<story><title>The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward</title><url>https://www.pcworld.com/article/549576/the-windows-11-taskbar-is-an-annoying-step-backward.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gibolt</author><text>I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use.&lt;p&gt;Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that I liked, it just needed a search function to quickly refine the buttons. That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well thought out.&lt;p&gt;UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up.&lt;p&gt;Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them.&lt;p&gt;I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.</text></item><item><author>Arainach</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows&lt;p&gt;This has been the case for a while.  I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10.  Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.&lt;p&gt;I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the &amp;quot;well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years&amp;quot; approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled.  I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8?  Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on.  Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on.  In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say &amp;quot;yes we can do that&amp;quot; get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.&lt;p&gt;I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened.  For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven&amp;#x27;t switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I&amp;#x27;m not switching.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The strange trend of &amp;quot;authoritarian minimalism&amp;quot; design that seems to be working its way through the majority of newer software is very strange. I wonder who actually wants this stuff, and is not content to merely make it a default, but instead forces it to be the one and only way.&lt;p&gt;Monitors are bigger than ever with huge resolutions, and yet UIs are being dumbed down to uselessness and alienating an increasing number of users.&lt;p&gt;A recent related article &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29954266&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29954266&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate that not even people &lt;i&gt;inside&lt;/i&gt; Microsoft --- who are being forced to use Win11, because MS --- have any say in the matter. It&amp;#x27;s almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows and is determined to show everyone else how much power they have by making these changes and gloating sadistically at seeing everyone object, but still end up using Windows.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much damage they will inflict before people start turning to WINE and a saner Linux distro, just to run their Windows applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>KronisLV</author><text>&amp;gt; Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan&lt;p&gt;Another commenter mentioned OpenOffice (&lt;a href=&quot;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.openoffice.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.openoffice.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) but i&amp;#x27;d also like to suggest LibreOffice (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.libreoffice.org&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.libreoffice.org&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) as a capable and reasonably compatible alternative to MS Office, which retain the old look of dropdown menus.&lt;p&gt;If you don&amp;#x27;t have the need to support very particular features of Office, then it might just be suitable to retain your preferred way of navigating the UI of an office suite app - on my personal computers i have just LibreOffice (with which i finished my bachelor&amp;#x27;s and master&amp;#x27;s thesis), whereas on my work computer i have both LibreOffice and Word, for those few exceptions when the latter is necessary.&lt;p&gt;That said, i can understand why many would also find the ribbon UI to be easy to navigate, should they get used to it. That&amp;#x27;s why some Office clones, like WPS Office (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wps.com&amp;#x2F;office&amp;#x2F;linux&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.wps.com&amp;#x2F;office&amp;#x2F;linux&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) and FreeOffice (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.freeoffice.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.freeoffice.com&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;) seem to copy it with varying degrees of success. That said, personally i like the open source nature of LibreOffice too and the file format itself not being proprietary.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward</title><url>https://www.pcworld.com/article/549576/the-windows-11-taskbar-is-an-annoying-step-backward.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gibolt</author><text>I hated the Ribbons. Nothing was categorized where I expected and none of the icons or sizes match their use or frequency of use.&lt;p&gt;Drop down menus are so much quicker to scan</text></item><item><author>cjbgkagh</author><text>UX at MS is this weird consulting style org. Maximum visibility with minimal accountability. I think the Office 2007 Ribbon was the last new thing they did that I liked, it just needed a search function to quickly refine the buttons. That wasn’t allowed externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know devs tend to hate the Ribbon but I thought it was well thought out.&lt;p&gt;UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamant that it stay in. I had a good laugh at Win8 when they finally got their chance to remove it and totally messed it up.&lt;p&gt;Now the Win11 UI is so slow that it feels like every click must be hitting telemetry first. When I right click I see the normal context menu briefly before the simplified context menu. Sometimes it’s so slow enough that buttons will move right before I click on them.&lt;p&gt;I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not something expected to happen so soon. I still use Windows for legacy reasons but few things would make me happier than deleting my windows partition for good.</text></item><item><author>Arainach</author><text>&amp;gt; It&amp;#x27;s almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows&lt;p&gt;This has been the case for a while.  I worked on the Windows Desktop Experience Team from Win7-Win10.  Starting around Win8, the designers had full control, and most crucially essentially none of the designers use Windows.&lt;p&gt;I spent far too many years of my career sitting in conference rooms explaining to the newest designer (because they seem to rotate every 6-18 months) with a shiny Macbook why various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users want X, Y, and Z.&lt;p&gt;Sometimes, the &amp;quot;well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years&amp;quot; approach got avoided things for a while, but just as often we were explicitly overruled.  I fought passionately against things like the all-white title bars that made it impossible to tell active and inactive windows apart (was that Win10 or Win8?  Either way user feedback was so strong that that got reverted in the very next update), the Edge title bar having no empty space on top so if your window hung off the right side and you opened too many tabs you could not move it, and so on.  Others on my team fought battles against removing the Start button in Win8, trying to get section labels added to the Win8 Start Screen so it was obvious that you could scroll between them, and so on.  In the end, the designers get what they want, the engineers who say &amp;quot;yes we can do that&amp;quot; get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team.&lt;p&gt;I probably still know a number of people on that team, I consider them friends and smart people, but after trying out Win11 in a VM I really have an urge to sit down with some of them and ask what the heck happened.  For now, this is the first consumer Windows release since ME that I haven&amp;#x27;t switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I&amp;#x27;m not switching.</text></item><item><author>userbinator</author><text>The strange trend of &amp;quot;authoritarian minimalism&amp;quot; design that seems to be working its way through the majority of newer software is very strange. I wonder who actually wants this stuff, and is not content to merely make it a default, but instead forces it to be the one and only way.&lt;p&gt;Monitors are bigger than ever with huge resolutions, and yet UIs are being dumbed down to uselessness and alienating an increasing number of users.&lt;p&gt;A recent related article &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29954266&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=29954266&lt;/a&gt; seems to indicate that not even people &lt;i&gt;inside&lt;/i&gt; Microsoft --- who are being forced to use Win11, because MS --- have any say in the matter. It&amp;#x27;s almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows and is determined to show everyone else how much power they have by making these changes and gloating sadistically at seeing everyone object, but still end up using Windows.&lt;p&gt;I wonder how much damage they will inflict before people start turning to WINE and a saner Linux distro, just to run their Windows applications.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zentr1c</author><text>Ranting in Gibbons:)&lt;p&gt;Still i wonder how much it effects my productivity decline in Office since i still search sometimes for functionality.
In anyway it made me hate office and made Switch to open Office wherever i can.
However I attribute it to having kicked of my quest for a plaintext workflow because beeing f*ked over by feature bloat and Designer circle jerking once to many times.&lt;p&gt;Simplicity is king. Maybe its just the age that makes me realize that there are just to many layers of complexity.&lt;p&gt;I feel for the young learners that get thrown into this world and dont even understand the concept of a file system tree anymore. It has been abstracted away. it&amp;#x27;s not in the cloud! It&amp;#x27;s in the app with 3 klicks reachable or doesn&amp;#x27;t exist.</text></comment>