Comment by akersten
4 years ago
I like the Run dialog and the folder properties menu and others that have been untouched since the early days. Their utility has been proven and so much muscle memory has been built up. I can not possibly imagine a revision that could be done to them that would have more benefits than simply leaving them be.
All of the Fluent/Metro designs have made things markedly worse. For example, check out the Metro control panel widget for selecting a default program for a file extension. It's a list view with 5 file extensions visible at a time, with no search. That's what I think of when I hear about a Windows UI update, and I'd love to be proven wrong.
This. I would forgive the inconsistencies if the new stuff was better. But it's worse. Its not a "meh I'm used to the old and hate change" situation.
It's a "holy shit fire the UX design and product manager leads in charge of this asap". The audio tab is another good example. It's so hard to do anything with the new one, you almost have to know how to get to the old UX to make any kind of change.
I have a 1440p screen. Why do I need to scroll to do anything in the new audio properties dialog? The old one fit more functionality on screen all at once on 768p laptops
Why has there been such a push to nerf UIs? Is it just trying to ape mobile? Mobile UIs are more basic because the screen is so damn small and the use case is more casual.
Most use cases for Windows are casual. I don't want to hazard a guess but I'd say easily more than 70% of Windows users may be basic? The type to not go particularly deep into the options and explore these menus and instead leave it up to the experts or get systems configured for them
For all these people, the new UI is actually pretty good. My parents find the settings they need easily enough. Most business people I work with use Windows and rarely want to configure anything more than the wallpaper. For all these people, the "nerfed" UI is more accessible than a wall of options in the control panel. It's a shame for us power users but most people actually like these changes or at least find them usable enough
For casual users these UIs are catastrophic. Casual users just straight don't change settings - they tend to live with the most insane easily fixable problems.
Whereas for me, person who has to give phone support, every version of Windows has made important settings harder to get too, which means I can't muscle memory train casual users about what setting they need to review if the problem recurs.
The new UIs are all attempted flash over substance, and idiom breaking - buttons and interactive controls are not clearly highlighted and information density is low.
For some reason when you search for files and folders now, this menu does not return the folder path, but some strange search path
I would hate for Microsoft to kill off the original Control Panel.