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> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Te

> It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z. Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled. I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on. Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on. In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team. I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened. For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching.

GuB-42 5y ago
> Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. What happened to the culture of "dogfooding" that supposedly was a big thing at Microsoft, and often pointed as a contributing factor to its success?
idiocrat 5y ago
Can somebody forward this feedback to Mr. Bill Gates? Not sure if he cares that his legacy goes down the corporate drain, becoming a failure.
aahortwwy 5y ago
> essentially none of the designers use Windows This is ridiculous.
- Spivak 5y ago
  I mean why would someone who cares anything at all about how software looks even glance at Windows if they had any choice? Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem. Windows, while extremely powerful and stable because of the commitment to not breaking things, is basically unfixable UI wise unless “forward” means going backward. There’s too much to rewrite and not enough value gained by it. So every iteration will be piling on even more inconsistencies and shifting around the “easy stuff” because that’s all you can do. You just have to embrace that Windows is 50 years of UX trends all coexisting.
  - ishtanbul 5y ago
    As an office power user i like the UI of windows 10. 11 sucks tho
    - BizarroLand 5y ago
      Going from 7 to 10 was like being a juggler who was used to juggling 3 apples suddenly having to juggle oranges. A little different but basically the same. Going from 10 to 11 is like being a juggler going from juggling oranges to being punched in the face for the entertainment of 10 year old boys. Have you tried using an app other than photos to view images? How about being forced to manually set every single extensions default opener? Oh, did you expect to be able to right click on the taskbar? Screw you! Have a kick to the groin instead! That's what you get for thinking that this version of windows would operate anything like any other version of windows, you poor, pathetic worthless mineable data source! Now shut up and answer this survey about how much you like Windows 11!
  - aahortwwy 5y ago
causi 5y ago
I knew the Windows UX was dead the moment I tried to type a search into the Start menu and drag a program off the results onto the desktop to create a shortcut and it didn't work, and then when I went to right click on it "Send to Desktop (Create Shortcut)" was gone too.
- digisign 5y ago
  In XP you had to revert to classic desktop to turn off the Fisher-Price.
  - causi 5y ago
    Not that bad aesthetics aren't a problem, but I think loss of basic functionality is a bigger issue.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Meh, Fisher-Price was cute. I've never understood the fascination for those drab Windows 3.11 grays. And Fischer-Price was also functional, you just got extra colors.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      Windows 3.x by default had colourful (yellow) borders and white backgrounds (except maybe the "main container" window in MDI apps; was that perhaps gray? Or teal?). The grey came with W95. Both were fully user-configurable via a quite user-friendly dialogue box, as were NT 3.x, NT4, and W2K. Can't recall whether XP, Vista, and 7 also allowed you to change colours directly -- if it was only the "Fisher-Price", "Glass", and, uh, "Glass 2?" that were locked-in in the standard UI setting -- or if you needed to switch to "Windows Classic", the 95--W2K-style UI, to change even the colours. Can't recall, because I of course switched to Classic first thing I did on any of those. That all went away with Windows 8, of course, and AFAIK didn't come back on 10 either. Actually, they'd started to sabotage it a little earlier: About halfway into the lifecycle of W7, you couldn't change the window border width in the dialogue any more; you needed to hack that value in the Registry (and re-hack it after any change via the dialogue box). And towards the very end, even that hack didn't do anything any more.
mcswell 5y ago
"title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart": Win10 (and iirc Win 7, I never had Win8) are a mix-and-match. FreeCommander XE (the file manager I use) and Thunderbird both have title bars that change color, and Vivaldi allows it (although the contrast is not as great as I prefer). But none of the MsOffice apps do. I think there's some kind of subtle change they do, maybe a 1 pixel wide border or something that shows up when they have keyboard focus, but I honestly can't tell. As a result, I not infrequently type into (or worse, delete something) from the wrong window. Also, the title bars on MsOffice apps are so cluttered with controls that you can hardly find a safe place to click on them if you want to select that app with your mouse. Why, for example, is the search bar in Outlook up there, instead of some pop-up dialog box? (And the Outlook and Word search tools themselves are a mess, but I digress...)
- Mavvie 5y ago
  To your last paragraph, my favourite thing about Mac is how if you click a window that doesn't have focus, the click ONLY makes the window focused. If you clicked on a button, it doesn't actually click the button. A similar thing is what happens when you touch a phone when it dims right before sleeping. Some OSes only let the touch restore brightness, while others will do that AND register a tap wherever you touched. Super annoying IMO.
  - aqfamnzc 5y ago
    I think I it would bother me to have to click twice when working back and forth between two windows. Maybe another approach could be to only register the click action if there is no overlap? Then again, the inconsistency would probably be frustrating with that approach.
    - dijit 5y ago
      Fun to see this come up because it is one of my biggest annoyances when switching between MacOS and Linux. I have focus follows mouse on Linux so it might be an exaggerated problem, but it’s annoying to click a text box and it not actually select the text box. There is an option in yabai for focus follows mouse, but I had to disable yabai because it’s really awkward and perceptibly slow on macos.
kcb 5y ago
Microsoft shouldn't even have MacBooks available unless specifically for the minority developing for Apple platforms. It's just a concession of defeat otherwise.
- lopatin 5y ago
  For devs I think it matters less. But, yeah, for designers on the _Windows Desktop Experience Team_ to not be using their own product for day to day work is absurd to me. It sounds like a joke: "The people who designed this shitty feature don't even use it themselves", but alas, it appears to be the truth.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    Why would you even hire designers that don't use Windows as their daily OS? It's not even a question of making designers use your software, but you could just hire people who do. Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based.
    - chelical 5y ago
      I'm not sure this is true. Anecdotally, across three Fortune 500 tech companies I've worked at, designers / web devs / program managers had Macbooks (or had the option of choosing Macbooks) even when the team was developing primarily in Windows.
    - gabeio 5y ago
      > Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based. That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised. I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.
kristopolous 5y ago
How did the designers become absolute dictators? I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once because they ignore everyone and are given unquestionable power. It's absurd. They have as much capacity to be wrong as anybody else
- megablast 5y ago
  Who should override the experts in design.
  - rvba 5y ago
    Management
  - Wildgoose 5y ago
    Users. They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment. "Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users. If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".
    - kevincox 5y ago
      Any high quality design team should be regularly interacting with users. They should be during users studies, with both the shipping products and mocks of new features. And design team that thinks they can make changes and new features just by sketching in their notebook is mistaken and ineffective. You can't have every user inputting on each change so the design team needs to be the voice of the user. They are talking to users anyways.
- fendy3002 5y ago
  Maybe same with usual companies, higher ups don't really get ux / functionality, and are moved purely by looks. "Because many users are appraising apple's looks, by cloning apple we'll also get praised by our users right?" "Then we can get Apple users to use windows too!"
andromeduck 5y ago
Yeah I've met two Metro/Modern designers during my internship at MS and both used MacBooks. One of them do most of his work in parallels.
- hulitu 5y ago
  That explaines some long lasting bugs on real hardware like single clicks registered as double clicks.
kebman 5y ago
> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows Why are they allowed to work on Windows? Even car salesmen are often required to drive the same car as the one they're selling.
- hparadiz 5y ago
  I honestly don't get how this is even a problem. My best friend is a UX/UI designer who works on Mac but the guy also games and used to do crypto mining back in 2013 so he is very familiar with Windows as well. Why is Microsoft having problems finding designers that use and know both?
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    It's a problem for so many reasons it's not even funny, from the mundane to the esoteric-but-important! A random example: Macs these days use screens with a brightness response Gamma curve of 1.8 and PCs use 2.2. Macs use a color gamut of DisplayP3 by default now, which has different color primaries than the PC sRGB standard. Why does this matter? Because two shades that are easily distinguishable when physically viewed on a Mac may not be easily distinguishable on PC! Colors wills shift, and even 50% grey is represented differently. The same JPG or PNG file from a design will look different on a PC even if it has an identical monitor as a Mac! Similarly, font weight, anti-aliasing, and kerning are very different on the two platforms. Any text design done on one has to be adapted for the other. It's not just the default fonts! The same font at the same size will look very visibly different. Did I mention default fonts? Only Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier are common between the two platforms. All of those are physically different fonts that look different even if transported to the other platform. Etc, etc, etc...
    - pbalau 5y ago
      This is an interesting reply, but very much off topic. The GP asked, and I quote: > Why is Microsoft having problems finding designers that use and know both? and you totally failed to answer that.
rk06 5y ago
> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. That explains a lot. Not having the designers dogfood their work is serious oversight As an MSFT employee, I have no choice but to use win 11. And suffer from taskbar annoyance and bugs
- niuzeta 5y ago
  In a same boat. I must have filed hundreds of internal feedback & bug reports to see none of them addressed. Nowadays I remember to double click the right-click context menu, because right-click + V doesn't open a file on a gvim anymore...
  - rk06 5y ago
    I had used some registry hacks to disable the new context menu. And now have installed explorer patch (mentioned in article and this thread) to fix other issues. You should give it a shot!
- userbinator 5y ago
  As an MSFT employee, you also have a better chance of getting things fixed. If everyone there (except the designers) complains, maybe the management might listen?
  - Arainach 5y ago
    You'd think that, but as an internal employee "you're not our target demographic". Not that this is exclusive to Microsoft. Every large company I've worked for has had some variation of that phrase.
    - 8note 5y ago
      Seems weird you'd be forced to use an OS not designed to be used for your usecase
anigbrowl 5y ago
I love good design, but designers are also able to completely ruin things in short order. I've been using Windows for 30 years as my primary desktop but in the last 6 months I'm increasingly ready to abandon it and just switch to Linux, even though I'd miss a lot of small things.
pwr-electronics 5y ago
Does that mean they're not doing usability studies anymore?
- hulitu 5y ago
  Like with every test the procedure is key to good results. They might be doing them only to confirm their actions.
dvt 5y ago
> This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé). The Windows design team was always terrible, and not to mention lazy[1]. Don't mean to throw shade on your ex-team, and I'm sure there's dozens of brilliant people working there, but the design has been an absolute dumpster fire for decades. And this comes from an almost exclusive Windows power user. (I just recently bought my first ever Mac laptop). [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_windows_10_still_uses_a_window_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_...
- Arainach 5y ago
  To each their own. Linux DMs (including KDE, Gnome, and many others) are still way behind in basic UX flows like multimon and snapping windows, and Mac has barely even tried. Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking on alternatives. I use Linux (Gnome 3 these days), OS X, Windows, and Chrome OS on a daily basis and still prefer Windows for my personal devices.
  - pkulak 5y ago
    > Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking. Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    KDE has 95% of the things you've mentioned for at least 5 years, if not longer (I'm using KDE for more than a decade, so I don't remember exact dates). I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28/ https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28/
cjbgkagh 5y ago
UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that I liked, it just needed a search function to quickly refine the buttons. That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well thought out. UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up. Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them. I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.
- jbay808 5y ago
  > That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. That's a fascinating dynamic. We can't make our product better, because that would suggest that it isn't already good enough.
- gibolt 5y ago
  I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use. Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan
  - megablast 5y ago
    But drop down menus were still there. I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.
  - zentr1c 5y ago
    Ranting in Gibbons:) Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times. Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity. I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.
lodovic 5y ago
> the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it This was extremely annoying, thank you for standing up for this.
vijucat 5y ago
> Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. How are they allowed to do this? This is awful and goes completely against the "eat your own dog food" philosophy. Separately, I've noticed that developers in general are too deferent to designers, who then get to run amok with shitty ideas. Your pushback is exactly what is needed.
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  Pushback will get you a bad review, smaller bonus, and a performance improvement plan. The company has been too dysfunctional for too long. Fixing it would be like boiling the ocean.
- llampx 5y ago
  Counterpoint: Different competencies. A UX designer telling a developer how to code would be laughed out of the room, the other way around is the same.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Difference being, the software (at least more or less) works; what's annoying people is the usability and consistency of the UI[1]. Designers deserve to be laughed out of the room; developers don't. ___ [1]: Until they get their shit in order, designers can kiss my ass for their pretentious "UX" claptrap. The actual experience is only max-half interface, min-half functionality. Where the latter is provided by lowly coders.
  - Arainach 5y ago
    To design the core UX for a system, you should understand its userbase. If you're stuck in a paradigm where there are documents instead of applications, where closing things doesn't terminate them, and where the default switching hotkey doesn't allow you to switch between windows of the same application, it affects how you perceive the whole system and puts you at odds with your user base.
  - vijucat 5y ago
laurent92 5y ago
Funny that Windows gets forced simplicity, Apple goes the opposite, more gestures and hot corners which means that there is no place to move the mouse that will not produce an effect. On iOS, the fact that the Home Button brought you back home every time was a selling point, so when you are in the sun, you click once and you know where you are. Then they introduced the 2-click on Home for the Control Center, 3-click, 4-click and now, it’s a cycle, so you never are home. Same for the swipe up to bring the control center, which you always have to do twice because the first scroll up generally brings the local app’s own swipe gesture. Apple became a model of stuffing the maximum of gestures, while Windows went the way of the simplicity. I can’t wait the day when Satya Nadella says “The problem with Apple guys is, they have no taste”…
- evilduck 5y ago
  It's not really evident you've actually held an iPhone or operated a Mac based on how strangely off your complaints are. Gesture and hot corner features and complexity hasn't really changed in over a decade. Getting to the home screen on any iOS device is still just one click or swipe and has never necessitated multiple clicks or allowed apps to override the OS level gestures.
zakius 5y ago
I want taskbar, not a dock, I also want it improved to disable grouping (who even thought that it was a good idea to be unable to put buttons in the order you want?) I want start screen (yes, I actively used full screen and yes, I made use of tiles grouping) and I want to get rid of all these attention stealing animations, all these readability degrading blurs, pre-neon 10 was great, why break it?
- bobby1234 5y ago
  I agree. I also have the taskbar on the side of the screen, so there is absolutely no chance of me going to W11. (That and their TPM2.0 insistance for DRM purposes) Hopefully by the time W10 is EOL there will be a Proton/Linux alternative for gaming, combined with all the malware some games require installed to work.
- soco 5y ago
  To replace W11 taskbar joke I installed StartAllBack - after 30 days you must pay about a coffee and it's all back and even better. Yes I'm fanboying. https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/
okl 5y ago
Thank you for your effort & for fighting for the users.
pmontra 5y ago
> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. [...] the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook [...] This is crazy. Essentially you get no product memory and no incentive at designing a good product because the designers won't experience the negative effects of their actions. If this is by design, tell me what Microsoft management wants Windows to go to. A saner dynamic would be Build this please I built it, use it for a couple of weeks OK it's shit let's try this other one.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I think the problem is that there is no one product evangelist at the helm saying, this is where we are, this is where we are going to go, we are going to solve these problems along the way, and we will have these metrics to tell us where we are. Instead its every crab for themselves and the bucket is overflowing.
MattPalmer1086 5y ago
Omg, the white title bars! I literally can't tell where the title bar is sometimes if there's several windows overlapping.
cerfirm 5y ago
You just pinpointed my biggest issue right now with windows. Found 8 or 9 different titlebars on my normally opened windows that have very little visual differences between active an inactive state and furthermore often no visual difference between window and titlebar. It feels like I more often than not click outside of intended window and also start to type with the wrong window active.
- bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
  Right-click on Desktop -> Personalize Colors -> scroll down to 'Choose your accent color' click a nice colour from the 'windows 'colors' tile. Scroll down to: 'show accent color on the following surfaces' click tickbox 'Title bars and window borders' The homogeneous madness then starts to dissipate a bit...
  - alushta 5y ago
hparadiz 5y ago
For the longest time I would fight with Windows to get a plain black task bar and active window title bar. And I mean #000000 as in fully black with white text. In Windows 7 you could kind of trick it into doing it with registry alone but after that I always had to do uxtheme.dll hacks to get it to work. Then one day I just stopped and started using Linux on my desktop and MacOS on my laptop. Whatever game MS thinks it's playing ... they are losing market share now in both business and education. All they really have left is DRM heavy gaming.
- speed_spread 5y ago
  > DRM heavy gaming. As someone who's now playing League of Legends from his Linux desktop, even that is going away.
  - minimouse 5y ago
    Microsoft has a lot of gaming IP that they'll only release games for on Xbox and Windows. They'll likely try using DRM and anti-cheat to avoid the likes of WINE or maybe they won't even feel the need to. It's just more effort for users anyway. And Riot Games has VALORANT. DRM heavy gaming is not going away but only just beginning. Off topic, but Microsoft can even bypass Steam and use their own (terrible) Microsoft Store and Xbox apps on Windows as they have hard to resist exclusive content. Just like Epic Games did with their store. Platforms, not services!
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  > All they really have left is DRM heavy gaming. AFAIK, it's not the DRM that's a problem, it's anti-cheat. Cheat software needs to evade detection of both its install and execution, and anti-cheat has to be able to detect those. I imagine writing API emulation that works with anti-cheat is pretty difficult. Now I'm curious about how anti-cheat could work in a Linux environment. Cheat software likely doesn't need root to benefit the player, but it will certainly need to run as root to avoid detection from the anti-cheat software which will definitely run as root. Of course, Linux gamers are probably going to raise an eyebrow about a game component wanting root permissions, but how else are you going to detect cheats?
bener 5y ago
I just want to say thanks, this is why I love HN. I'm a fairly new user, and the amount of "inside people" that show up in threads really blows my mind.
wolpoli 5y ago
> things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update) Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars, so it must have gone white in Windows 10. I do wish we have a way to get back colored title bars, since I find myself confused about what Window is active in a multi-monitor world.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars Depends on exactly which window, doesn't it? For example, the main Outlook window on my work Windows 10 PC has a blue title bar, but the pop-up-and-hover appointment reminder's is white. Don't think I ever used Outlook on Win 8, but I could well imagine it was the same. And so on for a lot of other apps.
dghughes 5y ago
Whoever decided to implement the mouse-over thumbnail preview for open apps on Taskbar needs to a whack to the head with a rolled up newspaper. It's incredibly aggravating having all these small windows popup when you're busy. Most times I end up clicking on something I didn't want just because the mouse cursor got near the Taskbar.
- minimouse 5y ago
  It gets even worse in Windows 11. I love the example of the Task View to show that they really don't use their own darn things. Since 2018 it has been incredibly buggy. Reproducibly even.
fuzzfactor 5y ago
>The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward Hmm, somebody noticed.
apostacy 5y ago
This is because of the toxic effect of economics and marketing. Everything has to be centered on making the platform more money. Even in cases where it makes no sense to do so! I've seen open source projects embrace market driven design methodologies, because they mistakenly think it matters. There are so many designers and developers who have only worked at startups, and dark patterns have become baked into our development culture. Mostly this attitude that you need to manipulate the experience of the user, and disregard any feedback from them, because you are the expert, and they don't know what they really want. That's what Steve Jobs said, and he was a success, right? So you should do that also.

GuB-42 5y ago

> Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. What happened to the culture of "dogfooding" that supposedly was a big thing at Microsoft, and often pointed as a contributing factor to its success?

idiocrat 5y ago

Can somebody forward this feedback to Mr. Bill Gates? Not sure if he cares that his legacy goes down the corporate drain, becoming a failure.

aahortwwy 5y ago

> essentially none of the designers use Windows This is ridiculous.

Spivak 5y ago
I mean why would someone who cares anything at all about how software looks even glance at Windows if they had any choice? Imagine taking someone who is so passionate about UX that they made a career out of it, making them use their worst nightmare as their daily driver, and then giving them zero institutional power to fix any of it because of the n-dev years problem. Windows, while extremely powerful and stable because of the commitment to not breaking things, is basically unfixable UI wise unless “forward” means going backward. There’s too much to rewrite and not enough value gained by it. So every iteration will be piling on even more inconsistencies and shifting around the “easy stuff” because that’s all you can do. You just have to embrace that Windows is 50 years of UX trends all coexisting.
- ishtanbul 5y ago
  As an office power user i like the UI of windows 10. 11 sucks tho
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    Going from 7 to 10 was like being a juggler who was used to juggling 3 apples suddenly having to juggle oranges. A little different but basically the same. Going from 10 to 11 is like being a juggler going from juggling oranges to being punched in the face for the entertainment of 10 year old boys. Have you tried using an app other than photos to view images? How about being forced to manually set every single extensions default opener? Oh, did you expect to be able to right click on the taskbar? Screw you! Have a kick to the groin instead! That's what you get for thinking that this version of windows would operate anything like any other version of windows, you poor, pathetic worthless mineable data source! Now shut up and answer this survey about how much you like Windows 11!
- aahortwwy 5y ago

causi 5y ago

I knew the Windows UX was dead the moment I tried to type a search into the Start menu and drag a program off the results onto the desktop to create a shortcut and it didn't work, and then when I went to right click on it "Send to Desktop (Create Shortcut)" was gone too.

digisign 5y ago
In XP you had to revert to classic desktop to turn off the Fisher-Price.
- causi 5y ago
  Not that bad aesthetics aren't a problem, but I think loss of basic functionality is a bigger issue.
- oblio 5y ago
  Meh, Fisher-Price was cute. I've never understood the fascination for those drab Windows 3.11 grays. And Fischer-Price was also functional, you just got extra colors.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    Windows 3.x by default had colourful (yellow) borders and white backgrounds (except maybe the "main container" window in MDI apps; was that perhaps gray? Or teal?). The grey came with W95. Both were fully user-configurable via a quite user-friendly dialogue box, as were NT 3.x, NT4, and W2K. Can't recall whether XP, Vista, and 7 also allowed you to change colours directly -- if it was only the "Fisher-Price", "Glass", and, uh, "Glass 2?" that were locked-in in the standard UI setting -- or if you needed to switch to "Windows Classic", the 95--W2K-style UI, to change even the colours. Can't recall, because I of course switched to Classic first thing I did on any of those. That all went away with Windows 8, of course, and AFAIK didn't come back on 10 either. Actually, they'd started to sabotage it a little earlier: About halfway into the lifecycle of W7, you couldn't change the window border width in the dialogue any more; you needed to hack that value in the Registry (and re-hack it after any change via the dialogue box). And towards the very end, even that hack didn't do anything any more.

mcswell 5y ago

"title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart": Win10 (and iirc Win 7, I never had Win8) are a mix-and-match. FreeCommander XE (the file manager I use) and Thunderbird both have title bars that change color, and Vivaldi allows it (although the contrast is not as great as I prefer). But none of the MsOffice apps do. I think there's some kind of subtle change they do, maybe a 1 pixel wide border or something that shows up when they have keyboard focus, but I honestly can't tell. As a result, I not infrequently type into (or worse, delete something) from the wrong window. Also, the title bars on MsOffice apps are so cluttered with controls that you can hardly find a safe place to click on them if you want to select that app with your mouse. Why, for example, is the search bar in Outlook up there, instead of some pop-up dialog box? (And the Outlook and Word search tools themselves are a mess, but I digress...)

Mavvie 5y ago
To your last paragraph, my favourite thing about Mac is how if you click a window that doesn't have focus, the click ONLY makes the window focused. If you clicked on a button, it doesn't actually click the button. A similar thing is what happens when you touch a phone when it dims right before sleeping. Some OSes only let the touch restore brightness, while others will do that AND register a tap wherever you touched. Super annoying IMO.
- aqfamnzc 5y ago
  I think I it would bother me to have to click twice when working back and forth between two windows. Maybe another approach could be to only register the click action if there is no overlap? Then again, the inconsistency would probably be frustrating with that approach.
  - dijit 5y ago
    Fun to see this come up because it is one of my biggest annoyances when switching between MacOS and Linux. I have focus follows mouse on Linux so it might be an exaggerated problem, but it’s annoying to click a text box and it not actually select the text box. There is an option in yabai for focus follows mouse, but I had to disable yabai because it’s really awkward and perceptibly slow on macos.

kcb 5y ago

Microsoft shouldn't even have MacBooks available unless specifically for the minority developing for Apple platforms. It's just a concession of defeat otherwise.

lopatin 5y ago
For devs I think it matters less. But, yeah, for designers on the _Windows Desktop Experience Team_ to not be using their own product for day to day work is absurd to me. It sounds like a joke: "The people who designed this shitty feature don't even use it themselves", but alas, it appears to be the truth.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Why would you even hire designers that don't use Windows as their daily OS? It's not even a question of making designers use your software, but you could just hire people who do. Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based.
  - chelical 5y ago
    I'm not sure this is true. Anecdotally, across three Fortune 500 tech companies I've worked at, designers / web devs / program managers had Macbooks (or had the option of choosing Macbooks) even when the team was developing primarily in Windows.
  - gabeio 5y ago
    > Globally you probably have to go out of your way to hire a designer that wasn't Windows based. That, likely, highly depends on your industry. Designers doing mobile application design, as well as web design from my limited experience tend to steer towards Macs. Even within my college the entire graphics design department was Macs. Of course if you are working on a Windows based product you'd in theory expect the designers to use or be familiar enough with Windows but you may be surprised. I'd be curious to know if there are regional (country) differences in this.

kristopolous 5y ago

How did the designers become absolute dictators? I've dealt with this at a few companies and it's really crazy. I've seen them tank products more than once because they ignore everyone and are given unquestionable power. It's absurd. They have as much capacity to be wrong as anybody else

megablast 5y ago
Who should override the experts in design.
- rvba 5y ago
  Management
- Wildgoose 5y ago
  Users. They are the ones providing the money that pays for their employment. "Expert" User Design is design that is recognised as such and accepted by Users. If Users reject these designs then they can't claim to be "experts".
  - kevincox 5y ago
    Any high quality design team should be regularly interacting with users. They should be during users studies, with both the shipping products and mocks of new features. And design team that thinks they can make changes and new features just by sketching in their notebook is mistaken and ineffective. You can't have every user inputting on each change so the design team needs to be the voice of the user. They are talking to users anyways.
fendy3002 5y ago
Maybe same with usual companies, higher ups don't really get ux / functionality, and are moved purely by looks. "Because many users are appraising apple's looks, by cloning apple we'll also get praised by our users right?" "Then we can get Apple users to use windows too!"

andromeduck 5y ago

Yeah I've met two Metro/Modern designers during my internship at MS and both used MacBooks. One of them do most of his work in parallels.

hulitu 5y ago
That explaines some long lasting bugs on real hardware like single clicks registered as double clicks.

kebman 5y ago

> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows Why are they allowed to work on Windows? Even car salesmen are often required to drive the same car as the one they're selling.

hparadiz 5y ago
I honestly don't get how this is even a problem. My best friend is a UX/UI designer who works on Mac but the guy also games and used to do crypto mining back in 2013 so he is very familiar with Windows as well. Why is Microsoft having problems finding designers that use and know both?
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  It's a problem for so many reasons it's not even funny, from the mundane to the esoteric-but-important! A random example: Macs these days use screens with a brightness response Gamma curve of 1.8 and PCs use 2.2. Macs use a color gamut of DisplayP3 by default now, which has different color primaries than the PC sRGB standard. Why does this matter? Because two shades that are easily distinguishable when physically viewed on a Mac may not be easily distinguishable on PC! Colors wills shift, and even 50% grey is represented differently. The same JPG or PNG file from a design will look different on a PC even if it has an identical monitor as a Mac! Similarly, font weight, anti-aliasing, and kerning are very different on the two platforms. Any text design done on one has to be adapted for the other. It's not just the default fonts! The same font at the same size will look very visibly different. Did I mention default fonts? Only Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier are common between the two platforms. All of those are physically different fonts that look different even if transported to the other platform. Etc, etc, etc...
  - pbalau 5y ago
    This is an interesting reply, but very much off topic. The GP asked, and I quote: > Why is Microsoft having problems finding designers that use and know both? and you totally failed to answer that.

rk06 5y ago

> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. That explains a lot. Not having the designers dogfood their work is serious oversight As an MSFT employee, I have no choice but to use win 11. And suffer from taskbar annoyance and bugs

niuzeta 5y ago
In a same boat. I must have filed hundreds of internal feedback & bug reports to see none of them addressed. Nowadays I remember to double click the right-click context menu, because right-click + V doesn't open a file on a gvim anymore...
- rk06 5y ago
  I had used some registry hacks to disable the new context menu. And now have installed explorer patch (mentioned in article and this thread) to fix other issues. You should give it a shot!
userbinator 5y ago
As an MSFT employee, you also have a better chance of getting things fixed. If everyone there (except the designers) complains, maybe the management might listen?
- Arainach 5y ago
  You'd think that, but as an internal employee "you're not our target demographic". Not that this is exclusive to Microsoft. Every large company I've worked for has had some variation of that phrase.
  - 8note 5y ago
    Seems weird you'd be forced to use an OS not designed to be used for your usecase

anigbrowl 5y ago

I love good design, but designers are also able to completely ruin things in short order. I've been using Windows for 30 years as my primary desktop but in the last 6 months I'm increasingly ready to abandon it and just switch to Linux, even though I'd miss a lot of small things.

pwr-electronics 5y ago

Does that mean they're not doing usability studies anymore?

hulitu 5y ago
Like with every test the procedure is key to good results. They might be doing them only to confirm their actions.

dvt 5y ago

> This has been the case for a while. I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. The idea that designers circa Win7 "ruined" windows UX/UI is just revisionist history. Windows has had pretty terrible UI/UX basically forever, and most Linux folks have known this since the early 90s, where KDE, GNOME, etc. were vastly superior to anything Microsoft was putting out. In fact, most ideas you see in MacOS these days can find their roots in early (and often experimental) Linux interfaces (from multiple desktops, to launchers, to Exposé). The Windows design team was always terrible, and not to mention lazy[1]. Don't mean to throw shade on your ex-team, and I'm sure there's dozens of brilliant people working there, but the design has been an absolute dumpster fire for decades. And this comes from an almost exclusive Windows power user. (I just recently bought my first ever Mac laptop). [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_windows_10_still_uses_a_window_from/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/grhjuu/til_that_...

Arainach 5y ago
To each their own. Linux DMs (including KDE, Gnome, and many others) are still way behind in basic UX flows like multimon and snapping windows, and Mac has barely even tried. Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking on alternatives. I use Linux (Gnome 3 these days), OS X, Windows, and Chrome OS on a daily basis and still prefer Windows for my personal devices.
- pkulak 5y ago
  > Keyboard shortcuts for moving windows between monitors, snapping, launching pinned apps, etc. are also sorely lacking. Allow me to show you this tiling window manager…
- bayindirh 5y ago
  KDE has 95% of the things you've mentioned for at least 5 years, if not longer (I'm using KDE for more than a decade, so I don't remember exact dates). I clearly remember that when Windows introduced auto-snapping/auto-scaling windows, I looked and giggled as yet another KDE feature made its way to one of the "bigger" environments.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28/ https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/28/

cjbgkagh 5y ago

UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that I liked, it just needed a search function to quickly refine the buttons. That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well thought out. UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up. Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them. I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.

jbay808 5y ago
> That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. That's a fascinating dynamic. We can't make our product better, because that would suggest that it isn't already good enough.
gibolt 5y ago
I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use. Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan
- megablast 5y ago
  But drop down menus were still there. I thought the ribbon was great, but obviously you had to get used to it.
- zentr1c 5y ago
  Ranting in Gibbons:) Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality. In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can. However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times. Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity. I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it's not in the cloud! It's in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn't exist.

lodovic 5y ago

> the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it This was extremely annoying, thank you for standing up for this.

vijucat 5y ago

> Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10. Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. How are they allowed to do this? This is awful and goes completely against the "eat your own dog food" philosophy. Separately, I've noticed that developers in general are too deferent to designers, who then get to run amok with shitty ideas. Your pushback is exactly what is needed.

cjbgkagh 5y ago
Pushback will get you a bad review, smaller bonus, and a performance improvement plan. The company has been too dysfunctional for too long. Fixing it would be like boiling the ocean.
llampx 5y ago
Counterpoint: Different competencies. A UX designer telling a developer how to code would be laughed out of the room, the other way around is the same.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  Difference being, the software (at least more or less) works; what's annoying people is the usability and consistency of the UI[1]. Designers deserve to be laughed out of the room; developers don't. ___ [1]: Until they get their shit in order, designers can kiss my ass for their pretentious "UX" claptrap. The actual experience is only max-half interface, min-half functionality. Where the latter is provided by lowly coders.
- Arainach 5y ago
  To design the core UX for a system, you should understand its userbase. If you're stuck in a paradigm where there are documents instead of applications, where closing things doesn't terminate them, and where the default switching hotkey doesn't allow you to switch between windows of the same application, it affects how you perceive the whole system and puts you at odds with your user base.
- vijucat 5y ago

laurent92 5y ago

Funny that Windows gets forced simplicity, Apple goes the opposite, more gestures and hot corners which means that there is no place to move the mouse that will not produce an effect. On iOS, the fact that the Home Button brought you back home every time was a selling point, so when you are in the sun, you click once and you know where you are. Then they introduced the 2-click on Home for the Control Center, 3-click, 4-click and now, it’s a cycle, so you never are home. Same for the swipe up to bring the control center, which you always have to do twice because the first scroll up generally brings the local app’s own swipe gesture. Apple became a model of stuffing the maximum of gestures, while Windows went the way of the simplicity. I can’t wait the day when Satya Nadella says “The problem with Apple guys is, they have no taste”…

evilduck 5y ago
It's not really evident you've actually held an iPhone or operated a Mac based on how strangely off your complaints are. Gesture and hot corner features and complexity hasn't really changed in over a decade. Getting to the home screen on any iOS device is still just one click or swipe and has never necessitated multiple clicks or allowed apps to override the OS level gestures.

zakius 5y ago

I want taskbar, not a dock, I also want it improved to disable grouping (who even thought that it was a good idea to be unable to put buttons in the order you want?) I want start screen (yes, I actively used full screen and yes, I made use of tiles grouping) and I want to get rid of all these attention stealing animations, all these readability degrading blurs, pre-neon 10 was great, why break it?

bobby1234 5y ago
I agree. I also have the taskbar on the side of the screen, so there is absolutely no chance of me going to W11. (That and their TPM2.0 insistance for DRM purposes) Hopefully by the time W10 is EOL there will be a Proton/Linux alternative for gaming, combined with all the malware some games require installed to work.
soco 5y ago
To replace W11 taskbar joke I installed StartAllBack - after 30 days you must pay about a coffee and it's all back and even better. Yes I'm fanboying. https://www.startallback.com/ https://www.startallback.com/

okl 5y ago

Thank you for your effort & for fighting for the users.

pmontra 5y ago

> most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows. [...] the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook [...] This is crazy. Essentially you get no product memory and no incentive at designing a good product because the designers won't experience the negative effects of their actions. If this is by design, tell me what Microsoft management wants Windows to go to. A saner dynamic would be Build this please I built it, use it for a couple of weeks OK it's shit let's try this other one.

BizarroLand 5y ago
I think the problem is that there is no one product evangelist at the helm saying, this is where we are, this is where we are going to go, we are going to solve these problems along the way, and we will have these metrics to tell us where we are. Instead its every crab for themselves and the bucket is overflowing.

MattPalmer1086 5y ago

Omg, the white title bars! I literally can't tell where the title bar is sometimes if there's several windows overlapping.

cerfirm 5y ago

You just pinpointed my biggest issue right now with windows. Found 8 or 9 different titlebars on my normally opened windows that have very little visual differences between active an inactive state and furthermore often no visual difference between window and titlebar. It feels like I more often than not click outside of intended window and also start to type with the wrong window active.

bigbizisverywyz 5y ago
Right-click on Desktop -> Personalize Colors -> scroll down to 'Choose your accent color' click a nice colour from the 'windows 'colors' tile. Scroll down to: 'show accent color on the following surfaces' click tickbox 'Title bars and window borders' The homogeneous madness then starts to dissipate a bit...
- alushta 5y ago

hparadiz 5y ago

For the longest time I would fight with Windows to get a plain black task bar and active window title bar. And I mean #000000 as in fully black with white text. In Windows 7 you could kind of trick it into doing it with registry alone but after that I always had to do uxtheme.dll hacks to get it to work. Then one day I just stopped and started using Linux on my desktop and MacOS on my laptop. Whatever game MS thinks it's playing ... they are losing market share now in both business and education. All they really have left is DRM heavy gaming.

speed_spread 5y ago
> DRM heavy gaming. As someone who's now playing League of Legends from his Linux desktop, even that is going away.
- minimouse 5y ago
  Microsoft has a lot of gaming IP that they'll only release games for on Xbox and Windows. They'll likely try using DRM and anti-cheat to avoid the likes of WINE or maybe they won't even feel the need to. It's just more effort for users anyway. And Riot Games has VALORANT. DRM heavy gaming is not going away but only just beginning. Off topic, but Microsoft can even bypass Steam and use their own (terrible) Microsoft Store and Xbox apps on Windows as they have hard to resist exclusive content. Just like Epic Games did with their store. Platforms, not services!
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
> All they really have left is DRM heavy gaming. AFAIK, it's not the DRM that's a problem, it's anti-cheat. Cheat software needs to evade detection of both its install and execution, and anti-cheat has to be able to detect those. I imagine writing API emulation that works with anti-cheat is pretty difficult. Now I'm curious about how anti-cheat could work in a Linux environment. Cheat software likely doesn't need root to benefit the player, but it will certainly need to run as root to avoid detection from the anti-cheat software which will definitely run as root. Of course, Linux gamers are probably going to raise an eyebrow about a game component wanting root permissions, but how else are you going to detect cheats?

bener 5y ago

I just want to say thanks, this is why I love HN. I'm a fairly new user, and the amount of "inside people" that show up in threads really blows my mind.

wolpoli 5y ago

> things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8? Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update) Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars, so it must have gone white in Windows 10. I do wish we have a way to get back colored title bars, since I find myself confused about what Window is active in a multi-monitor world.

CRConrad 5y ago
> Images online show that Windows 8 still had colored title bars Depends on exactly which window, doesn't it? For example, the main Outlook window on my work Windows 10 PC has a blue title bar, but the pop-up-and-hover appointment reminder's is white. Don't think I ever used Outlook on Win 8, but I could well imagine it was the same. And so on for a lot of other apps.

dghughes 5y ago

Whoever decided to implement the mouse-over thumbnail preview for open apps on Taskbar needs to a whack to the head with a rolled up newspaper. It's incredibly aggravating having all these small windows popup when you're busy. Most times I end up clicking on something I didn't want just because the mouse cursor got near the Taskbar.

minimouse 5y ago
It gets even worse in Windows 11. I love the example of the Task View to show that they really don't use their own darn things. Since 2018 it has been incredibly buggy. Reproducibly even.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

>The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward Hmm, somebody noticed.

apostacy 5y ago

This is because of the toxic effect of economics and marketing. Everything has to be centered on making the platform more money. Even in cases where it makes no sense to do so! I've seen open source projects embrace market driven design methodologies, because they mistakenly think it matters. There are so many designers and developers who have only worked at startups, and dark patterns have become baked into our development culture. Mostly this attitude that you need to manipulate the experience of the user, and disregard any feedback from them, because you are the expert, and they don't know what they really want. That's what Steve Jobs said, and he was a success, right? So you should do that also.