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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."
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.
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.
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.