Windows Phone fans pining for the days of Metro panoramas and integrated experiences have had a tough couple of years, with Microsoft steadily removing many of the platform’s user experience differentiators. But as I’ve argued, there’s reason behind this madness. And now an ex-Microsoft design lead who actually worked on Windows Phone has gone public and agreed with this assessment. You may have loved Windows Phone and Metro, but it had to change.
A different theory for Microsoft moving Windows Phone closer to Android’s UI design, from former Windows Phone executive Charlie Kindel (who now works at Amazon).
What’s most interesting to me is how they admit that in addition to the design improvements, Microsoft was intentionally trying to make it more like android and they’ve actually got a pretty good justification for that.
If I were a betting man I’d bet that tweet is mistaken. Visual Studio 2015 supports android development. Instead of making Android apps run on Windows Phone, I expect Microsoft is trying to make Android apps compile for Windows Phone.
They haven’t been able to attract a good app ecosystem despite the popularity of visual studio. If a windows app is just one click away from an android app on a great IDE (eclipse sucks) then I expect that will change.
Edited 2015-04-18 18:21 UTC
To me, saying that they are conforming to conventions that have become ubiquitous is simply the easier pill to swallow. That is, they can continue to say that their design decisions were novel and in some cases or in some ways better but, because of their position in the market, they failed to prove that in the market place.
But we also have the admission that they have decades of research demonstrating that panoramas and carousel scrolling is horrible design outside of very feature-specific use cases. So… why were panoramas and side-scrolling a fundamental design decision and sold to us as superior for five plus years? Large text is easier to read but cut-off headings that you can’t fully read are jarring and off-putting. Text is clean and “modern” but scrolling pages of system preferences that are poorly organized is more difficult than better organization, particularly with iconographic categories.
Whether or not Android is a backup or trojan horse plan to be developed in the future, I think it simply makes a more palatable excuse to be more like what is universally known than to say, not only did we have several architectural stop-gaps and/or abortions (6.5, 7, 7.5, 8, 8.1, 10) over the last decade but we also pursued a design dead-end for the sake of novelty for the last half-decade that we now need to undo (while partially trying to preserve it because we need novelty and can’t appear as if we were deluding ourselves as the world marched on for half a decade).
Unfortunately, these “excuses” belie themselves and still show problems. For example, claiming that it is a “good idea” to have the same universal design for 60″ tv screens as for 4.5″ phones… No, it’s not necessarily a good idea. Minimizing duplicative efforts and code for programmers and having some level of consistency for users is certainly a value, but saying that the UI/UX should be the same across all screen sizes, form factors, use cases, and environments doesn’t follow; if there are particular advantages and disadvantages of sizes, form factors, use cases, and environments, they should specifically be considered to maximize the value of that form factor and use case.
I’m not seeing Microsoft as having learned anything particularly useful that will propel them out of a hole of their own making. I see just another rationalization and reset (one which looks to driven by the state of iOS and Android from two years ago at that). Not a good sign.
FYI, eclipse is gone. The new dev environment is called “android studio”. I think its based on intellij idea. It sucks much less than eclipse.
You’re right. Android Studio makes Android development actually quite pleasant. The Eclipse horror is gone.
It takes a big -incompetent- man to admit that his design work can be improved by blindly copying absolutely anything from the Android UI disaster.
This is a freaking dark age of usabilty.
I don’t think Metro was the problem so much as there were no f-king apps for the platform. Microsoft should’ve released Windows 8 as ‘Windows 7.5’ with no Metro, and held off on Windows 8/Windows Phone until they had the whole unified platform ready. As it was, they blew their load too early and suffered for it. Windows 8 has so much negativity associated with it, who knows if they’ll be able to recover.
As an owner of a Windows Phone, I can’t follow his comments at all. In general WP8 is quite easy to use with the exception of a few apps.
But I would argue intuitivity doesn’t matter that much. After a few days of playing with your new OS, you know how it works, as long as it is consistent.
WP8 can be improved of course but I don’t see why MS should move away from Metro on a phone or tablet.
They should move away from Metro on a desktop though, the sooner the better.
You gave the reason why yourself:
“After a few days of playing with your new OS, you know how it works, as long as it is consistent.”
If it takes a few days to learn to use a phone, you lost the customer.
When you buy a phone for a large sum of money, you are not going to discard after a couple of hours.
WP doesn’t break down in UI in general I think, just it is the 3rd OS and nobody develops for it
Of course massive improvement possible but pls not hamburger menu’s. Firefox was fecked up by it as well
Microsoft would love it if people were buying WP and chucking it after a couple of hours. The problem is: they aren’t buying it in the first place.
In the U.S. you usually have 2 to 4 weeks to return your phone if you don’t like it. Discarding it isn’t a realistic response but the option is there if you want to choose it.
Also it’s not like you have to wear a sign around your neck that says you made a bad choice when you picked it. So there may not even be any stigma attached to remorse over picking it.
The is more than one reason no one develops for it. There were problems getting paid for at least some developers. Lack of activations (‘sales’ numbers hid the low volume of users for a while) point out that a very small percentage of smartphone owners were actually using it. Being #3 was touted as being a big win when the O.S. was new. So it’s humorous to see it being presented here as a negative.
While massive improvement would be possible if it were allowed it may alienate the current user base. Then what?
There is so much wrong with Ballmer-era everything, I don’t think it can be teased apart.
The retreat to industry standards is not mysterious to me. The old unusual designs failed. The people responsible were annihilated. MS has nowhere to go but industry standards.
lets fix also the stupid and nonsense control-freak designer dream expressed as “flatness/monochrome” trend pervasiveness.
It is not that I dislike consistency, I like it, but there are better ways to achieve it instead of insisting on use a square (or whatever basic shape they fall in love with) with some simple monochrome icon inside.
Hint: our species evolved with a talent to easily discern forms and colors from others in the same group, why not use it appropriately?
The comment about moving away from the radial menu in OneNote because the design language is so square is extremely telling. This is not the sort of decision Apple would ever make as can easily be seen in their current devices and software. Apple works toward consistency but if a design decision is better in a particular use case they’ll go with it, at least to test it out for a generation or two. Thus, we see round-rect icons on iOS (but also circles for other iconographic entities and buttons where they think it makes sense even while many design elements are now rectilinear), we see primarily circular icons on OS X and most other UI elements are rounded rectangles… Apple Watch features a strictly rectilinear display but uses exclusively circular icons and circular interfaces quite frequently where it makes sense, while buttons (with text, not icons) have returned to being rounded rects away from the more rectilinear design of iOS, etc and so on.
Consistency is an important ideal, but it can be harmed by being reactionary and/or by trying to bash square pegs into round holes… Thoughtfulness and getting core ideas right early can easily establish a greater sense of consistency than being almost militantly “consistent” at the expense of usability.
Edited 2015-04-19 13:34 UTC
Going back to the reddit AMA, it’s hilarious to see the number of times this designer has to say, “Trust me, lots of really smart people put lots of hard work into this, we aren’t just copying Android because they have the market share” and it falling on the deaf ears of the Microsoft fanboys who bought into the design language and argument of WP8 who say back, “We were told the same thing with WP7, why were they wrong then? What makes you right now?” Etc.
For me, it was always clear that Metro was like a design student’s final project and that it would not scale well across functionality, apps, form factors and future advancements in the various mobile OSes. It was also clear that WP8 came about largely based on the relative success of Xbox and Xbox Live (it didn’t really produce a significant new profit stream nor was it truly more successful than their existing Windows, Office, and Server businesses or the competition, but in the sense that it came out of an area that Microsoft had little presence and expertise in and did cement itself in the market, it was a HUGE success in comparison to other such attempts)… which led to Belfiore gaining power and the opportunity to build Zune… which although it was a complete market failure, it at least led to something which was novel and did seemingly have some UI advantages over the competition (within a very narrow subset). This power surge within the Home/Entertainment groups of Microsoft within a stagnant (I understand Windows/Office continued to grow, but this was incremental… business as usual) led Microsoft to make the bet that they had the talent and expertise to produce something novel and capable out of the Zune of all things! They then had to spend enormous capital over the last five years arguing that it was not only novel but also superior from a feature and usability perspective even though this was never true.
Now the Microsoft fanboys have been so bombarded, enamored, and deluded by these arguments for the last five years they are utterly at a loss when learning that it was all bullshit and that Microsoft was in utter disarray eight to two years ago. And even worse: even if they are moving away from this poor move, they still also have to continue to hold many of these failed arguments at the same time as abandoning them because Microsoft fully embraced the WP7 paradigm into desktop Windows and the paradigm cannot be fully abandoned with their universal platform vision.
At this point, I’m starting to think that UI capability and usability no longer matter as much as the fact that the numerous architectural and design restarts and dead-ends — and their subsequent rationalizations and assertions that their should be trust in their intelligence, hard work, and research — has killed any level of trust from loyal, new, or potential users and developers. Microsoft could develop the most usable, easily discoverable, most novel — while still familiar, and most powerful and feature-rich UI tomorrow and have it rolled out over night, and they’d still be f–ked because they’ve burned up all trust, credibility, and a sense that they have any idea where the market is and where it will be going beyond their being reactionary to their own existing businesses and the successes of their competition.
Edited 2015-04-19 17:00 UTC
Err, is the window to edit getting smaller? Anyway, all references to WP8 should be WP7. Apologies if the references to WP7 and WP8 are confusing.
I am not so sure about that. The memory of people is surprisingly short of past performance once they get something they like. And at least for Windows itself they have the advantage that the monopoly forces ppl to try their latest product.
Personally the latest screenshots of Windows 10 I’ve seen on this site hasn’t exactly convinced me they are moving in the right direction though. It is very nice the start menu is FINALLY back, but the entire thing is so amazingly ugly to me that it really hurts my eyes! I understand that some people apparently like this design (Thom, for instance), but they really should be smarter and realize an OS visual design needs to be at least digestable for the majority of users. And so far they are still moving in the wrong direction from my point of view.
Exactly this… I couldn’t agree any less with! 😀
From an aesthetical / stylistic point of view, the work MS did with Metro is unsurpassed – not only according to my humble point of view, but by recognized industrial design standards. This is symbolised perfectly by icon design: very distinguishable (remember, our eyes do most of the recognition work by looking at the contour, and this design eliminates everything superfluous around it) and easily maintainable (you can go full vector, scale up to any size you want, and drawing is pretty easy even for non-experts)… A very different but equally brilliant take on UI than, say, Apple’s old luxury-skeuomorphic design.
The only fatal mistake they did with this touch-perfect UI was to force it on desktops – and by doing so, they simply burned out this brilliant stuff on all platforms, as it’s starting to lose some of its peculiar traits. Add to this the average aesthetic level of users, and you can quickly understand how it ends: history repeats once again, and the best is not the winner (think about Betamax, or – ironically – OS/2 too).
And now, we all shall be forced to use Android’s cheesy UI… Well, at least it’s skinnable. 😉