Today I had to test some software on a Windows 8 release preview machine. And, oh boy, it was a confusing mess. Half of the settings were in Metro, while the other half were in the "desktop app". Metro itself had way too much of its stuff hidden away in "menus", such as the odd use of right-click and the swipe-sidebar. Oh, I have to explain that: sliding top-down the mouse down the edge of the screen shows stuff, on the left being a kind of task bar for Metro, and on the right a context-sensitive search, share and settings bar.
But that wasn't my main gripe. My main issue is that no matter how "simple" it is to use the side-swiping thing once you know about it, they are completely unintuitive. True, I often use those three-finger swipe gestures on my Mac trackpad and Magic Mouse, and even more gestures on my iPhone using VoiceOver. But all of these, even anything beyond a single mouse button, are shortcuts and never required to fully use the software.
And there's a good reason to do so: Gestures, like language (and even Siri on the iPhone to some extent) are after all a collection of arbitrary semantics with some logical rules to tie them together. But the most helpful things in a language are exactly those rules, because of the universalism of logic. Good UI metaphors tend to have few arbitrary conventions that build up "logically" to a rich set of interactions. But having a few disconnected conventions that don't build up to anything better lead to limited, bad UI.
I'm not necessarily trying to advocate for a command-line UI, but I'm just saying is that windowing systems as a superset of full screen "touch mode" makes far more sense than what Windows 8 does with a windowing system as a subset of a full-screen mode that requires touch gestures even with a mouse. It isn't just that those gestures are nearly impossible to guess without being shown how to do them, it's just forced down the user's throat and doesn't accomplish anything more semantically.
After all, Ubuntu's Unity desktop is just so much better than Windows 8. Microsoft, with Windows 7 you used to be cool for like 3 years or so, and now you're going to suck your usual self again. I should have guessed when I saw you were introducing the "ribbon" menu in the file manager...
Published on June 4, 2012 at 21:31 EDT
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