Long-Time Windows Employees Explain Changes

Long-time Microsoft employees explain changes in Windows: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=300193... Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled. > It's almost like some tiny extremist faction has gained control of Windows > 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 essentialy none of the designers use Windows. > 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. > Sometimes, the "well, if you really want this it will take N dev-years" 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 still between them, and so on. In the end, the designers got what they want, the engineers who say "yes" were the ones who got hired, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team. > 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't switched to right at release, and until they give me back my side taskbar I'm not switching. > 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. > UX was constantly trying to remove the start menu, I remember hearing that it was Bill Gates who was adamantly 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. > 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. > I now have a stutter in games making them unplayable. Having to boot into Linux for games is not SOrthing expect 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.

Скриншот поста в стиле Twitter/X с заголовком о том, как бывшие сотрудники Microsoft объясняют изменения в Windows, и ссылкой на Hacker News. Ниже показан длинный обсуждаемый комментарий о том, что дизайнеры получили полный контроль над UX, игнорировали инженеров и ухудшили удобство Windows; шутка строится на саркастическом обвинении дизайнеров и растущем раздражении пользователей Windows 8 и 11. EN: A Twitter/X-style screenshot titled with former Microsoft employees explaining changes in Windows, followed by a Hacker News link. Below it is a long discussion comment claiming designers gained full control over UX, overruled engineers, and made Windows less usable; the joke relies on sarcastically blaming designers and expressing escalating frustration with Windows 8 and 11.

• @gentoomemes / 8921 2024-01-23