Microsoft's Designers Are Now Working Together on the Future of Windows, Office and Surface (theverge.com)

Microsoft has changed the way it approaches design. The new Office icons unveiled this week are the first glimpse at a far bigger design overhaul that's going on inside the company. Windows is also getting its own icon changes, but the bigger change is a collaborative effort going on between the Windows, Office, and Surface teams. From a report: "This is definitely a cross company effort," explains Jon Friedman, Microsoft's head of Office design, in an interview with The Verge. The company's design leaders -- Friedman with Office, Albert Shum on the Windows side, and Ralf Groene for Surface -- all work together now. "We operate like an internal open source team," Friedman says.

"So we're all openly sharing our design work, critiquing the work, working on it together. What we've found is that the best way to develop our Fluent Design system is to truly open source it internally. What's happened is that we're getting the best of everyone's work that way."

Comments

They found another way

[DarkRookie2]

What is it with Microsoft and their continued exercise to keep making their products worse and worse.

Re:They found another way

[ConceptJunkie]

Well, they don't know how to make them better, but they have to change something...

Re:They found another way

[Oswald McWeany]

What is it with Microsoft and their continued exercise to keep making their products worse and worse.

The problem is, they have to keep changing UI and pictures so you know they're still working. They redesign the icons so that you don't forget they're still an active company and it looks fresher.

Honestly though, every time they come up with a new UI change it always takes a few years to get used to, because they always pick some weird idea or image style... they when you finally are accepting of their ugly UI and icons they feel the need to look fresh again.

It's probably like how some composers will throw dissonance into something pretty occasionally so you notice the change in tone and stay connected. If everything was pretty and slick you wouldn't stop to think about the UI you're using.

Re:wow

[ArchieBunker]

Knowing Microsoft they will now contain executable code. Expect gnome to implement a similar but half assed design but with calls to systemd. So now the OS can be aware of any icon changes.

Here are the Fluent guidelines

[SuperKendall]

I had missed the whole new "Fluent" design thing from Build (I normally try to pay attention to what they talk about but was too busy this year).

So I dug down a bit and finally found the Fluent design guidelines. There are some interesting things going on there, like use of light and focus in different ways depending on screen distance (viewing something on a TV screen vs. on a screen right in front of you), probably worth going over to incorporate good ideas into your own UI work...

Re:Wow! Wonderful Idea!

[Gilgaron]

Yeah it is kind of glaring sometimes that Windows has some theme settings and then Office just does whatever it feels like. Even the versions of Office that have themes don't let you just match the OS theme. So, while it seems like an easy/stupid fix for corporate culture they clearly haven't been sharing notes in the past.

Microsoft has changed the way it approaches design

[QuietLagoon]

Will the "new way" be as successful as the "new way" Microsoft implements Quality Assurance?

Changes changes

[Anonymous Coward]

Changes to Windows is a train that will never stop. They need change simply to show them doing *something*. Some of it is good. Most of it is lateral. Some of it is even backwards.

Excellent!

[Voyager529]

Having fixed issues with deleting user data, excessive CPU and disk I/O during updates, poor-to-nonexistent control of installing updates, user preferences regarding information density and screen resolutions, Outlook handling large mailboxes gracefully (especially with non-o365 servers), Access being super picky about version compatibilities, Sharepoint being an utter disaster, most of the newer Exchange server controls being exclusively Powershell applets, Hyper-V shadow copies being temperamental, convoluted licensing models, and coming to terms with the fact that consumers simply don't want to be locked into a vertical Microsoft ecosystem like Google or Apple...I'm glad they're finally able to spend development time on making prettier icons.

Re:Excellent!

[Voyager529]

I'm not sure if you're arguing that a company shouldn't employ designers until after the code fundamentals are all of a uniformly high quality, or that anyone trained as a designer should stop their work on their specialty and retool as an engineer/tester, or ...?

I'm trying to argue that Microsoft's priorities are a mess. Do I have an intrinsic issue with a new set of icons? Not particularly, if it was "one or two dudes in Illustrator coming up with a dozen concepts and putting a poll up for the rest of the office to vote on until they decided on them". I'm more inclined to believe, however, that it is the work of dozens of people with plenty of meetings, e-mail chains, and Slack arguments, encompassing hundreds of hours that could have been used more effectively literally anywhere else. However, the underlying tone of the article was that they're trying to do better with integrating the Windows and Office teams, but from the outside, that hasn't seemed to be much of a problem in comparison to some of the more fundamental shortcomings of their more recent - and self-inflicted - problems throughout their product offerings.

As for retraining designers, let's put it this way: the designers gave us the Windows 8 Charms Bar, Live Tiles, the Settings panel that's prettier but no less convoluted than the Control Panel it's replacing, the super-flat and difficult to read ribbons in Office 2013++, and have been working tirelessly to reduce information density throughout Windows and Office. If that's the fruit of their design specialty, then either train them or retrain them. If they all became QA testers, at least MS would *have* a QA department again - and I'd argue that's a better use of their human resources than changing icons.

Dear Microsoft:

[nuckfuts]

Windows is also getting its own icon changes...

For the love of God, who gives a flying f*ck about new icons? Give us back a working Start menu!

I work on multiple versions of Windows and Windows Server every day, and I am constantly hunting for things. Do I right-click or left-click the Start button?

I used to be able to get to anything I needed by drilling down through a menu or two. Now I resort to the search functionality constantly. Not to mention that settings for related things must be accessed in completely different places. Network-related settings are a good example:

• Right-click network icon -> Open Network and Sharing Centre
• Left-click network icon -> Network Settings (Control Panel -> Network & Internet)
• Run ncpa.cpl -> Change adapter settings

Want to edit network settings for a VPN connection, or authentication details? Two completely different places. I was recently trying to get rid of a remembered WiFi network in Windows 10 and I had to Google how do it!

It's a complete mess.

Re:Dear Microsoft:

[Immerman]

It's bad, but you can make it a lot better by stepping back and rethinking your usage patterns a bit (and ignoring Microsoft's apparent recommendations)

First don't "resort to searching", do what every terminal user has known all along and go directly the much more efficient keyboard interface to begin with. Leave the mouse out of it entirely. [Windows-key] "some related text", cursor down if necessary to select what you want from the results, and [Enter]. Starting with the search is specially important given what a mess setting have become.

Then take the abomination of a "smart-tile" start menu, stretch it to be as large as possible, and unpin everything you don't use from it. (I assume it's basically empty now?) Then replace all those useless "smart" tiles with the shortcuts to frequently used applications and folders that would normally be on your desktop or "common programs" start menu folder. You can organize them into groups, select different icon sizes as desired, and even create pop-up "subgroups" like you have on your phone/tablet by dragging icons on top of each other (if you can convince them not to dodge - I've had the best luck dragging between top-level groups).

Now you've got a faster-than-ever access to your programs, and a far more powerful and well-organized "desktop" that's always easily accessible at the touch of a button instead of being buried behind open windows, and stays free of all the randomly accumulating clutter than plagues most people's actual desktop.

Oh, and to pin folders to the start "menu" you probably need to first make a shortcut to the folder someplace, pin that to the menu, and then delete it.

Sadly their file search is pretty appallingly bad - but if you install Everything.exe from VoidTools you can add find-as-you-type filename search that updates within seconds of any filesystem change.