Clearing Windows 8 Usability FUD

[Mahesha999]

Forum members might be remembering that I have created one video explaining how Windows 8 is great with mouse and keyboard.
However there are many articles online saying Windows 8 UI sucks.
For example my friends pointed me to these articles:

• http://www.technologyreview.com/view/507676/windows-8-and-pc-uis-that-suck/
• www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html

So I wrote a post to cut out points made by second article here: Mahesha999's blog: Clearing out Windows 8 Usability FUD

Very truly talking, the whole decade old PC experience is still there in its original form with only one difference new Start Screen. You can use all legacy desktop apps the way you were using for more than a decade. So genuinely there can be only two possible reasons if anyone say it sucks with mouse and keyboard:


1. Switching between Start screen and desktop in Windows 8 - And as I wrote in post this is still done by hitting a decade old Windows key, so at least this cannot be a problem.


2. The next is whether Start screen itself sucks - And as section in my post proves, start screen actually makes it fast. How? two scenarios:

• In Start menu, you have to drill down to Program icon, in Start screen everything is pinned, no need to drill down
• Many times you dont need to open app, you can just see the tile for live update

Anything else that you think is new in desktop environment of Windows 8?


What people here think?

 

[brmiller1976]

I think that the one study that said "W8 is difficult for people to pick up and use cold-turkey without instructions" warranted the biggest "no **** Sherlock" of 2012.

DUH! Of course "cold turkey" use without ANY review of user concepts would be difficult. (And it's the same with every OS transition, including that from 3.X to 95 and Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X). Those sorts of "studies" are just silliness.

The remaining usability objections are easily solved by simple productivity. I can challenge an iPad user to several exercises where I'll dust him good on my Surface because of the multiple panes. There are other challenges ("open this file in Excel") that he simply cannot match.

And I guarantee the Start screen, with custom-configured Live Tiles, is faster and more intuitive than "Mission Control" on the oh-so-vaunted OS X (especially for users new to both concepts).