7 ms·

All this engineering effort for what? The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff. Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - wh

All this engineering effort for what? The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff. Part of me is just amazed at how slow large corps are - what does everyone do?? In so many areas the new stuff is not features complete or equivalent after years and years. And the usability is worse. And comically, despite going to a "modern" solution - the whole things runs SLOWER by far than classic settings which was near instant. So both they why for the change and the seeming insanely slow pace of getting the old working (again) on the new and improved are both questions I think. Sounds, printers, mouse, networking, user management and more - I feel like I'm always trying to fight my way back to harder to find classic control panels after trying to do stuff with the improved versions. For larger installs you used to be able to loin to audit mode, customize a profile and make it the default for new users. That was super easy for even non-IT folks to do to get a baseline setup that seemed to cover almost all settings. Now that's gotten "improved" into garbage as well. Instead we are getting UWP apps (mostly garbage) that can be hard to uninstall if provisioned in weird ways to a user.

mrweasel 2y ago
> And the usability is worse. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful. There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.
- da_chicken 2y ago
  There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time. Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
  - Gud 2y ago
    Indeed. Windows 2000 was a great OS.
    - BoredPositron 2y ago
      the best.
  - mystified5016 2y ago
    > it shuts up and gets out of the way God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work. And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code. This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
      - timlatim 2y ago
        I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names). Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS. [1] https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
- deelowe 2y ago
  Oh there's plenty of ux but it's all focused on dark patterns at this point.
- safety1st 2y ago
  You are the product now. They're still doing plenty of research into your behavior, you just aren't the benefactor of it. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users." -Richard Stallman
- everforward 2y ago
  This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface. I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95. I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones. Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
  - 6510 2y ago
    I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory. Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X No we don't like the new Slashdot.
    - mrweasel 2y ago
      > "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
    - keyringlight 2y ago
      In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.
  - 6510 2y ago
    Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses. Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.
fnimick 2y ago
> The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff. This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it. The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.
- timeon 2y ago
  Yeah macOS settings also suffered changes made for iPad users.
  - stuartd 2y ago
    I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years and I may be in a minority of one, but I prefer the new settings. When I use my old Mac with the old settings I find myself thinking “so which image do I need to click to do what I want?” but in the new settings I can find what I need from the text labels.
    - themadturk 2y ago
      I was a Mac user for about six years, went back to Windows through necessity, and returned to Mac four years ago. I don't hate the new Mac System Settings, but for me it's not as intuitive as the old version. Nor is the iPhone/iPad settings app easy to navigate. I don't completely understand the reasoning for the order or grouping of things. Then I realize I have no control over it, shrug my shoulders, and get on with finding and using the options I want.
  - 2snakes 2y ago
    New M5 may have a touch screen.
- practicemaths 2y ago
  I'm not sure I follow. I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint. However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.
throwaheyy 2y ago
Here’s one example of why it takes ages — drivers that grab the window handle of a control panel and hack at it to show custom UI. Old example that specifically addresses the Displays and Printers control panels, but similar hacks probably still exist today. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32703 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32...
akersten 2y ago
The most genuinely bad and frustrating part of the new control panel that made me ask "did literally anyone even test this for 5 minutes" are any of the pages where you have a list of things longer than 6 or 7 items. Like per-app sound device options, or associating a program with a file extension, or even just uninstalling a program. * No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc * List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before * The whole thing is just sloooooww A regression in every sense of the word :( Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.
riffic 2y ago
engineering the appropriate idiom is "development effort" -- engineering as a discipline is not at all applicable here.
- philwelch 2y ago
  Actually, it’s not true engineering unless it’s applied to the problem of siege warfare.
userbinator 2y ago
All this engineering effort for what? So developers who are otherwise incompetent can justify their employment and companies can virtue-signal their identity politics.
- Slyfox33 2y ago
  What...? You guys will take any possible chance you can to whine and cry about minorities having a job wont you?
  - userbinator 2y ago
    These are jobs that don't actually benefit anyone but the one being employed. They have a low bar to entry and thus can be "inclusive". Look at when the steep decline in software quality began, and see what that happens to coincide with.
    - ewoodrich 2y ago
      You could plausibly be referring to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows Vista or Windows ME. Making this strange line of argument just seem idiosyncratic and more about your own feelings on "inclusivity" than objective analysis of software quality.
      - userbinator 2y ago
        ME was a rushed attempt at making DOS-based Windows less DOS-like, while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI. 8 is when the nosedive started and things began getting really dumbed-down as they decided to rewrite huge swaths of previously working functionality and broke much of it in the process. 11 is, according to Microsoft in their official marketing material, "the most inclusively designed version of Windows". They sure are right about that -- they included a bunch of idiots in the design process.
        dmnmnm 2y ago
akira2501 2y ago
When you have no external business to compete with you end up with managers competing internally. They're literally just burning cash trying to look busy and distinguished. Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.

mrweasel 2y ago

> And the usability is worse. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful. There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.

da_chicken 2y ago
There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time. Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
- Gud 2y ago
  Indeed. Windows 2000 was a great OS.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    the best.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  > it shuts up and gets out of the way God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work. And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code. This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
    - timlatim 2y ago
      I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names). Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS. [1] https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
deelowe 2y ago
Oh there's plenty of ux but it's all focused on dark patterns at this point.
safety1st 2y ago
You are the product now. They're still doing plenty of research into your behavior, you just aren't the benefactor of it. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users." -Richard Stallman
everforward 2y ago
This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface. I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95. I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones. Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
- 6510 2y ago
  I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory. Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X No we don't like the new Slashdot.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    > "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.
philwelch 2y ago
Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.
- 6510 2y ago
  Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses. Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.

fnimick 2y ago

> The new settings stuff is materially worse than the old stuff. This depends on who your audience is, and I'm shocked by this community not seeing it. The new settings are far more intuitive for non-experience users who are more comfortable with an iPad than a traditional computer. That's where the market is. The enthusiast demographic who actually understands what the settings mean and how the machine works is minuscule.

timeon 2y ago
Yeah macOS settings also suffered changes made for iPad users.
- stuartd 2y ago
  I’ve been a Mac user for more than 20 years and I may be in a minority of one, but I prefer the new settings. When I use my old Mac with the old settings I find myself thinking “so which image do I need to click to do what I want?” but in the new settings I can find what I need from the text labels.
  - themadturk 2y ago
    I was a Mac user for about six years, went back to Windows through necessity, and returned to Mac four years ago. I don't hate the new Mac System Settings, but for me it's not as intuitive as the old version. Nor is the iPhone/iPad settings app easy to navigate. I don't completely understand the reasoning for the order or grouping of things. Then I realize I have no control over it, shrug my shoulders, and get on with finding and using the options I want.
- 2snakes 2y ago
  New M5 may have a touch screen.
practicemaths 2y ago
I'm not sure I follow. I understand your point from a purely aesthetic standpoint. However the second that a commonly needed setting is required you're going a layer "deeper" (it's not because before it was at the first level) and that aesthetic is broken. I doubt the iPad first crowd is going to really intuit that.

throwaheyy 2y ago

Here’s one example of why it takes ages — drivers that grab the window handle of a control panel and hack at it to show custom UI. Old example that specifically addresses the Displays and Printers control panels, but similar hacks probably still exist today. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32703 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060410-17/?p=32...

akersten 2y ago

The most genuinely bad and frustrating part of the new control panel that made me ask "did literally anyone even test this for 5 minutes" are any of the pages where you have a list of things longer than 6 or 7 items. Like per-app sound device options, or associating a program with a file extension, or even just uninstalling a program. * No way to search or filter the list, or jump to the extension I want (PDF), let me first scroll past .3gp, etc * List items are comically large, it must be like 10% of the information density from before * The whole thing is just sloooooww A regression in every sense of the word :( Not to mention all the things that are straight up missing from the new control panel, like all the right-click options currently available in the Audio Devices dialog.

riffic 2y ago

engineering the appropriate idiom is "development effort" -- engineering as a discipline is not at all applicable here.

philwelch 2y ago
Actually, it’s not true engineering unless it’s applied to the problem of siege warfare.

userbinator 2y ago

All this engineering effort for what? So developers who are otherwise incompetent can justify their employment and companies can virtue-signal their identity politics.

Slyfox33 2y ago
What...? You guys will take any possible chance you can to whine and cry about minorities having a job wont you?
- userbinator 2y ago
  These are jobs that don't actually benefit anyone but the one being employed. They have a low bar to entry and thus can be "inclusive". Look at when the steep decline in software quality began, and see what that happens to coincide with.
  - ewoodrich 2y ago
    You could plausibly be referring to Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, Windows Vista or Windows ME. Making this strange line of argument just seem idiosyncratic and more about your own feelings on "inclusivity" than objective analysis of software quality.
    - userbinator 2y ago
      ME was a rushed attempt at making DOS-based Windows less DOS-like, while Vista was perhaps too extravagant in its UI. 8 is when the nosedive started and things began getting really dumbed-down as they decided to rewrite huge swaths of previously working functionality and broke much of it in the process. 11 is, according to Microsoft in their official marketing material, "the most inclusively designed version of Windows". They sure are right about that -- they included a bunch of idiots in the design process.
      - dmnmnm 2y ago

akira2501 2y ago

When you have no external business to compete with you end up with managers competing internally. They're literally just burning cash trying to look busy and distinguished. Anyways.. watch any Microsoft "vision of the future" video from 1990 and it's basically just Teams. It took them 30 years to fully establish the steaming pile of bizarre Share Point plugins that is Teams.