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stmuk writes:
"BGR reflects on recent comments by a Metro designer. 'Metro is a content consumption space,' Microsoft UX designer Jacob Miller explains, 'It is designed for casual users who only want to check Facebook, view some photos, and maybe post a selfie to Instagram. It's designed for your computer illiterate little sister, for grandpas who don't know how to use that computer dofangle thingy, and for mom who just wants to look up apple pie recipes. It's simple, clear, and does one thing (and only one thing) relatively easily. That is what Metro is. It is the antithesis of a power user.'"
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Windows 8 Designer Explains Why It Annoys You
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Everyone hates me because I'm paranoid.
(Score: 1) by sibiday fabis on Thursday February 20 2014, @04:27AM
Yeah. That "one thing" it does effortlessly is frustrate every user. I have to support this for my clients who bought new computers without consulting me. Every user has problems with W8, especially the "illiterate" ones. Even with Classic Shell installed, somehow they wind up in Metro hell. A completely unintuitive mess.
Aside from that, wireless networking is messed up, theme syncing is a joke, file history to an external drive crashes randomly, search is still awful, et cetera ad nauseam.
More accurately, a completely unintuitive and randomly broken mess.
(Score: 1) by wjwlsn on Thursday February 20 2014, @02:46PM
This is not an attack against your argument, but your post made me think of it...
Why is it that a bunch of tech-savvy nerds are arguing so vehemently against an user interface that isn't immediately and intuitively obvious in its operation? At the same time, why do so many of us call the same interface "dumbed-down", "brain dead", and "pandering to the lowest common denominator"?
Aren't we the crowd that loves the command line for its power and efficiency, even though there's nothing intuitive about it? Aren't we also the people that believe that users should understand a little bit about what their machines are doing, even if that means leaving some of the underlying complexity exposed?
Obviously, I hold a minority opinion here ... I am a tech-savvy nerd that likes Windows 8 for its flexibility and ability to present the user interface I need for the device I'm using at the moment. I use and enjoy Metro on my tablet, and use the traditional interface (almost exclusively) on my laptop. One interface is highly optimized for touch and smaller screens, the other for keyboard/mouse and larger screens.
I understand that Microsoft has made many missteps here and could have done a better job integrating the OS as a whole. At the same time, we all knew that Microsoft's first release of a vastly revised user interface was going to be problematic... didn't we? It's almost cliché at this point: 3.1 good, 95 bad, 98 good, Me bad, XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad. (And before I get flamed for saying MS was good at anything, I meant "good by Microsoft standards")
We all knew Windows 8 was for early adopters expecting to deal with problems, so why all the uproar?
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.
(Score: 1) by sibiday fabis on Saturday February 22 2014, @03:14PM
Because it is all of the above. It's very poor UI design, period. Between that and the other broken or weird stuff it's just not fun to play with, much less try to support.
So why force the touch interface on non-touch devices? It's entirely inflexible in that very common user case, unless you third party tools.
In my experience average users go to a big box store, where they are told that Windows 8 is their only choice. They aren't traditional early adopters, but they are in essence forced into it as they don't know how to get a new computer with Windows 7.
They spend little or no time looking at the new interface before purchase. They trust that it will be navigable in the same way as every previous Windows computer. They don't want to have to figure it out, they just want to use it. It's a rude awakening.
Then, when they ask someone to teach them how to use this non-intuitive mess, they quickly discover that it's not "something they are doing wrong", it's the fundamental brokenness in the UI. I've had clients return W8 computers to the store. I've had others ask me to install W7. Both scenarios never happened for me with previous Windows OS offerings, even Vista and ME.
(Score: 2) by wjwlsn on Saturday February 22 2014, @04:07PM
Fair arguments. I concede your point.
I am a traveler of both time and space. Duh.