Earlier today I downloaded and installed the Developer Preview of Windows 8. These are my observations so far of Windows 8 as a desktop operating system.
Setup & Configuration
The initial setup was painless and the Express Configuration was a nice touch. Creation of the user account using a Windows Live ID was a good indicator as to how integrated the Windows Live services are into the OS and will be a good way to get preference syncing and SkyDrive services into regular use.
Express Settings
The setup process as a whole has been streamlined and is a lot more approachable for beginner or intermediate users. My only concern was that after configuring my location, temperatures were still displayed in Farenheit and I couldn’t find a place to change this, an issue which I imagine will be corrected later on.
My biggest concern with the new integration of Windows Live services into the operating system is it will establish the habit of using the same authentication details across all services, which is a considerable security risk and bad practice for online security.
Start Screen
Start Screen
For what it is, the Start Screen is an effective way of presenting a lot of high-level information quickly and easily. As an application launcher, it has a number of shortcomings:
Due to its modal nature (and the modal nature of Metro as a whole,) the Start Screen completely conceals the application you are currently working in. If you have two active applications, it conceals them both. This means the user is uncertain as to what will happen when they launch a new application. Will it open in the full screen, supplanting both the docked and main applications? Will it open in the main application area, leaving the docked application intact? Will it open over the top of whichever application was least recently interacted with? This was a source of confusion for me when I initially started using the Start Screen.
Again, because it is modal, I started thinking about the Start Screen as an application in and of itself. I thought that because it was modal, I could cycle through to it like I could all of the other modal applications I had running. Unfortunately, that was not the case and it took some exploration before I realised that when using Windows 8 on a non-touch device (ie, a desktop computer with a keyboard and mouse) there is no way to get back to the start screen using a visible UI element. You have to first either use the Winkey + C hotkey combination and then click “Start” or hit the Windows key on the keyboard to toggle it.
With the default installation of the Developers Preview, there are about 1.5 screens-worth of applications on the Start Screen. I can imagine that as people download and install more and more applications, the time to scroll from one point in the list to another will grow steadily. The search function and app launcher (Winkey + Q) is powerful, but most people I see have many, many desktop icons and they’re accustomed to that. Hiding the full, easily navigatable list of applications behind a hotkey combination will only serve to frustrate and confuse users who can’t find the application they need.
I will discuss the start screen more in a later section when I talk about Desktop Mode and how it works.
Metro Snap or Window Docking
The ability to have two applications running side-by-side is a boon for tablets and desktop computers alike. Unfortunately, it limits you to two concurrent applications, which is all well and good until you need to use three. I’m also not certain as to how it will work on a dual-screen scenario. Overall, a good solution for tablet multitasking for the most part, but combined with Metro’s low information density which I’ll get into later, I don’t see any benefits over a Window model.
Metro & Aero – Two paradigms, one OS.
Microsoft are very obviously pushing the Metro design philosophy, which makes sense. It’s beautiful and very pleasant to use for casual content consumption. It’s immersive and uses gestures to great effect to make navigation intuitive. It makes content easy to consume at a distance and doesn’t crowd the display. This is pure conjecture, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that this push towards Metro comes shortly after the public unveiling of a new, refined Microsoft Surface.
The big problem as I see it is, Metro doesn’t work on the desktop.
In all of the demonstration videos we’ve seen from Microsoft, Metro has been showcased on a large wall-mounted screen, a new model Samsung tablet or a touchscreen device of some kind. In that kind of environment, the low data density and large UI elements with plenty of whitespace allows for easy viewing from a distance and easy use of touch. I can very easily see myself with a wall-mounted Surface in the entrance to my home, or a tablet on the coffee table running Metro, but without that touch interaction, the experience is suboptimal at best and horrifyingly sparse and inefficient at best. When I’m sitting within a metre of a large, high-resolution display with an accurate pointing device I neither need nor want ample, finger-friendly whitespace or oversized controls. I want information within easy reach and the ability to use that space to the fullest.
To switch between modal Metro apps, there is no fluid or quick gesture. You can Windows or Alt-tab through them or go back to the start screen and “relaunch” them. Your only other option is to move the mouse to the left hand side of the screen where a miniscule thumbnail appears and you scroll through your open apps before clicking to select the one you want. There are a variety of other issues that I have run into personally, but small annoyances aren’t the point.
On the Building Windows 8 blog, Microsoft state the following (emphasis mine):
We believe there is room for a more elegant, perhaps a more nuanced, approach. You get a beautiful, fast and fluid, Metro style interface and a huge variety of new apps to use. These applications have new attributes (a platform) that go well beyond the graphical styling (much to come on this at Build). As we showed, you get an amazing touch experience, and also one that works with mouse, trackpad, and keyboard. And if you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop—we won’t even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there! This is Windows reimagined.
But if you do see value in the desktop experience—in precise control, in powerful windowing and file management, in compatibility with hundreds of thousands of existing programs and devices, in support of your business software, those capabilities are right at your fingertips as well. You don’t need to change to a different device if you want to edit photos or movies professionally, create documents for your job or school, manage a large corpus of media or data, or get done the infinite number of things people do with a PC today. And if you don’t want to do any of those “PC” things, then you don’t have to and you’re not paying for them in memory, battery life, or hardware requirements. If you do want or need this functionality, then you can switch to it with ease and fluidity because Windows is right there. Essentially, you can think of the Windows desktop as just another app.
I can see what Microsoft are trying to do. It makes sense in a touch, or gesture-based context. Unfortunately, treating the Windows desktop as an App breaks the coherent experience of Metro, while Metro breaks the established workflow and coherence of the Windows desktop. When using applications in the Windows desktop, it is quick and easy to switch between them, but if you want or need to access Metro applications, you are forced to lose access to all of your desktop applications until you bring the desktop “app” back into the primary Metro viewport. You can run a Metro application side-by-side with your desktop, but it is a non-negotiable sacrifice of almost a third of your desktop real-estate and not an efficient one, given the low data density inherent in Metro. It’s reminiscient of the sidebar in Windows Vista – and not in a good way.
On a similar note, when in desktop mode, the Start orb has been replaced by a Metro-style Start icon which, when clicked, returns you to the Metro Start Page, again completely obscuring the desktop. This breaks the fluidity and established non-modal paradigm of the Windows user experience and will be a deal-breaker for a lot of people. It interrupts and distracts from the current task at hand and forces the Metro experience upon people that may not want to use it in the first place.
To summarise, the Metro experience is not well-suited to a desktop. It is an amazing interface for mobile devices and lifestyle computing devices like the Microsoft Surface and I can see it embedding itself into day-to-day life when Surface goes properly commercial as I predict it will next year. The low information density, modal design and inefficent application switching is frustrating on the desktop. The transition between desktop mode and Metro apps is jarring when alt-tabbing or windows-tabbing and it genuinely feels like I’m using two distinct operating systems.
How can Microsoft save Windows 8?
Currently, Windows 8 is on target to be another Windows Vista. The Metro interface is not as visceral to use with a keyboard and mouse as Microsoft claims and the integration with the Desktop is not seamless, elegant or nuanced. Transitioning between the two interfaces is jarring and inefficient for power users, who make up a good portion of Microsoft’s customers.
Microsoft can turn this around with two small changes to Windows 8.
1. Bring back the Start Menu in Desktop mode.
As quoted above, the official word from Microsoft regarding the desktop and Metro is:
And if you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop—we won’t even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there!
That’s a fantastic approach for Metro users, but currently desktop users are not given the same level of respect. If they click the start button to launch a new application in the desktop, they are thrown unceremoniously back into Metro, obscuring the desktop experience. By reintroducing the Start Menu for Desktop mode, the established workflows of the Windows desktop remain and users that do not want to use Metro aren’t forced into it as they are now.
2. Make Metro a Windows Component.
Just like Internet Explorer, Media Player and Tablet Components, the Metro UI and application framework should be a Windows Component that can be added or removed as desired. By all means install it by default, or even better, have it as an option in the installer, but just as the code for the desktop isn’t loaded in Metro unless the user chooses to go there, don’t load the Metro code unless the user desires it.
Removing the Metro UI doesn’t mean that users need to say goodbye to Metro applications. IE10 uses the same engine in both Metro mode and Desktop mode. While, granted, I don’t know how much of the Metro experience is delivered with this engine, I see no reason that HTML5+JavaScript apps could not be run using a framework that plugs into IE10 to deliver these modal apps from the desktop, even without Metro UI installed.
Perhaps Metro tiles can be integrated into the desktop, like Active Desktop and Gadgets – but functional. I’ll leave that question for Microsoft to answer, but for now, I’ll be avoiding Windows 8 on the desktop like the plague.