The risk, of
course, is that customers will respond with confusion, or worse: outright
terror. The new Start screen looks entirely different from the traditional
desktop (though that interface still exists), with floating, blocky tiles
instead of files and folders. And it's almost entirely chrome-less — even basic
things like the battery indicator and clock are hidden from view until you
touch a button or the screen.
Believe it or
not, Microsoft doesn't delight in freaking out its customers, and there is a
reason it went with an interface that's so different and mind-mind bogglingly
Spartan. This is Windows designed for the connected user, from the ground up.
"We started
looking at big trends in the industry and asked, 'How does Windows fit
in?'" says Sam Moreau,
director of design and research for Windows.
"Most of the Windows metaphors — the desktop, the taskbar, the control panels, the start menu — all those things were invented in the Windows 95 era. Windows 95 didn't even have a browser."
"Most of the Windows metaphors — the desktop, the taskbar, the control panels, the start menu — all those things were invented in the Windows 95 era. Windows 95 didn't even have a browser."
As computing
evolved over the last two decades, the Internet and shared media played a
larger and larger role, elevating the browser from a mere app to the
centerpiece of the connected experience. However, the system it was running on
stayed stubbornly the same.
"All the
things since then that you care about — like a browser, like an MP3 file, the
PC as a communications device —- none of those things were native to the UI of
windows," Moreau points out. "An application created a file, and you
could put a file in a folder. That was basically what the operating system
did."
Microsoft set
out to modernize the PC experience with Windows 8. Instead of static icons,
apps now have animated "live tiles" on the Start screen that serve up
fresh information at regular intervals. It's a far cry from when the only thing
connected to the Internet in a dynamic way was the browser.
"There's
tons of stuff on the Internet," says Moreau, "And your PC basically
has this little straw — Internet Explorer — to see all this.
We didn't think that should be the case. The whole PC should be about that.
Part of what the Start screen is really about is making all this activity —
these people that you care about, and all this information — sort of explode so
you're immersed in it."
That immersion
comes at a cost, however, and there are few clear signposts on how to do
things, such as how to call up your tabs, change your PC setting, or just shut
the darn thing off. Moreau explains why Microsoft would choose to leave new
users with few visual clues about the capabilities of the UI.
"We have a
design philosophy, and one of the aspects of it is putting the information that
you care about at your fingertips. Everything else we want to recede. It should
be the best presentation of the thing the person cares about. It's their photos
— it's not wrapping it in big buttons that say it's a photo. You don't need
that," he says.
"[Visual
cues] are good for one-time discoverability. But then that's always there —
it's kind of always barking at you, in your periphery, that [the UI] can do
these things."
