Jensen Harris, Microsoft’s former director of user experience (UX), recently railed against the design of the Windows 11 Start menu – Microsoft’s UX flagship.
Jensen Harris, who played a key role in designing the Windows 8 Start menu with its touch-sensitive tiles, says the Windows 11 Start menu has some confusing elements, and even makes his PC feel like ” infected with a virus.
And, an update: Microsoft has already gotten to work fixing some of these things.
The Bing Wallpaper ad is gone, and few of the corners have been fixed up a bit.
It is cool to see how fast they can update content server-side (the double-edged sword of directly embedding HTML.) pic.twitter.com/lUn1xbC7kb
— Jensen Harris (@jensenharris) August 30, 2022
The designer aired his criticisms in a series of Tweets explaining the importance of the Start menu and pointing out some weaknesses in the current design.
“The Start menu is Microsoft’s flagship user experience”
“The Start menu is Microsoft’s flagship user experience. It should represent the best UI design the company is capable of,” writes the former manager. “Today I searched for ‘chrome’ in Windows and was shocked at the user experience. »
Jensen Harris thinks Microsoft’s Start Menu ad promoting the “Bing Wallpaper app” looks like it’s been teleported from the Geocities era of Web 1.0. “Honestly, it looks like she was infected with a virus. The text is misaligned and sits on top of a Windows Vista-era background.
Additionally, the left corner of the ad is rounded – in line with Microsoft’s new Windows 11 app window design – but features a sharp right corner, while the bottom left corner is a hybrid of the two.
The big advertising question
For years, Microsoft has used Start Menu ads to promote its own apps and third-party apps from the Microsoft Store. Many users did not like them. More recently, Microsoft “accidentally” placed ads at the top of File Explorer windows.
Jensen Harris is not a fan of Start menu ads.
“The most important question is why there are banner ads in the Start menu. Is the money earned worth cheapening the experience people have of this highly tactile element of the user interface? It erodes trust. »
The “poorly designed toolbar”
He is highly critical of Microsoft using the Start menu to promote the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser. As Jensen Harris points out, Microsoft has given this ad the most space in the Start menu and notes “that it is designed specifically to distract me and prevent me from completing the task I had intended.” Microsoft is aggressively promoting the new Edge browser to Windows 11 users in hopes of weaning them off Google Chrome.
Then there’s the “poorly designed toolbar” containing a “salmon-colored” button with a Bing icon for “open results in browser” that covers two other buttons. The buttons are also not uniformly rounded and square.
For Windows 11, Microsoft chose to align the Start button in the center of the taskbar rather than to the left, where it traditionally was. Jensen Harris thinks the central alignment of the Start button is an error that ignores users’ familiarity with its position on the left.
“Moving the Start button to the middle of the taskbar was not a good decision”
“I think moving the Start button to the middle of the taskbar was not a good decision. The corner location not only had decades of muscle memory, but also took full advantage of Fitts’ Law to make it ideally easy to target. It’s worse for the mouse, it’s worse for the touch,” he wrote.
Fortunately, it seems Microsoft’s designers are still paying attention to their former colleague. Jensen Harris notes that Microsoft has “many brilliant designers who care deeply about the work they do.”
Within 24 hours of its review, Microsoft pulled the Bing wallpaper ad and made some design improvements.
“Design is not the enemy of monetization”
Jensen Harris’ final word on Windows 11 Start Menu UX is that it’s possible to strike a balance between UX and monetizing desktop space.
“Remember that design is not the enemy of monetization. It can be difficult to find compromises, but a good all-round user experience makes for good marketing and monetization. Experience design is the friend of business success because it leads to products people love to use,” did he write.
Source: ZDNet.com