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Brace yourselves for the Orwellian double speaks and get your puke bags ready!

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Windows 8 UX designer on Metro: "It is the antithesis of a power user".

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"I want to talk about why we chose Metro as the default instead of the desktop, and why this is good in the long run - especially for power users.

...but not in the way you might think.

At this point you're probably expecting me to say that it's designed for keyboard execution, or some thing about improved time trials for launching programs, or some other way of me trying to convince you that Metro is actually useful. I've talked about those in the past extensively on reddit, but for this discussion let's throw that all out the window. For this discussion, assume that Metro is sh*t for power users (even if you don't believe it to be)."

"It was like a rented tuxedo coat - something that somewhat fit a wide variety of people. It wasn't tailored, because any aggressive tailoring would make it fit one person great, but would have others pulling at the buttons. Whatever feature we wanted to add into Windows, it had to be something that was simple enough for casual users to not get confused with, but also not dumbed down enough to be useless to power users. Many, MANY features got cut because of this."

"Our hands were bound, and our users were annoyed with their rented jackets. So what did we do? We separated the users into two groups. Casual and Power. We made two separate playgrounds for them. All the casual users would have their own new and shiny place to look at pictures of cats - Metro. The power users would then have free reign over their native domain - the desktop."

"Familiarity will always trump good design. Even if something is vastly better, if it is unfamiliar it will be worse. That's why people act like a unicorn was murdered every time facebook releases a new redesign. The windows 7 start menu IS better because it is familiar. We've used that design paradigm for the last 20 years. Metro is going to take some getting used to. As I mentioned, this is a long term strategy for MS. We knew full well casual users wouldn't like it initially. Hopefully in 5 years we'll look back and see we made the right decision."

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[Steven W]

Glad you brought this up. Something further:

Now that the casual users are aware of their new pasture, we can start tailoring. It will be a while before the power users start seeing the benefits of this (that's why I said they'd benefit in the long run). Right now we still have a lot of work to do on making Metro seem tasty for those casual users, and that's going to divert our attention for a while. But once it's purring along smoothly, we'll start making the desktop more advanced. We'll add things that we couldn't before. Things will be faster, more advanced, and craftier than they have in the past -- and that's why Metro is good for power users.

So, the definition of "is" is "will be"? Doubleplusgood.

[Steven W]

A great example is multiple desktops. This has been something that power users have been asking for for over a decade now. OSX has it, Linux has it, even OS/2 Warp has it. But Windows doesn't. The reason for this is because every time we try and add it to the desktop, we run user tests; and every time we find that the casual users - a much larger part of our demographic than Apple's or Linux's - get confused by it. So the proposal gets cut and power users suffer.

I remember showing a friend, that I'd hardly call a power-user, KDE. One of the first questions out of his mouth was, "What are those four little screens in the taskbar?". I demonstrated for him. I remember his astonishment and declaration that he'd use that all the time, going on and on about how he downloaded all this third-party stuff, like Taskbar Shuffle, etc. to help keep things organized in Windows.

This also demonstrates that Microsoft is only concerned with the lowest common denominator, I spoke in another post here about the consequences of being a publicly traded company. Another case in point.

[Scorpius]

Jacob Miller, posting as 'pwnies,' said Metro is the 'antithesis of a [power user's desktop],' and designed for 'your computer illiterate little sister,' not for content creators or power users.

Lowest common denominator, it seems that Microsof is working hard to keep the little sister ILLITERATE!