To me their biggest sin is senselessly ruining previously available and adequate functionality and usability. The aforementioned taskbar is a typical example. It not only force grouping icons (instances) of the same program but makes it mandatory, eliminating the choice of turning off grouping. This copuled with sh&t, truly sh&t level develpment when not the last used (frequent) instance gets activated on click but perhaps the last/first opened, "inventing" slow preview that not always work (during an active Teams chat it does not) needing a second click to get to where you want, but also removing title from this tiny undistinguishable preview for same layout instances making the choice even harder. I frequently need to work with several instances of the same software and my productivity is worse now just because of this maddening incompetently formed central thing of the taskbar. It was good, worked, but then they worked hard to ruin it. Ruined it and made it mandatory! How stupid is this?! It causes loss for my company: I work slower than could been, also making me mad, distracting, which also takes time to get back the focus. Less work can be achieved in the same amount of time. Costs money for the user, considerable amount of money. Need to look for (available, interestingly, the demand is that high, they make good money on this) auxiliary software that brings back essential functions (just to ruin those software too with a Windows update as underlying mechnism and tricks the auxiliary software relies on changes).
Software is supposed to ease and help the work we have to do, not making it harder! They seems to be careless and arrogant (forcing their choice without self critique), which is very dangerous combination.
All other usual things like incompletely reorganizing functionality/settings into yet another different form and location again and gain just to distract the known workflow, the continuous damaging refactoring pile on the top of these. But this taskbar thing, the very essential first door into the system, its destruction into inadequate pile of sh&t is a serious crime. Unluckily I am (yet) forced to use this in work, at home I free myself from Windows. Some friends, who can do, demanded to stay on the earlier verion than 11 from their organization until they finaly complete the taskbar to the usability level already achieved more than 10 years ago.
The new taskbar is the most visible - it can't be on the sides, can't be resized, and breaks a large number of workflows around right clicking, dragging, and more.
Context menus are a mess, hiding most options multiple levels deep when there's plenty of space.
Every quarter they get more intrusive trying to get you to click on the wrong button that will change your browser and default apps, and they use every antipattern short of moving the window under your cursor to try to convince you not to change away from their defaults. Yes, Win10 had a "are you sure you don't want Edge" popup but Win11 is far worse.
It's also harder than ever (maybe impossible now?) to create a local user account.
I honestly can't fathom for the life of me why taskbar grouping is even the default, or what problem it was supposed to solve. It is a terrible UI pattern.
The taskbar change is a symbolic thing. The company that spent decades pushing "we don't break the customer's workflow" has decided that's no longer a high priority.
They are playing at a unique scale: even a "narrow interest" feature with .1% take rate is millions of people they snub if they break it. That's a huge responsibility and they used to be very good and respecting it.
The fact they backpedaled some of the changes shows that it wasn't actually a difficult technical limitation, or necessary to enable some new vision. So we can either give them the benefit of the doubt and say they lacked the resources to prioritize these features (on a trillion dollar company?) or we can figure it's a mindset of "if we break people's existing workflow, it steers them into something we prefer" (see, any excuse they can find to monkey with people's default browsers and home pages).
My work sent me a Win11 laptop. I dislike it because of an obvious trifling thing (I miss being able to click on the clock and get a pop-up month calendar), but there are other nuisances:
* Rounded window corners. I don't know who is begging for them, because it's the trend in several newer Wayland desktops, MacOS, and now Win11. It might work well with exclusively new software designed assuming there are keep-out areas, but right now we still have the occasional legacy program with some trim in the corner that's being unceremoniously cut off. This seems like something that would be a themable option, but the ability to style Windows with built-in tools seems to have peaked years ago and is crumbling with every new version. The overall look just felt off, like someone was trying to convince their elderly Grandma that a KDE desktop with Firefox was the Windows XP + IE6 he was used to.
* The constant unasked-for changes. This last week, my machine started displaying a bunch of weather and sports boxes on the lock-screen. I didn't ask for that. I assume it's an extension of the earlier "let's put a bunch of random dialog on the lock screen about the random wallpaper, which happened to of course link back to Bing" feature I didn't ask for. I don't know how to be rid of it offhand, and can't be bothered trying to find out. (It's a work machine, so I'm not going to put that much effort into making it 'mine'.) But I shouldn't have to be going in and making changes to keep the machine I use for work purposes in a predictable steady state (modulo security fixes).
Very similar observations about software trends and quality.
Particularly the trends to remove essential functionality like one importat example in Windows 11 that you cannot put task bar on left or right side of screen and using ungrouped and fully labeled items. It's de facto unusable for my case because I need a lot of different windows with constant context switching between and was totally lost (went back Windows 10). Left/right taskbar has all items exactly the same place where opened, enought text to instantly indentify what program and what document/IP address etc. it contains, nothing moves itself and it's almost muscle memory to glance and see what program and window I need to open the current moment.
It's not the most popular use case for sure but if even 0.1% users like developers or other multitask heavy workers need similar overview on desktop workspace then that is like ignoring 10 million users. And for what? So that company can optimize away like two workers on Windows UI team for 6 months effort. Instead released broken Windows to RTM and 2 years later still essential functionality missing.
There have been problems in this area before, like Windows ME and some but those were more like broken drivers and things that were not or at least did not seem to be intentionally broken, just bad quality. Now there are more problems that are literally in the genre of f. u. user, we do what we want and optimize everything to 51% users, if you are in 49% then good luck.
Maybe need to adapt and accept that everything needs tinkering, third party tools and constant management after updates to be barely usable, still not fond of this method but what are the options any more.
- task icons different size than pinned icons on task bar
- task text vertically aligned too high
- icons stylistically not matched
- system icons unreadable (badly designed, all look the same, don't convey purpose adequately)
- task bar icons on right are vertically all over the place
- task bar mini icons sizing on right is not consistent
- file manager icon sizes all over the place
- file manager bottom bar icons are too low and lack 'breathing room' at bottom compared to top bar with buttons
- file manager top/bottom bar size is mismatched
- horizontal alignment/margin of icons on file manager's top and bottom bars is inconsistent
I could go on and on. People who don't care about these things don't see them. Their vision is not trained for it.
But for a polished experience, even to UI laypersons, they make all the difference.
I find it amazing that Microsoft can be doing this sort of thing, mean while, at the windows team they decided to change that windows taskbar sound control tool so that you now need to do “start->control panel->soundoptions” to change your primary source, rather than just right clicking the damn icon. One in a long range of terrible designs for windows.
How can a company simultaneously be so great and so terrible at usability?
Very true indeed they're cluttering up the OS's and it feels like there's no escape.
This unexpected change to the windows taskbar broke my concentration on some task I was doing the other day, and right away I stopped what I was doing to go chase down how to disable the thing so I wouldn't lose more moments of concentration in the future.
https://superuser.com/questions/1725905/get-rid-of-decorativ...
Such a crazy idea of our own OS's being the source of interruptions. Even iOS is getting in on this with the Maps app I noticed the other week, I'd even count iTunes displaying a bunch of random album titles that are on the ugly end of the spectrum in my opinion. At least iTunes uses the same batch of images so one can train to ignore it. It's kind of interesting to conceptualize the OS as like this pesky idle assistant just hungry for attention and with nothing to do who likewise feels its owner is just as idle as them with free time and free attention to spare. "My owner isn't doing anything special or fun, let me bug him with this visual distraction". It's even funny at a meta level to even observe myself getting riled up over this growing assault.
It's interesting you say impossible to use without it, I wonder if a certain subpopulation of folks are more prone to these traps. Basically those with a high degree of attention to detail, those with sharp powers of observation, and those juggling a ton of things in their lives where spare mental capacity is on the short end of the spectrum.
It isn't petty, it is indicative of an incompetent development team. We have been able to move the taskbar since Windows 95, but apparently whoever Microsoft hires to work on Windows UI these days can't figure it out. Lord knows what else those yahoos have fucked up.
It also inherited a ton of bad habit from Windows 8, such as shiny fancy-looking but overly simplistic configuration screens, except the original configuration dialogs are still there underneath. This is indicative of a bad development methodology: devs/teams work on useless small projects (jazz up these dialogs so that grandma can use them) which can easily be executed and completed within a year or so (you know, a review cycle). While leaving all the old mess little changed underneath (because of course the new shit is horribly incomplete and doesn't actually fully replace the old controls). They have a corporate/dev culture which actively discourages long term incremental improvements of core components and focuses instead of trivial window dressing that can be packaged up in a SMART-goals format so that people can tick off their commitments and get their bonuses, raises, and promotions.
Even aside from the things that Microsoft is doing that come off frustrating, the tone-deafness is amazing.
The whole "we don't want to let you move the taskbar" saga is a disaster of messaging even more than it is a technical fiasco.
Even if you have actually decided from some top-down diktat that the taskbar is now permanently glued to the bottom, the appropriate corporate answer is "We're taking your feedback into account and considering it." It creates no obligation. You don't whine "very few people actually want it" or "It's too hard even though somehow it was doable in 1995 on a 386SX." That does not make your customers feel appreciated and valued. (I'm sure this then pivots into a "they're not really our customers if they aren't a PC OEM or large enterprise" discussion.)
If they don't want to reach out to the power-user community directly, they still have the ability to pawn this sort of problem off on third-party developers. I recall back in the late Win3.1 era, it was, perhaps not common, but not "strange" to use alternate shells. Compaq and Packard Bell home PCs booted into their cutesy custom UIs in instead of Program Manager, and on the more enthusiast-side, I fondly recall Calmira (the Win95 Explorer clone) and the one IBM prepared which was a cutdown model of the OS/2 Workplace Shell.
These days, alternatives feel almost illicit-- "You can install Classic Shell or the like, but odds are you're going to have to keep battling with Windows updates that want to restore the defaults."
When they acknowledge the third party ecosystem-- the biggest selling point Windows has over MacOS or Linux-- they can then reframe the message as "We're providing a basic solution that services most people's needs, but there's also a vibrant ecosystem of alternatives." All it requires is respecting user choice.
I'm personally mostly not interested in Windows 11 because of the account requirement. (PC login is a huge obvious point for "I have a home persona and a work persona and potentially multiple of each, so trying to force One Account To Rule Them All is just going to conflate details that should remain siloed") Yeah, I could switch over to local accounts after install, but it feels like it ends up with some terrible situation where the license I paid $120 for is locked behind a throwaway Microsoft account I can no longer recover.
That single "improvement" will keep me away for as long as possible. It's the first thing I change when setting up a new Windows environment, and have done it for over a decade. I'm enough not alone that I've seen in mentioned in multiple articles.
MS makes all kinds of noise about "reworking the UI from the ground up for true usability" or some such. Yet I have no idea what could possibly be the benefit to removing such functionality. MS says they listen, but obviously not.
Unless a developer has a massive and utterly revolutionary improvement in the way we interact with the machine, and it yields 10X productivity improvements (or even 3X) for 90% of the user base - fkn leave it alone!!
Marginal improvements are the worst - the time spent relearning, or fumbling while using a different machine is never recovered, and it just makes people annoyed at you. Even if the improvements are "free" the price is too high.
Ahh that weather widget was so bad. I had to use Windows for one project, and one day that abomination just appeared there. It rendered very badly (text didn't look at all like other taskbar elements), it was in a wrong language (???) and unnecessarily hard to remove. Felt super unprofessional, something I'd expect from browser malware.
They love hiding things and then calling "productivity." The system tray is one that has always historically annoyed me.. randomly hiding users icons inside of a menu that you have to know exists before you go to use it. Talking people through that on the phone was always a nightmare.
And now.. "taskbar overflow!" Even more hidden context to trip my users up and generate support calls. Thanks!
Totally agree. I occasionally work on family member's Windows PCs and hate it every time. Everything is huge, I can't tell what is supposed to be an actionable element and what isn't, and its just subjectively ugly.
Information density took a huge hit in the later Windows versions and I find it incredibly frustrating to use. The first thing I always have to do is figure out how to open the old version of control panel so I can actually accomplish something.
Glad to know I'm not alone in these thoughts, thought maybe I was just being stubborn in adopting the new style.
I'm willing to throw a bone to Microsoft with regards to the bottom-fixed taskbar: Many programs simply do not account for non-bottom taskbars and run very jankily when executed under such environments.
I assume they judged it was better for end user experience to make dumb assumptions always true rather than try and convince programmers to stop making dumb assumptions.
Software is supposed to ease and help the work we have to do, not making it harder! They seems to be careless and arrogant (forcing their choice without self critique), which is very dangerous combination.
All other usual things like incompletely reorganizing functionality/settings into yet another different form and location again and gain just to distract the known workflow, the continuous damaging refactoring pile on the top of these. But this taskbar thing, the very essential first door into the system, its destruction into inadequate pile of sh&t is a serious crime. Unluckily I am (yet) forced to use this in work, at home I free myself from Windows. Some friends, who can do, demanded to stay on the earlier verion than 11 from their organization until they finaly complete the taskbar to the usability level already achieved more than 10 years ago.
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