Long-Time Microsoft Employees Explain Windows

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. Arainach on Jan 21, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: The Windows 11 taskbar is an annoying step backward... > 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 essentially 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) what a shiny Macbook various ideas had been tried and failed in usability studies because our users weren't 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 they 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 got what they want, the engineers who say "yes we can do that" get promoted, and those of us who argued most strongly for the users burnt out, retired, or left the team. 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. Nor 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. cjbkqgh on Jan 21, 2022 | next [–] UX at MS is this weird consult 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 allow externally because needing a search function was an indication that the UX designer failed. I know does tend to make 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 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. 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 so ALTing 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.

The meme contrasts a sarcastic headline about Microsoft designers with a long Hacker News discussion from former Windows engineers. The joke is that usability-focused engineers allegedly lost repeated battles to designers, leaving Windows with attractive but frustrating interface decisions. It is shared as a reaction to bad redesigns, slow software, or technology teams ignoring experienced users.

• @right_wing_dev_squads / 12477 2025-07-10