The nice thing about Windows programs was that you knew how big the display was likely to be, and more recently, the scaling has gotten much better.
The modern trend towards tiny screens that have to be scrolled in order to fit any usable amount of data in, and the various different scroll / UI paradigms means that you can technically have something that most of humanity could have access to, but most users aren't likely to be happy.
Some folks, myself included, reel at the conventional wisdom that a small screen necessarily means reduced functionality.
While I agree that it can be difficult to design information-dense UIs for small displays or provide navigability to a large feature set, I strongly applaud efforts to unify computing and work through these challenges.
I very much want all of my computing devices to be unified. In fact, I want a model where I have one computing device and multiple views ("terminals" if you wish) [1]. But a consistent experience as Purism is pitching, and which Microsoft attempted with Windows 8 + Windows Phone 8, are viable first steps. There is learning to do here and it's great to see people taking on the challenge.
> I mean, if someone said, "I've successfully ported Vim to Android!", my first thought would be, "Why in god's name would I want to run vim on my phone?"
Sure, but if they find it useful, fun, or just plain cool, I applaud it. I want more desktop-class computing capabilities on my phone-sized device and I routinely find myself deferring important actions until I can get in front of a "real computer." Many things are just too challenging or limited on today's mobile operating systems. Even with "convergence," as Purism calls it, there will still be cases where I simply want to use a larger screen, so I'll defer until I can dock the device and use some large form-factor I/O devices. But with the stance Purism is taking, I would no longer experience the frustration of software limiting me even when I am willing to endure the limitations of my hardware.
Years ago I had occasion to visit my mother at work. In her department most of the worker's time was spent in a custom Windows app that was developed specifically for them... as in exclusively for that department of that company.
The app was modal and took up the entire screen. Except is was clear that the developers had larger displays than the workers because in order to view and use the entire page the workers had to scroll around both X and Y using the scroll bars. Well, that and the fact that tabbing around didn't go around in a logical order.
I walked out and returned with a slightly LCD display that I bought in a local big box store and nearly started a riot. They had all been using that crappy app for years like that and the worst pain point for it was due to the fact that the devs had assumed that everyone in the company had the same size displays while their employer had refused to buy those larger displays for the 45 people that had to use it.
It's also about poor consideration of the varying circumstances of real world use. Ideas about a full screen start menu that work well in small form factors can't just be assumed to work on a desktop display. I think the new start menu is great on a small touchscreen device like a tablet, but my workstation has a pair of 30'' monitors and it's ridiculous.
UWP apps that work by accident on phones is not a bad strategy, though. Good application design is responsive, same reason responsive became a huge buzzword in web dev. Even if you are just designing with Desktop in mind: there are hundreds of combinations of monitor resolutions and DPI settings, and everyone has their own personal preferences for how they arrange applications on those monitors. Windows apps have always been resizable and there are always people that will want to shrink app windows to tiny phone sizes while they work on other things.
> For old school windows desktop apps you don't have to worry about client rendering, client's browser size, responsive (mobile vs desktop), etc.
Is this just a matter of there being less ways to interact with the apps back then? Everyone had the same platform, same hardware, same screen resolution... etc. Plus, accessibility was an afterthought. Now, users have bigger and more varied expectations.
Seems like around Windows 95 was the last time designers put a thought to designing for usability and around the actual constraints in the medium.
Most modern UIs seem to focus almost entirely on clean aesthetics, usually mindlessly drawing on conventions that serve limitations that exist in mobile, such as being really conservative about using screen space.
I think desktop Firefox is an excellent example of this. A lot of very useful features are hidden behind an additional click on a minuscule =-button (What does that symbol even mean? Why doesn't it have a label?) All, it appears, to save hundreds pixels of screen space, while desktop displays are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. You can't even use full screen windows on many desktop displays, you'll get neck pain from literally having to turn your head to read.
That's a pretty bold claim when the desktop still exists exactly like it did in Windows 7. Basically you're saying that all of the functionality of Windows came from having a start menu that is a couple inches tall and a couple inches wide, and by increasing that space it is now less functional. Listen to yourself, seriously.
"Besides, who even /has/ a windows phone or tablet? Who would want one?"
Millions. And to answer the second question, millions.
If the only problem with the Windows 8 UI changes were that people had to learn a few new ways of doing things, it wouldn't be a big deal.
I think what really fuels a lot of the ongoing frustration over this stuff is that it's a new way of doing things that is much more awkward than the old way. So, not only are some of your old habits invalid, but the functionality has been replaced by something you would rather not use in the first place.
Adding insult to injury here is the fact that the main reason these changes were made in the first place was to get Windows users accustomed to the tablet interface, with the assumption that they would want to use the same OS on their tablet that they use on their desktop. It was to give Windows tablets a leg up in the market vs. iOS and Android devices; it doesn't appear to have been based on a desire to simply improve the desktop users' experience.
I'm sure they also wanted to create a market for touchscreen Windows PCs too. There were probably some marketing people that were convinced that a touchscreen would simply be a standard thing that every PC had in the future. Who knows, it could still happen I guess. If it goes that way they may look like geniuses in 10 years. I'm skeptical though.
Funny how these days it's the inverse, isn't it? Everyone, including Microsoft with Windows 10, seems to be obsessed with making PCs into large hand-helds and phones as far as user interfaces are concerned.
Mobile I give you -- of course that is obvious, it would be hard to get worse UI on a 1080p OLED screen that we had on a 50x100 pixel monochrome display.
Desktop, no way. Windows 2000/Office 2002 usability by beginners was head and shoulder above today's versions, even at 10x less dev effort and 100x less HD/RAM/CPU usage (yes the functionality was lesser, but the UI wasn't).
And add to that the counterfactual of 200,000 man years of development within sane UI paradigms that don't live under the pretense that every Windows PC is a touchscreen tablet, and you could have so much more!
> Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for.
I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.
I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.
We need large icons in the context of mobile computing because we’re using our fingers and our fingers are fat. You don’t need giant tiles when you’re using the tiny curser of the mouse.
Or perhaps Microsoft is actually forward thinking here and is considering that touch is becoming a more popular interface even on laptop. If you are designing a new UI now to cover the next 5 years, it seems like a good idea to take this into account.
Why would I be forced into a full screen view on a 20-inch monitor? The only reason applications are full screen on mobile devices is that it is assumed that screen real estate is small. Microsoft is indeed very confused.
I also believe you can have two Metro apps beside each other. But aside from that, I took a quick look at my setup and all my applications are full screen except for the Command Prompt instance I have open.
I don't buy this line of argument regarding app design.
Next time you fire up your image editing program on a PC resize the window to 90%, 70%, 50%, 30%. Try and use your application.
At the smaller windows sizes you just can't. There is simply not enough real estate to accommodate the UI.
Desktop applications have simply assumed you have a certain amount of real estate at some given level of technology. Anything better is usually just gravy since you have everything you need on your screen.
We know simply resizing does not work. Just try an iPhone app on an iPad at 2x.
I'd wager the points where you have to reconsider the UI are much closer together at small sizes. An extra half inch in screen size could allow just one more icon and make your app that little bit nicer to use.
Even if you fix the hardware compatibility problem (they solved it for PCs) it's still going to suck without new ways to design apps.
I used Windows RT on a tablet and it was great. Easily beat iOS and Android at the time, and I still don't get why professionals went for iPads for so long when there were great Windows tablets that did so much more so much more easily.
I used Windows 8 on a laptop and it sucked. Windows 8.1 made the OS usable but it took until Windows 10 until I stopped being annoyed at the random mix between Windows and Windows Mobile UI controls. I still dislike how obviously touch-targeted the Windows applications I'll only ever interact with using a mouse are.
UWP itself was a better model in many ways, but the way they implemented them as a screen filling thing that took away your task bar was a mistake. The design language, which seems to be "make everything flat, make buttons difficult to recognise rectangles, add whitespace wherever you can", is something I'll probably never get over. I use a 1080p screen at 1x scaling, maybe I'm supposed to buy a 4k screen to make UWP feel less bloated?
I think the Windows 7 had perfectly fine mouse targets. I think the design matters too: when I was looking at a fake Windows 7 theme, I saw a picture of the X button independent of the title bar, and it felt weirdly large. Only when I dragged it up to the top right did I notice that the button was much larger than I remembered it being.
The touch targets could've been bigger (the OS was still optimised for stylus based touch screens) but Windows 10's tablet mode shows how that could've been resolved. I'm not suggesting we go back to the tiny buttons featured in Windows 2000, but I'd like to trade some modern whitespace back in for information density.
- Dell, HP, Compaq, Acer, etc didn't invent entirely new UI's for the computers they sold: everybody's OS looked basically identical and had similar interface elements and metaphors.
- Screen sizes and resolutions increased slowly and didn't involve taking over the entire screen as with smartphones. Software that previously took up the whole screen at 1024x768 simply ran as a smaller window at 2560x1440 and wasn't forced to scale up to full screen.
The desktop UI has reached something of a local maximum which users are content with.
In the absence of justification for refining the desktop UI, UI vendors have developed another excuse to change shit on people: the mistaken impression that more tablety UIs are more progressive and easier to use on the desktop. Which is false on its face, given the different ergonomic constraints between a desktop PC and a tablet.
For me it's the efficiency. The 90's era Windows UI and applications ran productively on machines with 8MB of RAM. That's an enormous amount of value for what amounts half today's desktop CPU cache. The limited memory forced developers to conform to the OS provided API and resources (fonts, color pallets, image formats, etc.) and the result was small, fast, consistent applications.
Today this discipline survives in mobile devices. Meanwhile, our desktop operating systems are festooned with a multitude of widget toolkits and language runtimes yielding wildly diverse, inconsistent and often fragile behavior and require 3+ orders of magnitude more memory.
Aside from (usually) pretty nice font rendering, what has actually been achieved with all of this?
Weirdly enough, that's one of the things that originally made me want to explore options outside windows.
The mobile ecosystem kept changing and taking you into new experiences (even before smartphones). Meanwhile, a Windows desktop never felt like something new. Just a layer of paint over the old creaky house.
I even remember a 'smartphone' of sorts I had before android was a thing, which run windows phone: They literally shoved the desktop version there, I remember not being able to click buttons even with a stylus because the ui was so small for the device. The most popular app was some weird dragon themed overlay that, lo and behold, gave it finger-sized buttons.
The modern trend towards tiny screens that have to be scrolled in order to fit any usable amount of data in, and the various different scroll / UI paradigms means that you can technically have something that most of humanity could have access to, but most users aren't likely to be happy.
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