped the hard drive and restored Windows 7 from a backup (Acronis True Image is your friend).

Award for menu that limits you to 512 programs?

[BenJeremy]

What sort of morons put an arbitrary limit on the number of items your menu has?

Apparently there is a fix in the pipeline, but it's a bit stupid to have released this with a known issue that should be a simple fix. In this day and age, there is simply no excuse for an arbitrary limit on the number of items in your start menu. I easily have 1500 unique items (Microsoft being one of the worst offenders of dumping lots of useless entries into my start menu) in my Start Menu->Programs folders, so it's likely something important will be displaced by some application's web URL or an uninstall link.

Re:Award for menu that limits you to 512 programs?

[Sponge Bath]

512 should be enough for anybody.

Re:Award for menu that limits you to 512 programs?

[BenJeremy]

Well, for starters, the problem is 512 TOTAL apps, regardless of folder structure. The Start Menu also doesn't support more than one folder level, which in itself is rather dumb. It seems like whoever was in charge of architecting the Start Menu couldn't figure out how to organize the data internally to represent a multi-level tree, though it's a basic pattern every developer should be able to handle.

The limits aren't imposed by the registry (but thanks for playing), and Microsoft has a fix in the pipeline (as I stated, and as you could have read in the link I posted), but it hasn't dropped yet, at least not in yesterday's big update.

I've dealt with arbitrary limits in Microsoft's internals for a long time... going back to having to write my own ini file parser for a Win95 application that had a 3MB configuration file (not my fault) - at the time, the API could only handle 64k of text, and silently accepted larger files, just chopping off the remaining content. My parser handled the larger files with ease, and no arbitrary limits (there is always a limit based on available memory, disk space, etc...). More recently, I discovered Microsoft doesn't really have a strategy for a situation where writing to the registry causes the boot drive to run out of space, resulting in an unbootable machine (I was able to fix it booting PE and moving some files around).

Re:It's sandboxed

[gstoddart]

Right, because I trust every vendor when they tell me how the new hotness is 100% safe and secure.

We'll see what time and reality bears out.

If it's secure, awesome. If not, well, my cynicism will be well founded.

Over the long term, my cynicism has proven to be established by what happens in reality. So you'll excuse me if I don't simply take that claim on faith.

Microsoft is not someone who I take their security claims at face value, they'll have to earn that over a lot of years, because my distrust is a lot of years in the making.

Craming a touch interface on a PC badly

[sjbe]

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.

IDSA?

[PPH]

It Doesn't Suck Anymore?

Why?

[guacamole]

I have used Windows 10 for a couple of weeks, and so far the Start Menu the way it's shipped is more of a hindrance. The Start Menu becomes somewhat usable once you remove all or most of those tiles from it, remove all the defaults, and then add a bit of your own customizations. The end result is not much different from Windows 7. Why should Windows 10 get any big awards for it. Who is funding IDSA right now?

Re:You can't pin items correctly.

[cyberchondriac]

In that case I apologise.

You sir, just broke the Internet. An apology on Slashdot? Next people will start feeding homeless kittens.

Re:Third party menu apps should NEVER be needed

[CastrTroy]

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.

No good deed.

[danmoran]

Awards are a sham anyway. To award Microsoft for fixing the monstrosity known as Metro is like naming the 1960 Ford Comet Car of the Year because it's not an Edsel.