UI redesigns of desktop operating systems are usually opposite of exciting these days. You could be damn sure they'll further optimize it for touchscreens no one uses.
Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well. The best thing you could do is revert most of the last 10 years of "innovation" and then leave them alone forever. Stop reinventing stuff that has worked well for decades.
Ironically today I tried to pair a Bluetooth device on my wife's Surface Pro 4 and I told her to hit the Windows key and start typing Bluetooth and then select the result for managing bluetooth devices. She opened it up and we were unable to add the Bluetooth device no matter what we did. It was the most frustrating experience I had in months (I am a macOS and Linux user). Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows. One had the old school look, the other had some modern oversized bullshit look. Turns out one of those two worked, the other didn't. Windows search returned the non working one first. In the taskbar was a Bluetooth icon to the other one. WTAF?
Honestly, fuck Windows for being such an utter pile of shit.
They don't need a UI re-design. They need a fucking working operating system.
Later I discovered that there is an entire different Bluetooth managing app on Windows.
Oh, see, I thought this was going to end differently. Like how you typed in "Bluetooth settings" and Windows decided to bring up a web page with instructions on how to change the Bluetooth settings on Windows 10, instead of showing the g-ddamned applet.
Because that's how it seems to work on my machine most of the time.
WIN+"calc" opened up a Bing search for the term "calc" inside of Edge for me the other day. I imagine in a few more years that will actually be the expected behavior.
I was expecting that the application wouldn't appear at all, whatever they tried.
The number of common failure modes on the main interaction the Windows DE supports (that is opening the start menu and launching a program) is just incredible.
Surely MS could look at their telemetry data they collect on absolutely everything and tell what people are disabling or otherwise modifying. The default of course will be "person does nothing" because most people have an adversarial relationship with their technology -- it must do what they want or they work around / cease to use it.
What Microsoft should be doing with this "Windows is back" initiative is comprehensively rethinking everything below the launcher and window management level. The visual presentation could follow the very same "fluent" system or whatever it is Microsoft is calling its current design language, but all the stuff from Control Panel to mounting network shares would be harmonized with the same UI metaphors and mental models.
What Microsoft almost certainly will do is yet another pass at launchers and window widgets, leaving its three-decades-deep sediment of system functionality largely untouched.
Couldn't agree more. The pragmatist in me would rather MS understand that people don't want quarter inch drills, they want quarter inch holes, and yet another part of me wonders how they could freshen up the UI. But what I want more than anything else is consistency. Either is fine, but both aren't.
The Control Panel in "small icons" or "large icons" viewing mode defaults to organizing the contents into columns. That's OK, that's pretty easy to read through.
The contents are also in alphabetical order. That's good, too, it's something the user is likely to expect.
Within the columns, the contents are not organized alphabetically! Instead the alphabetical ordering completely ignores the very clear column structure. Who does this?!
If you’re interested, look up “God Mode” it’s a shortcut that can be created which gives you access to a complete control panel which covers everything.
It seems that God isn't omnipotent. God mode still doesn't allow me to tell my machine that I want to open .jpeg files with the Adobe Photoshop installed on my machine (like I can with .jpg) and not Photoshop Elements available through the Microsoft store). There is no option to search my file system for an arbitrary .exe.
This was somewhat forgivable when Windows 10 came out, you can't do everything at once. But they seem to have completely stopped working on it 5 years ago.
Desktop UIs are hardly mature, but for the last 15 years UI innovation has been about putting lipstick on a pig rather than deep-diving subsystems and figuring out how to graphically represent and control them.
Designers aren't doing subsystem deep-dives, they're just implementing subsets of existing wholly inadequate GUIs using new widgets. Conversely, systems people who understand the un-GUIed subsystems aren't doing design work to better expose them, or expose them at all. It's an unproductive and frustrating stalemate.
Desktop UIs are mature, and were such by the end of '00s, in the sense that they've made the best use of the keyboard and mouse. Sure, it's okay to add subtle new things, like window snapping on Windows (the thing where you drag it to the edge of the screen) or inertial scrolling on macOS. It's absolutely not okay to take a perfectly functional and polished UI and "refresh" it with disproportional controls and huge fonts because people now carry phones in their pockets. The only good reason for a complete UI redesign is change in the way it's interacted with, for example because some novel kind of input device came about. But then again, the mere existence of touchscreens shouldn't be detrimental to the UX of those who use keyboard and mouse.
You're talking about cross-cutting UI concerns (themes, widgets, window system), which I agree are largely mature, while I'm talking about vertical combinations of specific UIs and subsystems, which aren't mature by a long shot.
Example: "delete file" on Windows. Windows has relatively aggressive file locking, but if you try to delete a file that's open, it just errors out, it doesn't tell you what's using the file and give you the option to (force) quit it.
See also: networking, disk management, permissions, sound, preferences, ipc, etc. There are a hundred of these "just needs a bit of work" UI verticals, but designers keep trying to solve these problems with themes and functionality subsets, which are doomed to fail because the underlying issue is a lack of expressiveness in the existing UI, not an excess of it. Meanwhile, systems people live with "just use CLI / sysinternals / wireshark / nmap" like it isn't an issue that bog-standard tasks still require arcane tools in 2020 (arcane by the standards of typical users).
Yeah, in my Windows days, I remember having a lot of small utilities that filled the gaps of the OS. There was one for deleting files too, I don't remember the name, probably unlocker something — it showed you all currently open descriptors for a file and allowed you to close them. As opposed to macOS, which straight up tells you "this file is being used by X.app, close it to try again" when you try to delete an open file.
But this is how it works, which is UX. UI is more about how it looks and how it's interacted with.
They're actually still pretty archaic but no one's cared to do anything about it for decades so we've all been trained to accept the shortcomings. Stuff like background processes grabbing the focus while I'm typing my password, lame modals with an "OK" button, mysterious delays all the time, etc etc etc.
If you mean pixel density, then sure it can be made scalable by using vector graphics or using several different dpi variants of assets. All without changing visual appearance even. Apple managed to do this exact thing in 2012.
> Desktop UIs are hardly mature, but for the last 15 years UI innovation has been about putting lipstick on a pig rather than deep-diving subsystems and figuring out how to graphically represent and control them.
I disagree. To various degrees, the last "15 years of [desktop] UI innovation" have been trying to push trendy touch UI concepts into places where they don't belong.
Windows 7 was their last true desktop UI. What came after was the mobile tax, driven by their lust for appstore margins. We had to gradually claw it back since the Windows 8 disaster, but I'm confident they will never give up.
I agree, windows 7 was doen well and it was a successful os. Following that is the distaster of Win 8 and the irrevocable disaster windows 10 is. There really is no hope to get a better version every other 2 iterations of windows
On the contrary. I think desktop UI design needs lots of improvements. To me the peak was around Windows 7 but that's not "perfect" - it needs more improvements in the same direction. Probably KDE is a small improvement over Windows 7, but of course has some drawbacks by being exclusively on Linux. Still, it's my favorite modern desktop UI.
Windows 10 is much better than Win 7. IMO one reason, desktop search that works. Some may consider the reliance on search a UI failure, but I think it has become the dominant organizational principle. The other being pinned apps to the task bar.
> Some may consider the reliance on search a UI failure
No, it's brilliant, in principle. See: spotlight on Mac OS X.
The problem is that Windows Search just doesn't work. I install apps, it can't find them unless they have a start menu enry. I save documents, it can't find them. It does find plenty of irrelevant websites and spurious results from caches, but it misses files sitting directly in my documents folder. Sometimes it returns a result from a partial name hit but when I accidentally type the next character (correctly!) the hit disappears, and it doesn't come back when I remove the offending correct character. It's a mess.
I used to supplement Windows Search with launchy, but then launchy started bugging out. Now I use keypirinha, which intentionally configures bad defaults to encourage you to learn its config file format. Mega cringe. Once you do, though, it does actually work.
Interesting. I’ve never had a problem with desktop search in Win10. It’s all I use and it finds pretty much everything I try. I wonder if indexing issues can end up with vastly different experiences for users.
...interesting... my experience with Win10 search is the complete opposite, it's so broken that I'm really not sure why there is a search feature in Windows10 in the first place. The only way to "fix it" is to install an alternative start menu (like OpenShell) which has a search box which actually works (somewhat, but better than the default search).
Yes for example the new Snipping Tool. It is so slow when you click the save button. I just expect instant the save dialog, but there is a small time delay.
It just does not feel good. And yes, all Syytem Menus are a mess and what you want is allways somewhere hidden. No wonder you need a good search on your desktop, because without you wouldn't find anything.
Huh? How does it work for you, and how did you get it that way? To me it has been nothing but useless.
To those who are also looking for a better search solution on Windows: download 'Search everything'. It basically lets you grep on the filenames of all files on your machine, using regexp if you want. It's marvellous.
Problem is that it often doesn’t work. I can type in “calc” and get a list of web links instead of the calculator app. The search box in explorer also sometimes finds things and sometimes doesn’t without any rhyme or reason (at least none that I can figure out).
Design is features. The problem is that all designers trip over each other to win the high-visibility low-effort turf of top-level theming, when the work that actually needs to be done involves paying more attention to individual features, where there is actual progress to be made.
the windows 10 search bar is really good for finding local stuff. it's unfortunate that they decided to use it as another vector for pushing bing and edge. if it would allow me to use the search engine and browser of my choice for web results, it could be an extremely powerful feature. it's definitely a value add for me, but it's frustrating to think about how much was left on the table.
The parent was talking about UI, and he's right, the Win7 Aero and its Start Menu are superior to everything since. They could certainly bring back that UI with better internals, including Search.
However, Search Everything is the absolute best search tool for Windows, regardless of version.
Maybe we'll finally get one Settings area again so we don't have stuff like: Search 'mouse' > Click 'Mouse settings' > Don't find any option to change pointer speed > Click the tiny 'Additional mouse options' text > Click 'Pointer Options' > Change the mouse pointer speed.
Yeah I saw that comment too. We had to search for two weeks to find an affordable non Surface touchscreen because it was my 16 years olds preference for school work.
And touchscreen all-in-one desktops. Touchscreen external monitors are not as popular, which is unfortunate since I use them and want higher resolution ones.
Every screen I have is a touch screen. Laptops, all-in-ones, external screens, on Windows and Linux.
I get it, laptops with touchscreens exist, but do people actually use them, or do they buy them because it's hard to find a laptop that doesn't have a touchscreen?
The touch screen UI experience design isn't well thought out.
I never use tablet mode even though I have a few windows detachable devices.
All they need to fix it is to realize that windows isn't a mobile is. And that windows users keep their important stuff in the desktop.
In tablet mode, desktop is hidden and you'd would have to jump through hoops to access it.
It seems windows cannot distinguish between a touch screen tap and a mouse. Because long pressing on desktop randomly shows a touch optimized context menu or the normal one designed for mouse.
> UI redesigns of desktop operating systems are usually opposite of exciting these days. ... Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well.
I couldn't agree more. Your points are exactly why I've remained a happy Linux Mint user for nearly a decade. I don't dread OS or desktop environment updates, precisely because I know my chosen desktop environment will mostly remain the same (if not exactly the same).
The Desktop UI paradigm has definitely matured, and requires only some fine tuning here and there. Mostly with graphics and not design.
What Microsoft really need is a Window strategy. Where is it heading. Its source of revenue in the future. Its longtime programming framework, library, API Strategy etc....
I believe they have WinUI 3.0 now? What happened to WPF, UWP and WinForms? And they are moving all of the Outlook Apps to Electron for cross platform development. [1] And just look at .Net. Have they finally settled on .Net Core now?
May be because I am on Mac so I am confused. It is not Apple are perfect, but looking from the outside either Microsoft doesn't have a clue or they just dont care.
I'm not sure the version where Excel went from desktop app to rendered monster, but if we could roll that back I'd be most grateful. The number of UX issues that generated surely was predictable.
I don’t think Microsoft will make the same mistake again by pursuing a touch UI on the desktop. Windows 8 and the Metro UI was a huge waste of time and effort that really harmed Microsoft.
What I think they are pursuing is how to monetize Windows. They tried it in Windows 10 with some start menu shenanigans, but people hated it and you can find tons of articles about how to hack Windows to get rid of that shit. So this role’s job will be to find a design that supports monetization without pissing off users.
have they considered, you know, charging money for the OS? I would be happy to pay a reasonable yearly subscription fee for a telemetry-free windows install.
I have often wondered when a UI will be 'settled' and won't need to be updated anymore. But then what will the UI designers do? Idle fingers make new designs?
Here's an opinion: desktop UIs are mature. They serve their purpose outstandingly well. The best thing you could do is revert most of the last 10 years of "innovation" and then leave them alone forever. Stop reinventing stuff that has worked well for decades.