> It feels slightly odd to celebrate [the start menu's] return, as it should never have gone away. I've spent a lot of time looking at Fitt's Law, then asking

> It feels slightly odd to celebrate [the start menu's] return, as it should never have gone away. I've spent a lot of time looking at Fitt's Law, then asking myself why I didn't like the tiled start screen. I mean, maybe a launcher should take over the entire display for the brief moments it's in use. It's not a crazy theory... Yet me and my friends couldn't get into it. After some long discussions, we realized that most of us had a tiny spasm of psychological panic when we hit the Win key, because it looked like all our work was suddenly gone and we entered a new environment. We didn't believe that, of course, but UX is all about subliminal signals the interface sends you faster than you can reason about. Maybe we're weird. But if not, the start screen would have worked if it used a transparency effect or only took up 90% of the screen, as if to tell people, "It's ok, everything you're doing is still here and easy to return to." Or, on the other hand, maybe big usability shifts are just jarring. Only 6% of Windows users use alt+tab. Maybe for this userbase, UX theory goes out the window, it doesn't matter beyond "any change is bad." Regardless of which reason drove the resentment, a resizable start menu that can expand all the way to a screen? That's the most brilliant way to solve all of preferences. If you love Fitt's Law, you can have the screen. If you want to avoid panic, you can have a giant menu. If you scan your desktop while launching or even just fear change, you can have a small menu. Default is somewhere between two and three, unless you're on a tablet where start screens aren't as jarring and make more sense. Everybody wins, and with a stroke of genius: pragmatism without sacrificing the ideals that originally drove the design.