Dan Luu Follow У @danluu in Wind cnanges In у wala —2 Designers were handed full control over lick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled. It's almost like some tiny ex

Dan Luu
Follow
У @danluu
in Wind
cnanges In
у wala —2
Designers were handed full control over
lick-looking interface burned out and left
after repeatedly being overruled.
It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows
This has been the case for a while. 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 rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been
tried and failed in usability studies because our users want У, and
Sometimes, the “well, if you really want this it will take dev-years” approach got avoided things for
а 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 that" get promoted, and thase of 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 in a 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 not switching.
at 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 designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well
thought out.
was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who
was adamant that it stay in. 1 had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance remove
it and totally messed It up.
Now the Win11 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 а stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not
expected to happen so soon. 1 still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would
happier than deleting my windows partition for good.