To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward if not simpler than the traditional way to interact with Windows. I'm sure anyone that is actually told how it works will have little trouble with it. I'm not sure why an OS has to retain a 20 year old UI paradigm if a nicer method appears to replace it.
People seem to hate change, even for the better. This reminds me of a recurring theme in the Linux world where any Windows originated UI feature seems to follow the pattern:
1) Users complain loudly about not copying useless Windows features.
2) UI features get copied from Windows with a 5 year delay once they become the expected norm.
3) 10 years later the community staunchly opposes the removal of features. The ones which were once "unnecessary Windows stuff".
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward if not simpler than the traditional way to interact with Windows.
However it's mystery meat: it provides no clue as to what is active and what is not (in fact, it provides no activable element at all). There's a reason why WP7 mandates (if not requires) side-arrows or that a bit of next screen's content be visible on the edges of the current screen: it hints that there is something there, it's a very nice clue (even with that, the most frequent criticism of WP7 is that it's hard to know what is active and what is not).
Completely hidden "edge of screen" elements are very nice but only work if you know they're there already. What do you do when you don't? You're boggled, and either you try hunting the interface for active areas (looking for pointer changes, old-school adventure games style) or you give up and go back to something you can use at a glance.
> Completely hidden "edge of screen" elements are very nice but only work if you know they're there already. What do you do when you don't? You're boggled, and either you try hunting the interface for active areas (looking for pointer changes, old-school adventure games style) or you give up and go back to something you can use at a glance.
Is this really how we expect to progress as an industry? Basically make no meaningful changes so that we never expect our users to learn anything new? Do we have that little faith in our users?
How obvious is it to a new iOS user that they need to press an icon on the Home screen until the icons go wiggly in order to re-arrange them? I'd argue that this is pretty non-obvious, yet every iOS user has learned this action, despite there being no "active areas" that reveal this behavior.
You don't prohibit change. You make affordances. What people are complaining about isn't the new interaction paradigm, it is how hard it is to figure out that paradigm.
The iOS example is valid, but not as valid as you think. You could happily use you iOS device forever without learning that (especially now that Apple put the same functionality in the settings app, probably because it wasn't discoverable). The same is not true in Windows 8.
Given you have to know a gesture just to get logged in, you can't even start using it without knowing the magic incantations.
I think it's great MS is experimenting. They have had he same metaphors since 1995. But you have to be very careful when you change 15 year old metaphors, and I don't think MS has been careful enough. I hope I'm wrong, because that will mean users are getting more savvy, which can only be good for making more interesting apps. But my experience has taught me to never rely on users being more savvy.
> What people are complaining about isn't the new interaction paradigm, it is how hard it is to figure out that paradigm.
People always complain about change. Always. That's not to say that there couldn't be improvements to the W8 interactions, but it's good to remember that a lot of complaints are really about the fact that something has changed, and not how that thing has changed. Look at the hate Facebook gets every time they change, and then notice that despite all the complaints, everyone is still using Facebook, and that the next time Facebook makes a change, those people loudly demand that Facebook revert to the version they complained so much about last time.
I am certain that the Windows team is listening to the feedback they are getting. The removal of the Start button was due to that feedback. People complained that it was confusing and misleading that the old start button did something so different. Whether that was the appropriate reaction is obviously something that not everyone agrees with.
> especially now that Apple put the same functionality in the settings app, probably because it wasn't discoverable
Out of curiosity, where? I looked and couldn't find it there.
> Given you have to know a gesture just to get logged in, you can't even start using it without knowing the magic incantations.
I feel like this is kind of a ridiculous claim. The login screen "swipe" is extremely discoverable. It's so understandable that Apple stole it (bounce and all) to use for exposing the camera functionality from the lock screen in iOS.
On top of that, any key will invoke the "reveal", as will the scroll wheel.
> But you have to be very careful when you change 15 year old metaphors, and I don't think MS has been careful enough.
I agree. I think the Windows team realizes that they have to change, though, or they will get passed by.
Oh, I was actually talking about rearranging, not deleting. The scenario that the storage page supports is actually much different from the ones that the "wiggly icons" supports. Wiggly icons are for deleting apps the user doesn't want and rearranging the icons according to preference. The storage page is for reclaiming storage. The behavior is similar, but the root user desire is somewhat different, which is why it's in a separate place with different information provided.
You can rearrange icons in iTunes. The "wiggly" interface us completely redundant. I agree it is not discoverable; I've had to show each of my kids. It just isn't a comparable example.
I would put the original MacOS eject behavior as much closer. That was horrible.
Hmm, I think of the iTunes interface as an affordance for the awkwardness of the wiggly icon interface, rather that its discoverability. But I suppose it is more discoverable as well.
The old MacOS eject behavior was indeed horrible. It was a miderable design. I can't understand how anyone ever thought "throw the floppy away" was a reasonable abstraction for "eject".
Actually, touch-and-hold-to-move/delete apps is one of the few interactions that iOS specifically pops up a message to let you know about the first time it becomes available to you (after initial setup). It's an interaction that works well once you know it but isn't easily discoverable, so while a popup message explaining it is undesirable, it's probably a good/needed thing to have. But obviously those kinds of interactions must be kept to an absolute minimum - you don't get very many opportunities at all to go outside of the user's workflow and teach them something without becoming extremely annoying... most learning needs to be through intuition/discovery.
Anyway, to a large extent I agree with you - change is often OK and users, while complaining, will pick up on it.
I'm almost certain that it's been there since they added "wiggle mode" — which I think was pre-App Store: back then it was just so you could rearrange the built-in apps or web sites you had added to the Home screen.
Assuming it is still there, it wouldn't at all surprise me if a huge percentage of users would say they've never seen it, which is exactly what I was trying to say is the problem with such messages.
Fair enough. All I know is that I can't recall ever seeing it, and I've set up a couple of iPhones and an iPad. I'm not willing to wipe a device to confirm, though.
Basic things should be easy. What is the most fundamental, basic action in a UI? On an iPhone, it's calling someone, which can be done by touching the green icon with a phone on it, and dialing like on any other physical phone. That's easy. Rearranging icons is not basic--many people might use an iPhone happily for years without rearranging their icons. Requiring some extra hunting around for that isn't a huge problem.
The big flaw of Metro is that you can't do anything without figuring out the non-obvious edge of screen elements. That's not a learning curve, it's a learning cliff.
Hot corners and edge gestures are quite non-obvious. So is double-clicking to open a file, but not surprisingly, people learned it. Everything we know about computers is learned. The question is whether the learning curve (or "cliff") is worth it.
There is probably a decent way to communicate to users that the corners are hot, probably via some animation.
For example, running apps are available from the left hand side. When an app disappears (eg. hitting the Windows key), just having it slide over (perhaps even popping out the running windows to see it slot in) would communicate where you need to look for things.
The RHS charms are probably harder, but I think there's a way to do this given a little extra polish.
That's actually exactly how it was designed in the Developer Preview, and for just that reason. Every time you pulled up the Start screen from with an app, the app would slide to the left as a hint it was available there.
The problem was that the sliding animation just gave you a headache after a while, especially using the start screen from the desktop. So in the Consumer Preview it was replaced with a more subtle fade-ish animation, making it less apparent where the app went but protecting the user's long-term sanity.
The corner actions are always the same though - it's not like there are random corner actions available at different times. The idea is to have a fairly small amount of system UI that's available everywhere, so that even if there's a bit of learning involved at the start, it doesn't amount to much amortized over all the times/places you can use it.
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward
My Windows desktop is the middle of three computers on my desk using Synergy; at work we use MouseWithoutBorders which doesn't have corner protection. I predict serious frustration in my future.
I'm not sure why an OS has to retain a 20 year old UI paradigm if a nicer method appears to replace it.
If Metro actually replaced Windows classic I would agree but it doesn't. It just sits there on the side and randomly throws you out of a comfortable environment. Running two entirely different GUIs in parallel is infinitely confusing to normal people. Microsoft could have probably got away with this if they did it 5 years ago when there was no competition to the PC. People would have had to just deal with the change but that's no longer the case. A lot of those PC buyers are just going to end up with iPads instead.
> To be honest the "edge of screen" interaction paradigm seems pretty straightforward if not simpler than the traditional way to interact with Windows.
It may be convenient, but the real problem here is discoverability. There's no way you can realize that screen edges are interactive unless you either knew that beforehand, stumbled upon it on accident or saw a YouTube video explaining it.
People seem to hate change, even for the better. This reminds me of a recurring theme in the Linux world where any Windows originated UI feature seems to follow the pattern:
1) Users complain loudly about not copying useless Windows features.
2) UI features get copied from Windows with a 5 year delay once they become the expected norm.
3) 10 years later the community staunchly opposes the removal of features. The ones which were once "unnecessary Windows stuff".