When looking at the tablet experience for windows 10, this render shows what issue needs to be adressed, especially on the surface pro render.
In tablet mode the taskbar and its icons and fonts are too small for a functional use in daily life. It may look nice with regards to ethics in design, but its not functional and for many users it is going to be a frustrating experience. I think microsoft should still consider core design elements used in the modern UI design from windows 8. Icons and fonts are a bigger size, relative to what Im seeing now in the render. Personally it is not necessary for me to navigate to the same info in three ways.
I think the workflow in tablet mode should be a simple experience of accessing information. This design seems to show what appears as three degrees of freedom for accessing information. Apparently for one information sourece, e.g. one app, you can access this by either glancing the live tile, pressing the live tile, pressing the pinned live tile on the taskbar or (most likely) accessing the app through the left start menu panel in the frequenly used and locations area. It still boggles my mind, because this systems increases choices which influences workflow. Everyone's different, but I can see in this case that too much choice can leave with a less good experience, because you have to make a choice of how you want to access information. But I would argue that finding and accessing information this way on one device is somewhat illogical because the user actually has to think about how to access the information rather than a clear cut and faster choice to access the information. I think the latter is what everybody would want to chose. Because it adds less layers. The info can already be accessed at a glance by just selecting the live tile. It is also a pinned function, so that makes pinned tiles/files/programs on the taskbar in tablet mode more of the same and potentially less efficient and confusing. Add the fact that for tablets the taskbar space, pinned items and the system tray are just too small for finger touch use (increased user error mouse over input due to larger input surface area of the finger) it makes a less desirable choice to have the taskbar present in tablet mode in any orientation. The user has to chose between pressing the taskbar or the live tile which, in my view, would make the tablet navigation experience more complex, especially if they're both present on the screen at the same time. I think tablet mode should be clean. One navigation style, clean out doubles. This means hide the navigation pane to the left and the taskbar below in tablet mode. Live tiles are bigger, present more info at a glance and have bigger more finger friendly button design. And what one can find in locations and frequently used one can also pin as a live tile on the startmenu screen in tablet mode. Even the many degrees of freedom gives the user the power to reorganize to groups and locations for quick access of locations and frequently used apps/programs at the users disposal, already part of wiinodws 10 technical preview.
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