Quote:
Originally Posted by Brannigans Law
Torque I really wish you'd just accept that a lot of people, and dare I say the majority (I'm willing to concede thats my personal opinion and no where near fact) don't like how the start menu looks and functions on the PCs. It's not intuitive and it's sloppy man.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog
It's not like Microsoft just did this to make people re-learn the interface. They did it because the metrics showed that use of the Start Menu and subsequently the items inside the Start Menu, were being used substantially less over time.
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I think what people like Brannigan are unaware of is how extensively Windows is instrumented (capable of reporting usage patterns and measuring interactions) and how exhaustively Microsoft does R&D in labs watching people use Windows and collecting that instrumentation data. It's done on a scale at MS that dwarfs just about any other company. All of their GUI design work is based on this methodology, including the classic Start menu, the Office ribbon, and the Windows 8 interface.
I don't have links handy, but I could easily find them, that show the immense amount of thought Microsoft puts into their interfaces.
I will concede that elements of Windows 8 are not intuitive - that is, easily discoverable without coaching, but to suggest that it's sloppy, unproductive, or haphazard flies in the face of the empirical evidence they have collected on how people actually use computers.
In many respects, the "intuitive" Mac interface is actually less well engineered from a human-computer interaction standpoint - what is easy on the surface is actually slower, more semantically complex, and less well understood from an empirical standpoint than anything Microsoft has done. One need only look at the growing hue and cry over skeuomorphism and the detrimental affects it has had on OS X productivity-wise to see that there is a lot of validity to Microsoft's approach of engineering an interface through empirical testing. Just go use the Contacts app in Mountain Lion, or the Calendar app - they are abominations to usability (or even intuitiveness, to be honest).
What would be wrong, of course, would be to say that the Metro UI and design language is the only right one, or the one that everyone should be using, or even the right one for individual users. But I don't see anyone saying that here or elsewhere. We have an embarrassment of riches to choose from in human-computer interaction like we've never had before - you've got everything from Windows 8, to OS X, to iOS, Android, BB10, KDE, Gnome, ChromeOS, and many other interpretations of how we should work with computers and interact with the internet. Choose a effing big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose an OS if this one doesn't suit you.
Most of all, choose to be flexible and adaptable - the rate of change on how we use computers and where we use computers, and the types of computers we use is accelerating right now in ways that weren't predicted when the Windows 95 interface was originally designed. That's 18 years of stagnation that has been swept away nearly overnight with the rise of mobile computing and ideas about how we use computers. There's an entire generation of kids now that will have never known non-multi touch enabled machines, tablet computers, smart phones, pervasive connectivity and an app-centric view of the web. Things are shifting dramatically.