

  (Source: flickr)





Windows 8 boxes

Among his major gripes:
    Why? creates interface slowness and cognitive dissonance
  • Switch to single windowing
    Why? Hard to remember what you have open for complex tasks
  • "Flat" look of Windows 8 UI tiles
  • Photo/graphic heavy UI themes
  • Live Tiles
  • Charms
  • Gestures
  • Tablet UI for Desktops
Windows 8 ugly live tiles









Source: UseIT / Jakob Nielsen

Comments     Threshold


RE: Need to stop clinging to the past...
By Scrogneugneu on 11/21/2012 9:43:44 PM , Rating: 2
The reason you can only tab through the running apps from right to left is synonymous with pressing the "back" button on your web browser. Similarly, if you press and hold the "back" button in your browser you'll see a list of all the sites you visited and can pick one to revisit without having to tab through each of them.

MS basic paradigm here is based around abstracting a web browser - which is probably the most universally familiar way of interacting with a computer for most people. Even granny can work a browser.

I did not read your whole post, but I did get up to that section.

I find your analogy perfect. However, you forgot to mention the best part : browsers have tabs, allowing fast switching between different web pages. If MS really did create the paradigm based on a web browser, it was thinking about a stone-age browser.







By EricMartello on 11/22/2012 3:17:26 AM , Rating: 2

Abstracting a web browser's basic functionality does not mean duplicating it exactly - Google tried and failed to do this with ChromeOS. Remember that? They basically made a linux distro with the chrome browser as the UI and it never really caught on. MS sort of built on this idea and improved upon it.

The tabs you claim are missing happen to be represented by both live tiles and the customizable charms.

Traditionally there was a requirement to open up several programs to accomplish a single task...metro UI reduces this with live tiles and charms. The remaining necessity for apps are to do a specific task like word processing or media editing.

Using the windows key, which is on most standard keyboards, you can perform simple key presses to bring up the metro version of the task bar, the "start menu", etc. No need to click.

