Why Microsoft Can't Design a Consistent Windows

The Windows 10 UI is an inconsistent mess, but there is a good reason why (The Story Behind - Ep. 37)

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#TheStoryBehind #Analysis #Windows

[xOPERAND]

"There will be no Windows 11 or 12"

this aged well

[TheoWerewolf]

The main problem, from a developer's POV is that Windows has THREE different systems in it:
1. Classic Win32 and .Net Forms (classic desktop apps)
2. .NET WFP (modern desktop apps)
3. Win RT (aka UWP - mobile apps that can run on desktops)

Classic Win32 is the part that looks like Win7 and earlier. Some of the visuals have been upgraded, but it's still mostly that old style. Things like the control panel and the file explorer are written using this. It uses GDI+ and so can't handle things like complex animation or composition - so no visual effects or translucent layering. Technically, you CAN do it - but it's a lot of work.

WPF is a wholly independent system that uses DirectX as its core for visuals. It still uses Win32 for low level stuff like file access and networking, but can do very advanced graphics elegantly and easily. BUT... by default, it looks like.. Win32. Developers have to build their own visuals and so a lot of WPF apps still kinda look like Win7 apps... just with nicer touches and animation.

UWP takes WPF one step further by replacing the Win32 core with WinRT. This fixes all the old crufty OS bits that go back to 2000. It also provides a much richer set of user controls and design elements. This is where 'Fluent' lives. BUT... Microsoft originally intended this to be the foundations of Windows 8 and Windows Phone... and the idea was that desktop systems were dead and tablets and phones were the future. As part of that, they also introduced bizarre access restrictions that made sense on phones, like only allowing access to a limited set of folders and a serious permission system that forced users to approve almost every app's access to things like the camera or microphone, but that NO desktop user would live with for long. They also wanted 'apps' like iOS and Android that would run in full screen mode all the time. Again, ok for phone - not for desktops.

Worse, they completely misread the developer reaction to this because for some reason, when they designed UWP, they decided not to base it on .Net - which everyone just spent the last ten years learning - deciding instead that the world was going HTML/JS and C++. They had to VERY quickly throw together a .Net front end for WinRT and UWP that started out missing a lot of stuff.

I'm sure you can guess how well that went. Microsoft had to backtrack and in Windows 8.1 they started to wind this all back. They accepted that UWP wasn't going to be the first choice of developers for a long time, and that they had to make UWP compatible with .Net. Then they had to bring WPF up to a point where it wasn't quite so far from UWP in concepts and design.

They also quietly introduced a way for WPF apps to use UWP controls and code.. and just this year, finally made it official with real documentation on how to use it. Same with a 'composition' layer that will let WPF apps look and feel like UWP apps. Unfortunately, it just makes WPF apps more complicated for minimal benefits. On the other hand, they also reduced many of the restrictions and difficulties in writing UWP apps making it a little easier to write desktop apps using it.

They also open sourced pretty much all of this, allowing developers to 'fix' many of these problems.

So... long story short.. it's getting better. But there's still a ways to go.

[sunyavadin]

"Control panel and settings, that are basically the same app twice"

Yep, one that's functional, one that's decorative.

[DinomadeAventura]

The neatest UI is the calculator mouseover effect... on an app where you mostly use the keyboard. Microsoft can't get a single one right.

[MauriceGucci]

it feels like 20 different teams worked on individual parts of Windows and in the end it was all just put together and released without checking the final product.

[chrissre]

New windows is like a Frankenstein. I even had one of my custumers that upgraded from windows 7 said that he thinks the instalation didnt complete because half of the system looks like the old one.

[jackfreeman]

“There will be no Windows 11”

Aged like milk.

[MrMoon-hypn]

Windows 10 will forever be in early access, change my mind

[aaronseet]

The longest running legacy UI as I remember was the font control panel. It had the exact same layout and UI widgets from Windows 3.1.

[vwestlife]

Microsoft never used to have these problems before. If you ran a Windows 3.1 program in Windows 95, it looked almost indistinguishable from a native Windows 95 program, because the old API elements were updated with the then-current design theme. Same thing with running a Windows 95/98 program in Windows XP -- it looked like you were running a program designed for XP.

But Microsoft started breaking their own rules and releasing software which created its own custom UI elements rather than relying on the Windows API to do everything, which made it impossible to provide consistency with future Windows UI designs. And that became pervasive enough across the industry that now they don't even bother to try to provide any consistency, even within the OS's own software!

Hardware really has nothing to do with it; the reason why this isn't a problem on Mac OS is that Apple is simply a lot more strict about requiring application developers (including their own!) to follow their OS's design standards. For example that's why the Mac version of Microsoft Office still has the traditional File / Edit / etc. menu bar at the top instead of just the "ribbon" -- because Mac OS requires it.

[carldressler]

"There will be no Windows 11" — well...

[dumbcat]

MS Paint is incredibly quick and useful in a business environment where a screenshot with markup needs to be made as quickly as possible. i have the entire adobe cloud sweet, and snagit, etc but i still use paint every day in a business environment because it is so fast and easy for very simple things

[neoqueto]

The device manager looked almost exactly like this way back in Windows 98, when it first appeared. Hell, Windows 10 to this day STILL contains code and hidden icons from Windows... not 95... not 3.11... from Windows 2.0.

[devchawla]

Why only some youtubers give consistent quality videos

[mikaels-p]

If everything looked like the calculator!

[mmsbludhound]

While I'm used to the design inconsistency between different apps by now, having 2 separate apps just for system settings still gets on my nerves. It makes things hard to locate and also makes it more difficult to provide support to a less tech-savvy user over the phone. While I love the OS as a whole especially with the improvements made under the hood I feel that they should really make it a point to streamline the settings interface and to keep improving the consistency between apps.

[TheUltimateBlooper]

Not a fan of those design changes in WIn10. As a power user I want my Control Panel to have everything in a technical list with lots of tweaks, not like in that half-assed settings app.

[TheSengard]

i dont understand why windows dont let the user choose, if they want a typical desktop styled OS or a tablet styled OS.

[memarkus]

"There will be no WIndows 11" - Well that sentence didn't age well 😂

[onee]

That still doesn't explain why their designs feel so shitty.

It feels like they don't care about design, and it's just a side project they "have" to do.