It's like the new settings UI on mac os. It's all list. Before there were different layout patterns (Grid, then sectioned forms inside tabs). Great for spatial memorization. They've thrown it out of the windows for something that only works for small vertical screens with touch. It also sucks if you're using a mouse with the iPad.

Why the hell isn't that list in alphabetical order. No, the random groupings aren't helpful for me to find things at all.

> It's all list.

Now I'm imagining a kind of spreadsheet-based hell where the UI is one enormous vertically scrollable grid of cells that are sometimes labels and sometimes inputs and sometimes buttons...

I feel like I caught a glimpse of it once or twice in the VB5 / Java Swing days.

and the search is still awful. In the world of tags, AI, and fuzzy search you still have to remember the -exact- name of what you're looking for

UI/UX is designed by UI/UX specialists at giant corporations. Often engineers who have criticism get brushed off.

Yeah if engineer critises something like that UX/product will counter "yeah, but not everyone are as autistic/nerdy as you are. Normal person will never care for it". Also they really need to change something to justify their jobs. If an engineer pushes back they can make less change and might seem like they are doing nothing.

If engineer keeps pushing back, it is bad performance review and "hard to work with".

You're all correct, of course. Whenever I listen to UX/UI where I work talk about "improving" the UI or how they design things, I just want to chug on a bottle of vodka until I forget which year I'm living in. I can't stand the UI for the services we provide because it's utter shit and was designed with a laser focus on increasing KPIs and sales. I'm not sure what Microsoft's excuse is in designing such a terrible control panel replacement. The only small solace I can find is that all our competitors are designing their UIs the exact same way. Or maybe that's just more depressing. I can't decide.

I don't even see it as increasing KPIs or sales. Unless it's sales as in selling the idea to the leadership.

A lot of it is trying to make it look visually and superficially impressive trying to apply the common hammers like whitespace, very little visible content at once as to not "overwhelm" the user and other rules to anything, and then trying to pretend whatever that is going to increase the sales by doing non-sensical user research, only listening to what proves their initial vision and then later trying to cherry-pick success metrics.

A/B test the new Settings panel:

If User spends more time in the Settings page -> We just increased engagement. They must really like the new Settings page and find that pleasurable to use. That's a win.

User spends less time in the Settings page -> We made it quicker to find and tweak the correct settings. That's amazing.

Either way, any change you make you can find wins. You could even keep going back and forth between two versions.

I was specifically talking about where I work with that criticism about KPI and sales. I have no idea what might be driving Microsoft's design philosophy.

You might be into something though.

Yeah, I wanted to specify that in my experience everyone does want increased sales and have results with KPIs, but many times these things actually won't do it. Maybe they will improve some KPIs, but still won't have results where they would bring in more sales/profits. E.g. KPIs are cherrypicked, gamed in some way, they are flawed, increasing the KPIs comes at cost of something else, so sales are actually unaffected or they even have a negative effect.

Or at least leadership definitely and obviously wants it, but product and design under leadership wants to just convince leadership that it's going to do that. But frequently it isn't or it's very difficult to analyze that data and it's easy to cherry pick flawed metrics retroactively to try to convince leadership that it actually did some improvements. It's difficult to question and verify any sort of metrics without launching a whole investigation into it yourself, which rarely someone would have an incentive to do so.

It could be that at your workplace maybe these things actually do improve KPIs and sales, I would actually be more happy with that compared to if there are meaningless changes or changes that make things worse that don't improve sales at all.

My problem with KPIs and sales is that I've seen the people I work with actively make decisions that make the experience worse for our users because it increases the amount and/or value of sales we make, verified through A/B testing. Meanwhile ignoring or deprioritising legitimate issues because it can be very difficult to "prove" that it would increase KPIs.

I've long been of the opinion that UI/UX "experts" cannot be full-time employees, otherwise you will get a constant stream of utterly pointless changes and redesigns to justify their employment. I'm sorry, please design the product you were asked for and move on.

UI/UX contractors are not much better - they still need to justify their billable hours somehow, leading to pointless changes.

What's really needed is internal pushback against UI changes without user studies to back them up as well as a willingness to listen to user complaints and not just brush them off as "people complain no matter what change is make hurdurdur". Perhaps also an understanding that even neutral changes (as far as usability is concerned) have a negative cost to users.

I like the part where it clearly knows a tv with sound is disconnected but it doesnt switch to the only working audio device. Trips around the settings and back get all the more interesting like that.

I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored until it bothers me with a popup that is slightly to fast to interact with.

I belive a complicated ui should have a kind of blog where you can find all the nonsense going doen in chronological order with tags and categories.

I've kept a file called "problems.txt" for the last two years, where I record the many Windows aggravations for posterity (and for when they happen again).

If you begin the txt file with .LOG each time you open the file Notepad will add a timestamp and a new line at the end of the document.

I stopped using Notepad because updates were turning it to shit, now I use SciTE (with a command rigged up to run a .bat to insert time and date on a key combo, which is the one thing I missed from Notepad).

> I dont even know where my failed prints from 6 months ago are stored

Bluetooth & devices > Printers & Scanners > pick any printer > Open print queue. The Print Queue can also then jump between printers.

And you don't need to go into the Settings app to change sound devices. Click the Sound icon in the taskbar, click the icon to the right of the slider with what looks like little sliders and an arrow, choose your device. But even then its pretty easy using the full Settings app. System > Sound > click the circle next to the device you want to change to the default. I don't get how that's materially worse than Control Panel > Sound > Right click > Set as Default Device.

I do know how to right click the printer icon in the tray.

The os should know when new screens are attached or removed and take logical action.

If you have 2 cars in your driveway you have to chose. If one is removed, which one do you use?

Putting things under system or behind a vague icon is not instantly obvious. If i did that i would sell nothing.

That 3 things combined in one icon is wrong is already obvious where you refer to it as the sound icon. The convention is for the banana icon to open the banana menu. You switch to the banana mind set and learn new banana features.

It is not the engineers. It is the product and UX who never actually use the product themselves.