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

[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

[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.

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 ?

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.