In their efforts to appease the Luddites, Microsoft has made far more changes than was necessary, mostly at the expense of those who use touch-enabled devices. I am finding W10 all but unusable on my 10" Yoga 2 tablet. Yes, I know it's in beta but I'm not talking about that stuff, I am talking about the fundamental experience of "Tablet Mode" on a tablet. If you look at what everyone disliked about W8, it is relatively easy to come up with a few much simpler changes to keep everyone happy.
So, what are those issues? It's pretty straightforward, really. They don't like the full-screen Start Menu or the Live Tiles that go on it. They don't like being flung from the Desktop into the Modern UI by default file associations. They don't like hot corners, either. So if all those things ceased to be issues for desktop users, everyone could be happy without too much effort. What's quite disturbing is that Microsoft really haven't addressed all these issues, yet they have changed things that worked perfectly well before. The result of all this effort so far is a desktop experience that is largely the same as W8 but a touch experience that is barely functional.
These so-called Luddites are enterprise users and like it or not Microsoft makes pretty much all their money off enterprise users - who all pretty much happen to be mouse and keyboard users. 90% of enterprise applications are not optimised for touch or high resolution screens as often they tend to use legacy applications and out-dated-standards (which is why IE was always bogged down with legacy code).
So it was only natural they would react in such a way to bring back these users. They had to by necessity as these large corporations would have transition to Windows 7 and later perhaps the competition If Microsoft remained the course they were pursuing with Windows 8.
The money that Microsoft makes off consumers is no way near enough to warrant a draconian approach with enterprise and corporate entities. However if they did take such as stance; they would have lost a lot of money in the long term as repeat business transitioned away to other solutions.
Simply because the crux of the issue with Windows 8 was that users would have need to re-trained to adjust to a new way of working, experienced staff let go (those who couldn't make the transition), a new recruitment drive for younger employees who are used to the "new modern approach" and without experienced staff to mentor these new recruits it would lead to chaos or it could help them transition successfully - BUT
all this costs time and money. Then to compound matters you have the issue with compatibility, speaking of which Windows 10 has compatibility mode for Xp and even 95 (if you don't have this then your not running Windows 10 Pro).
People like yourself won't admit it - Windows 8 had fundamental design flaws, the 8.1 updated addressed some glaringly obvious flaws but it came too late.
1. W8.1 features. Keep some - hot corners optional, return to last app when you close an app, etc. - but get rid of the pop-up title bars and taskbar from the Modern UI, they just get in the way.
The are options in the task bar for hot corners and charms, that are greyed out (have been for the past builds). I imagine they could be enabled via workarounds; however as the previews has been pretty buggy for me I have not played around with them - in case I make it worse. I imagine Microsoft could easily re-enable these.
2. Start Menu/Screen. This is where Microsoft seem to have gone berserk. Nobody asked for all the useless dross from the Win7 Start Menu back, so get rid of it, please. Having the option for a non-full-screen menu makes sense and should stay and some options are handy, like Power, but we don't need an explorer button when there is one on the Taskbar. Get rid of all the Live Tiles. By default, have small tiles for installed apps and change the right-click menu so that medium and large tile entries have a "(Live Tile)" written after the size.
Yes, they did - a lot of people voted with their wallets and then you have enterprise users - [covered in the previously].
3. Touch. Leave it alone! We don't want or need a "tablet mode" or Continuum. They make the touch experience awful. Just give us a few options to set up the way we want to work. e.g. Instead of a million options for this or that, all you need to offer is "Optimise for Desktop" or "Optimise for Touch". If you choose the former, you get the new, changed stuff. If you choose the latter, you get what we have now in W8, with the changes I mentioned above. Also get rid of the hot corners but keep the swipe gestures.
Let's make something clear here, when you say "we" - your not speaking for every body but for the individuals who prefer how Windows 8 worked and don't care about the impact this has on users who have become accustomed to the old method. Which in this case would be older people, a lot of upper management in corps & enterprise, grand parents etc who have become so used to the traditional method and who can blame them?
This method hasn't changed since the 90s.
Plus you have users without touch screen PCs, laptops and tablets.
Not to mention when Windows 8 came out, the bulk of PC's shipped with it - did not have a touch screen - even Ballmer confirmed that at Build 2014.
Furthermore Continuum is needed for phones to give a PC-like-experience when docked or attached wirelessly to a bigger screen. However a Phone is not meant to
replace the PC but to be additional accessory / extension. Battery tech & cooling has not caught up to a point where a user could run a virtual machine on a phone. A tablet is a more appropriate replacement - you could run a VM on this albeit it would be slow and choppy due to the lack of resources - low CPU, limited ram etc.
Here are a few mock-ups I've made to show you what I mean.
View attachment 105996
This would be the basic Desktop Start Menu. To keep things consistent, all options would be shown in small tiles and those in grey would be persistent (always there). "Pin to Start" would put small tiles in the top area. (I would have manually resized some tiles in this example.)
View attachment 105997
This would be what you get when you click on
All Apps. This would not be persistent.
View attachment 105998
This would be what you get when you click on
Live Tiles. This would be persistent. (It would be there next time you opened the menu.)
And below are a few variations on how it could look for touchscreen work, if they put some of the options from W10 Mobile into it. Note that the grey tiles used for common functions remain in the same spot as on the Desktop and the Taskbar is double width to make the touch targets more finger friendly. Optionally, it could be done away with altogether, I reckon. I certainly don't need it and it just adds clutter.
View attachment 105999
View attachment 106000
View attachment 106001
Constructive discussion would be most welcome!
The Mock ups look half decent [
pretty good -
removed- {
strikethrough not working for me}
See Edit], however if you want a touch centric O/S then you would need to revise the system tray (some food for thought :winktongue
, increase the start button and Cortana's search box by a few pixels and center them on the task bar so they are centered with the taskbar icons (just nit picking). In regards to the last screen shot, make the a icons a little grey or give them a dual tone for contrast (perhaps an undertone of the accent colour?) so they don't completely merge into the background when a bright background is used.
Edit:
Initially, I felt ending my post addressing the obvious flaws would be overly negative and I admit I did not read page 2 of this thread. Now that I have, I feel that was not the right call as the OP's responses to some posters are clearly a) emotional b) stubbornness to a degree that a dose of harsh constructive criticism would give insight to what the OP called as facts are nothing but emotional responses to changes imposed by Microsoft.
The underlying fact of Windows 10 Technical preview is that Microsoft can obtain feedback and impact change tailored combined with their design ethos to said feedback.
Users are no where near in charge of how this progresses, the o/s is not being designed by a committee for several million users... if that was true Microsoft would be constant flip flopping from one iteration to the next.
The most glaring obvious flaw in the OP's design is the redundant option for Live tiles once the start "menu" is loaded up. It is only necessary in the "all apps scenario". The second obvious flaw is the option for "all apps" when "all apps" are showing.
Another not so obvious flaw is how will the OP's "tablet mode" work in portrait orientation?
To presume all users would simply be comfortable in horizontal scrolling with a visible task bar with tiny UX system tray elements in portrait mode would be just silly :wink:.
If your going to stick to what you are saying and going to class everything as "gospel" (basically everyone in the world is agreement with you - which is clearly not the case) then your going to have to go further than a few mock ups.
- A design ethos is needed to be detailed in depth.
- How you plan to tackle different scenarios again explained in depth.
- What would be the over riding priorities in terms of goals - a pragmatic approach that would work in reality.
Windows is not just used by a handful of countries but almost everyone in the entire world and thus the things one may think that are redundant will far reaching consequences on a scale unimaginable.
Windows is not all things to all people, but it is (one way or another) the central conduit to almost everyone's lives. So to make Windows all things to all people is no measly task and the saying goes - you can't make everyone happy.
Thus a balance has to be struck - the balance was way off with Windows 8.
Windows 10 in my opinion is teetering almost on balance and time will tell if it tips to one side or is balance thus able to become everything to all people. Which once achieved would most likely accomplish what Satya Nadella said "we want people to go from using windows to loving windows".
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