"Explore—go off into the craziest recesses of interaction models you’d like to see[…]
Even if you end up back where you started, you’ll have lit up the entirety of the “Zelda map” of possibilities, as it were. You’ll understand the context of your choice in the greater whole, and your work will be decidedly more confident for doing so."
~ Craig Mod, Designer, Flipboard (via A List Apart)
This is genuinely Microsoft’s idea of a “streamlined”, “optimized” UI for Windows Explorer. They were so proud of it they wrote a blog post about it.
The post is a sort of masterpiece of crazy rationalization, but I think my favourite part may be this screenshot:
Here, they proudly overlay the UI with data from their research into how often various commands are used. They use this to show that “the commands that make up 84% of what users do in Explorer are now in one tab”. But the more important thing is that the remaining 50% of the bar is taken up by buttons that nobody will ever use, ever, even according to Microsoft’s own research. And yet somehow they remain smack bang in the middle of the interface. The insanity is further enriched by this graph:
Again, this is Microsoft’s own research, cited in the same post: nobody — almost literally 0% of users — uses the menu bar, and only 10% of users use the command bar. Nearly everybody is using the context menu or hotkeys. So the solution, obviously, is to make both the menu bar and the command bar bigger and more prominent. Right?
Microsoft UI has officially entered the realm of self-parody.
Chrome - Notification bar overlaps with the browser UI, that way it can be distinguished from fake bars.
/via stefanwehrmeyer
Perhaps my new favorite blog. I’m a sucker for great design with purpose.
I'll take two, please.
Obsessed with Wally yachts and awed by their design. Can’t wait to see some of these in production, despite the insane waste of wealth they represent.
WHY? Because we can!
Awesome. I would buy this thing in a heartbeat if I had $160 Million extra dollars… Absolutely incredible.
About Me
A strategy consultant with a passion for IT, geopolitics, economics, media, and simple, elegant approaches to difficult problems. This represents my favorite slices of the web and serves as networked storage for my brain which is now entirely pointer-based. Opinions expressed here are my own and do not represent those of any organization with which I may or may not be allegedly associated.
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