The Start Screen is substantially less functional than the Start Menu. To understand why, you have to look at what the Start Menu is for. It’s not for fast access to programs you use all the time. That’s what desktop icons are for. It’s for compact representation of programs you don’t use every day. Large, animated areas work against that, as does the lack of folders. Instead of a short list, you have a large, hard to search busy display that requires far more scrolling.
There are times you want large pictures that show you the contents of an item, and there are times you want a simple list. That’s why the File Explorer allows you to choose between a variety of such views.
The Start Screen is more properly a replacement for the functionality of the desktop, not the Start Menu. It’s best at displaying a relatively small number of items that you use frequently. It goes a bit overboard in that regard, since the huge area of each item is only really functional for a few programs. The programs that show photos, usually animated, definitely get mileage out of the space, but the vast majority of programs display simple icons which work just as well in a much smaller space.
Basically this. It’s difficult to tell which screen elements are interactive, because they’re not highlighted in any particular way. There’s no button outline, or underline, consistent color, or consistent location. You just have to guess. This is a common (and spot-on) criticism of iOS7. Like I said, I don’t use metro enough to really call it, MS may have done a better job.
I said the start screen is more functional in some ways-- not all. It’s a better use of space, less cramped, and live tiles are neat. But all your criticism is spot on too, particularly the lack of folders.
Exactly (on cueing), although there’s a lot of more subtle stuff as well :) The Win8 “flat” look and lack of colour…ugh.
Thing is, Stusser…I see the start screen as a second desktop. Which I’ve been able to have for ages with other software.
I’d like to be able to mix and match my current desktop with a few useful tiles. (I’ve got shift-menu key set up to “show desktop”, have for years)
Oh I don’t use it as a desktop at all. What little of my desktop is exposed behind active windows is largely covered with stuff I’m currently working on, and I do not use show desktop that way. Obviously my use patterns are not universal.
He’s using the wrong word for “affordance”-- interface elements that are deliberately made to look interactive. It’s something that a lot of recent interface design has tripped over in the race to strip things down to bare minimalism.
I suppose we have fundamentally different ideas of functionality. The Win7 Start Menu gives me a direct link to every installed program on my PC, at most 3 clicks deep, and hides in a tiny percentage of the screen space when I don’t need it. From what I have seen of the Win8 Start Screen, it demands either all or none of a monitor (with many folks claiming to keep it on their second monitor, but why own a second monitor if that’s the case?); it handles programs that aren’t bought from the Windows App Store very poorly, assigning every silly item that would be properly buried in a Start Menu sub-menu and be ignored (such as uninstall buttons and developer support page links) their own co-equal square of the interface; and stretches out to infinity if you have a substantial number of applications installed. Nor are the menu squares visually distinct enough to quickly eyeball like the program icons on a Start Menu.
There’s a reason my wife had her tech guys install a workaround for the Win8 Start Screen as a first priority, she just wants to get work done. I think MS has caught hell from their corporate/gov’t customers who won’t touch Win8 at all and aren’t interested in “upgrading” all of their monitors to touch screens and re-training all of their employees on how to use the new paradigm that MS has decided to impose.
TL;DR. Some folks really hate having their PC turned into a goddamn tablet emulator.
Win8.1 gives a direct link to every installed program on your PC 0 clicks deep, if you tell it to go directly to the all programs view. The problem is that includes readmes, links to uninstallers, links to homepages, etc, because all the folders are expanded. If it supported folders properly it would be more functional period.
It doesn’t hide in a corner of your screen, but “when you don’t need it” makes very little sense. You open the start menu only when you do need it; same with the start screen. My main problem with the start screen is that it covers the entire screen including the taskbar. That’s my main complaint. Like I said earlier in the thread, if the start screen:
Was overlaid on the desktop as a horizontal stripe consuming, say, 85% of the vertical space, showing the taskbar below
Supported folders in the all programs view. Perhaps they could do something elegant, like only show the main program icons by default, with a folder overlay on the tile that expands on mouseover or keyboard select.
I would be pretty darn satisfied with it. But again I don’t pretend that my preferences are universal. Some people just hate it period, and I respect that.
It’s not really 0 clicks deep, since the scrolling involved is considerable. Flat file views are a problem once the number of files starts growing large. Even Apple eventually figured that out for iOS.
It would still only be a substitute for the desktop icons, not the start menu.
As a desktop substitute, it still has problems. The task bar, as you mention, and the inability to support folders or folder shortcuts. Even with your changes, though, those huge, colorful squares are a problem. Most programs can’t use the additional space in a useful fashion, so you end up with grotesquely oversized icons. They also lack whitespace. They need to 1) space the areas farther apart 2) allow for smaller squares than they do at present and 3) get rid of those colored backgrounds. That last is of course a personal aesthetic reaction, but the size and space issues are real. Getting rid of the kindergartner construction-paper squares would help with the whitespace issue considerably. Their main value is they make for bigger touch-screen targets.
If you say so. I found the windows 7 style “programs” menus difficult to navigate and in fact, never really used them. I just searched, which is how I find stuff in win8.1 too now that search is no longer segmented.
That’s what they were thinking at Microsoft. They removed them because they didn’t use them, and they didn’t realize quite a lot of users did. And they thought the search box was a good substitute, which makes no freakin’ sense to me, since rarely-used items often have nonintuitive names, and you have to know they exist in the first place to search for them. The only time I’ve used the Windows 7 search box personally was when some “how to” web page directed me to do so. And for Cmd, of course, but that’s a special case.
Well, yes, but my point is that if you never used the Start Menu, you don’t really understand how other people used it, and shouldn’t be comparing it to the Start Screen. People who used the Start Menu don’t use it that way.
“Many valid use cases” is also something that Microsoft denied, since they removed a commonly-used feature in favor of a method they preferred.
I still don’t see the search box as a full substitute, even if that is how you use Windows. I expect there are programs you’ve installed that you don’t know exist. I wouldn’t know Photostitch came with the EOS utilities, for example, if I didn’t have it on the Start Menu. As I said, you can’t search for something if you’re unaware there’s anything to search for.
Indeed. Thus my (and apparently other folks’ as well) frustration with MS adopting a top-level policy of feature reduction with Win8 (and the Xbone as well) after using a superset of existing features for every prior version of Windows.
The “all programs” list is really what we’re talking about. I’m unclear on why scrolling to something is worse than guessing the name, but I guess it’s YMMV. It still strikes me as the sort of conversation we used to have in the early days of menus, where some people staunchly insisted that typing out commands on the command line was better than presenting the user with a list of options.
It’s not, they’re completely different mechanisms. Scrolling is browsing/discovery while you need to know part of the name to search. When I need to browse all installed programs on win8.1, I use the all programs start screen view. It’s not great for reasons we discussed earlier in the thread (primarily the lack of collapsed folders), but luckily I don’t need to do that very often. Once or twice a month, maybe.
Even without closed folders, I do find the start screen all apps view to be a better browsing mechanism than scrolling through a super long tiny menu, because it’s a better use of space and easier to read.
You really use the all programs menu to start your programs? You don’t have them pinned to the start menu or the taskbar, or even on your desktop? That seems really inefficient.
