9 ms·

To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start

To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu. A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI. The next version was then a slightly milder version of it, and at the same time people had gotten used to it a bit, so most were happy with Windows 7 and are now happy with Windows 10. It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things.

cheschire 6y ago
It didn't help that the initial versions had no button at all and expected the user to know to click in the corner of the screen.
washadjeffmad 6y ago
Another example was GNOME 2.32 to GNOME Shell, which Microsoft later attempted to emulate in 8.x, though with the major conveniences removed - namely, a "classic" fallback mode. Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness. I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.
- tifadg1 6y ago
  Well I for one do have multiple complains, but I'm impartial now to it's success having switched to KDE years ago. If something happened to KDE I'd switch to Cinnamon. If something happened yet again, I'd continue my search for a desktop-focused DE, but gnome would be the last resort (I do say that as someone who's otherwise quite committed to redhat)
MisterTea 6y ago
> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that. > A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. > It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.
- newjersey 6y ago
  > No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. The biggest fault of Windows Vista in my opinion was Microsoft made one too many compromise. There were machines that came with Windows Vista pre-installed that should have never gotten Windows Vista. My roommate in college had a Compaq machine on which the screen completely blanked for over three minutes at a time as it tried to display the user access control overlay. Of course, over three minutes later the screen would turn on as if nothing had gone wrong at all. iirc it was something about the processor/integrated graphics being too weak for Windows Display Driver Model. [1] I think Microsoft is making a similar mistake today by allowing OEMs to ship Windows 10 on new machines with anything less than a SATA SSD (mechanical hard disks or eMMC). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#:~:text=Windows%20Display%20Driver%20Model%20(WDDM,versions%20beginning%20with%20Windows%20Vista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#:.... Off-topic but if the url looks weird it is because it is a Chrome only thing: more at https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/ https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/
- buran77 6y ago
  > and resource hogging Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people. People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything else. When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7 arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds complaints. Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market, targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it and complain that the fuel consumption was huge. Strangely enough this was a modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing. The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption. When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering" complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not). Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a product, not its actual qualities.
WhitneyLand 6y ago
But people don’t use software agnostic of history so the net of it was still a huge UX design mistake. Lots of people internally knew it was a mistake in real time before realease but it was strongly backed by exec Steven Sinofsky, iirc.
flohofwoe 6y ago
> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Change is only good if it improves things. Win8 and later were a massive usability regression for keyboard+mouse/trackpad users. Windows 10 rolled some changes back, but those that weren't rolled back are still an inconsistent mess (and with no signs of improvement, that's the actually worrying part). There's no rational way to call the Windows 10 start menu or system settings an improvement over Windows7 all the way back to Windows95. And both the start menu and the control panel area weren't all that great to begin with in Win95+, but somehow Windows 8 and 10 still managed to make it worse. PS: The main reason why the Win8 start screen and Win10 start menu are bad seems to be that they assume that a Windows application is just the executable, like on macOS. But Windows applications usually have more files associated with them, mostly other tools, readme files, uninstallers. Visual Studio is the best example, it's nearly impossible to find the tools associated with Visual Studio in Windows 10 without installing a proper start menu replacement. And Visual Studio is a Microsoft product. Go figure.
Erlich_Bachman 6y ago
> People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of 5-10 seconds to showing every result... What are people paying for? Apparently it must also be that it doesn't even properly separate the drawing code from the search/IO/sync code because while it lags away I can clearly feel the lag even in how the text cursor moves and responds... Reliably! Wtf this is the world's most used OS? (Sorry, rant over.) There are definitely major problems in Windows, be it incentive structure, or some wrong people at key positions in the UX department, or legacy, or whatever it is, but after experiencing a good desktop manager it is obvious that Windows is not getting better in this regard... It's not about tablet or no tablet, it is just worse, in many ways.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  KDE Plasma happily copied windows in this way. I have often had the wrong thing launch on KDE because the search updated between when I decided to hit "enter" and when the key press was registered.
- Guest0918231 6y ago
  How is it possible in 2020 a basic search of the start menu doesn't work? For example, I have Spotify installed, it appears in my start menu, but if I search for "Spotify" it's nowhere to be found. https://i.imgur.com/y55C38B.jpg https://i.imgur.com/y55C38B.jpg
chrismorgan 6y ago
No, the Windows 8 Metro/Win32 split was simply an extremely bad design. I’ve been dealing with a few 8 machines recently, and it’s really, really bad. You want to get between the two worlds? Hope you know about Alt+Tab, because otherwise you’re probably not going to find out how to get there. Seriously. It’s that bad. Windows 8.1 made some improvements, so that users will probably be able to find their way from Win32 to Metro. Getting back is still a pain. It retained the fundamentally bad paradigm. Windows 10 was the proper fix: abolish the ecosystem split, as a disastrously failed experiment, and return to a unified experience. You still have the UWP apps (though their design is finally somewhat more in line with the rest of the OS), but they are properly windowed like everything else now.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  The split made a lot of sense to tiling window manager fans. Admittedly a small niche to accidentally target a mainstream operating system to, so unsurprising it got so much bad press. In 8 the tiling window manager and non-tiling window manager were separate worlds you switched between virtual desktop style. In 8.1 they made the entire non-tiling window manager desktop a "proper" tile. (In 10 they killed the tiling window manager.) As a tiling window manager fan, it's easy to sometimes wish they'd gone down the other path in some AU 10 and "promoted" more Win32 applications to proper tiles in the tiling window manager, rather than "demote" all the tile capable apps to the chaos of traditional non-tiling window manager.
  - AshamedCaptain 6y ago
    It also had the side effect that Windows 10 is very nasty to use on a tablet, compared with 8.1 .
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Indeed. It should not be a surprise that tiling window managers are probably preferable to every method of input other than mouse. That AU probably would be a good one. (Keyboard included and especially. Do you know the keyboard shortcuts to move/resize/arrange windows and when was the last time you tried to use them? Part of my love for tiling window managers came from daily use of a laptop with a bad trackpad and wanting to automate more things with the keyboard.)

cheschire 6y ago

It didn't help that the initial versions had no button at all and expected the user to know to click in the corner of the screen.

washadjeffmad 6y ago

Another example was GNOME 2.32 to GNOME Shell, which Microsoft later attempted to emulate in 8.x, though with the major conveniences removed - namely, a "classic" fallback mode. Today, GNOME Shell is a default DE for major distributions, and while people have their preferences, it's more popular than the 2.32 fork, Cinnamon, which I think is good evidence of change-averseness. I had my differences with the GNOME Foundation's handling of things, but I have few complaints about the convenience of their DE today.

tifadg1 6y ago
Well I for one do have multiple complains, but I'm impartial now to it's success having switched to KDE years ago. If something happened to KDE I'd switch to Cinnamon. If something happened yet again, I'd continue my search for a desktop-focused DE, but gnome would be the last resort (I do say that as someone who's otherwise quite committed to redhat)

MisterTea 6y ago

> To be honest, I think it was not that bad from a usability point-of-view, agnostic of history. Perhaps in a vacuum it might work. But this is the real world were hypothesis are just that. > A similar thing happened with Vista, people were overwhelmed with the wildly different UI No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. > It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Interesting? It's human nature. We develop habits and routines which take time to memorize and get right. It's work which we personally invested. I'm sure you have routines that if changed by an external force without choice would be upsetting to you.

newjersey 6y ago
> No. People were apparently overwhelmed by system instability and resource hogging (mainly hard drive grinding). I don't remember people complaining about the UI's usability. Though there were UI complaints which were mostly echos of the same complaints leveled at the glossy "Teletubby" XP theme. The biggest fault of Windows Vista in my opinion was Microsoft made one too many compromise. There were machines that came with Windows Vista pre-installed that should have never gotten Windows Vista. My roommate in college had a Compaq machine on which the screen completely blanked for over three minutes at a time as it tried to display the user access control overlay. Of course, over three minutes later the screen would turn on as if nothing had gone wrong at all. iirc it was something about the processor/integrated graphics being too weak for Windows Display Driver Model. [1] I think Microsoft is making a similar mistake today by allowing OEMs to ship Windows 10 on new machines with anything less than a SATA SSD (mechanical hard disks or eMMC). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#:~:text=Windows%20Display%20Driver%20Model%20(WDDM,versions%20beginning%20with%20Windows%20Vista https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model#:.... Off-topic but if the url looks weird it is because it is a Chrome only thing: more at https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/ https://wicg.github.io/scroll-to-text-fragment/
buran77 6y ago
> and resource hogging Memory usage used to be a major complaint (possibly the biggest) even if it was made clear repeatedly that the OS was simply keeping more stuff in RAM instead of dumping it to disk specifically to improve performance. A mechanism that stuck to these days. That memory isn't marked that obviously in the Task Manager now, and memory is is no longer such a luxury so people don't complain anymore. But on my 16GB machine I have 4.1GB in use clearly marked on the graph, and another 7.5GB cached that is not at all made to jump at people. People want the added goodies and expect absolutely no impact on anything else. When XP was launched we heard the same grumbles. XP was bloated, had higher resource usage than 98/2000, less stable than 2000, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP3 people were loving it and by the time Win 7 arrived nobody wanted to let go of XP. Win 7 was bloated, had higher resource usage than XP, less stable than XP, not compatible with a lot of hardware, weird GUI. By SP2 people were loving it and by the time Win 10 came along nobody wanted to let go of Win 7. And no, it's not an issue of OS quality going down. Like you said, people just get used to stuff and can't take change and when you combine it with the lack of understanding you get all kinds complaints. Reminds me of an anecdote about a certain car made for the low end market, targeting a segment of owners of 20+ year old clunkers. Everyone would buy it and complain that the fuel consumption was huge. Strangely enough this was a modern engine, certainly more efficient than the old ones it was replacing. The problem? The fancy computer was showing instantaneous fuel consumption. When accelerating? 25 liters/100Km. Outrageous! The company just hid the instantaneous counter and left only the very reasonable average. Problem solved. Then there were the "I can't feel the road with this power steering" complaints which worked themselves out, although to this day there are people who swear the old cars were better (they were most definitely not). Between lack of knowledge, nostalgia goggles, unreasonable expectations ("all of it, for free"), and a few more things these popular opinions of tech of the past aren't all that useful. It says a lot about the commercial success of a product, not its actual qualities.

WhitneyLand 6y ago

But people don’t use software agnostic of history so the net of it was still a huge UX design mistake. Lots of people internally knew it was a mistake in real time before realease but it was strongly backed by exec Steven Sinofsky, iirc.

flohofwoe 6y ago

> It's interesting to see how strongly change-averse most people are when it comes to those things. Change is only good if it improves things. Win8 and later were a massive usability regression for keyboard+mouse/trackpad users. Windows 10 rolled some changes back, but those that weren't rolled back are still an inconsistent mess (and with no signs of improvement, that's the actually worrying part). There's no rational way to call the Windows 10 start menu or system settings an improvement over Windows7 all the way back to Windows95. And both the start menu and the control panel area weren't all that great to begin with in Win95+, but somehow Windows 8 and 10 still managed to make it worse. PS: The main reason why the Win8 start screen and Win10 start menu are bad seems to be that they assume that a Windows application is just the executable, like on macOS. But Windows applications usually have more files associated with them, mostly other tools, readme files, uninstallers. Visual Studio is the best example, it's nearly impossible to find the tools associated with Visual Studio in Windows 10 without installing a proper start menu replacement. And Visual Studio is a Microsoft product. Go figure.

Erlich_Bachman 6y ago

> People were just not used to a full-screen, search-focused start menu Ok, a search-focused menu is fine, but what I can't understand is how is it possible that the in 2020, on a new computer the search in the start menu can still lag??? What is this? There are menus in some linux desktop managers that haven't been lagging for decades, and the newest windows reliably takes 0.5s-3s for showing any results, upwards of 5-10 seconds to showing every result... What are people paying for? Apparently it must also be that it doesn't even properly separate the drawing code from the search/IO/sync code because while it lags away I can clearly feel the lag even in how the text cursor moves and responds... Reliably! Wtf this is the world's most used OS? (Sorry, rant over.) There are definitely major problems in Windows, be it incentive structure, or some wrong people at key positions in the UX department, or legacy, or whatever it is, but after experiencing a good desktop manager it is obvious that Windows is not getting better in this regard... It's not about tablet or no tablet, it is just worse, in many ways.

aidenn0 6y ago
KDE Plasma happily copied windows in this way. I have often had the wrong thing launch on KDE because the search updated between when I decided to hit "enter" and when the key press was registered.
Guest0918231 6y ago
How is it possible in 2020 a basic search of the start menu doesn't work? For example, I have Spotify installed, it appears in my start menu, but if I search for "Spotify" it's nowhere to be found. https://i.imgur.com/y55C38B.jpg https://i.imgur.com/y55C38B.jpg

chrismorgan 6y ago

No, the Windows 8 Metro/Win32 split was simply an extremely bad design. I’ve been dealing with a few 8 machines recently, and it’s really, really bad. You want to get between the two worlds? Hope you know about Alt+Tab, because otherwise you’re probably not going to find out how to get there. Seriously. It’s that bad. Windows 8.1 made some improvements, so that users will probably be able to find their way from Win32 to Metro. Getting back is still a pain. It retained the fundamentally bad paradigm. Windows 10 was the proper fix: abolish the ecosystem split, as a disastrously failed experiment, and return to a unified experience. You still have the UWP apps (though their design is finally somewhat more in line with the rest of the OS), but they are properly windowed like everything else now.

WorldMaker 6y ago
The split made a lot of sense to tiling window manager fans. Admittedly a small niche to accidentally target a mainstream operating system to, so unsurprising it got so much bad press. In 8 the tiling window manager and non-tiling window manager were separate worlds you switched between virtual desktop style. In 8.1 they made the entire non-tiling window manager desktop a "proper" tile. (In 10 they killed the tiling window manager.) As a tiling window manager fan, it's easy to sometimes wish they'd gone down the other path in some AU 10 and "promoted" more Win32 applications to proper tiles in the tiling window manager, rather than "demote" all the tile capable apps to the chaos of traditional non-tiling window manager.
- AshamedCaptain 6y ago
  It also had the side effect that Windows 10 is very nasty to use on a tablet, compared with 8.1 .
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    Indeed. It should not be a surprise that tiling window managers are probably preferable to every method of input other than mouse. That AU probably would be a good one. (Keyboard included and especially. Do you know the keyboard shortcuts to move/resize/arrange windows and when was the last time you tried to use them? Part of my love for tiling window managers came from daily use of a laptop with a bad trackpad and wanting to automate more things with the keyboard.)