Metro is much more than just a user interface. It’s a new experience. A new Windows 8 way of life… All right, I’m going to stop now.
UI elements aside, Metro is about immersive applications. Users will pretty much need to forget all they know about traditional Windows desktop programs. They’ll all still be there if they’re needed, but there are new apps in town. Metro apps. Steve knows all about it:
The challenge with the discussion of Metro style was definitely due to the ordering of our blog posts. We were not sure whether to speak abstractly at first or concretely. Given that nearly 6 million people viewed the video demonstration of the Windows 8 user experience (a rather in-depth demo) we felt that people already had the context for the user experience. That probably wasn’t a good assumption on our part. We also know that even with that much background, until you can touch the software it is going to be difficult to develop a complete picture. Many products look better or worse until you can use them. I’m fairly certain that in this case we have a lot of upside.
In many of the comments, people primarily focused on Metro as what I would say are the graphical elements of the user interface—it was Metro v. Aero. We’ve seen a clear turn where Aero is the past and Metro is the future. And with that a strong desire for the existing Windows experience to take on a new look or a Metro redesign. These comments are usually focused on style and looking “old” or “new.” Generally, those details of the visual styling come later in the engineering process, but we wrongly assumed that this was known. Stating that, we could have short-circuited this concern.
A lot of this discussion will depend ultimately on what Metro comes to mean for folks. As we looked at Metro style for Windows 8, as we talked about in an earlier post, we see much more than a more monochrome set of visuals and fewer controls (when there are fewer commands). We see a new platform, a reimagining of Windows. For Windows 8, Metro style means a new type of app—an app that learns from and improves upon the current (and most popular) platform. This is a lot of what we’ll talk about at BUILD. If you watchVideo #1 you can see Metro style apps at work. At BUILD we’ll talk about the attributes of those apps, and the tools and languages you can use to create those apps. What we’ve said is that there is a very deep platform that provides for a rich opportunity for apps of all types—from media to social to games to productivity. We don’t see any limits to where this will go.
The other part of this dialogue is about the desktop. The desktop is many things to many people. To some it is literally the place where the important documents are stored (the most important folder). To some it is the Explorer window for managing files (it is an app to some). To some it is a metaphor or even Windows itself (toolbars/ribbons, menus, MDI/SDI, etc.). To some, their view of the desktop is an app they run “all the time” and they experience Windows only through File Open or maybe the Start menu (for example, people who for the most part use Outlook or Word, or Photoshop, or AutoCAD, or a line of business app). The desktop might even be relatively invisible to someone who does a lot of web browsing.
The unique element of Windows has always been the “open market” approach to interface. We embraced how people used and adapted the Windows APIs to bring unique experiences to market. Within any context there really isn’t a single “desktop” experience. Certainly some have been critical in the past that “Aero” did not achieve a uniformity or consistency, even within Windows.
We said the desktop is like an app in Windows 8—you can use it or not, as much or as little as you want. Some have said “it feels jarring” to go to the desktop. My perspective is that it is no more or less jarring that switching between any other apps if you embrace diversity or experiences that are built for a specific task or purpose. Today’s websites (and mobile apps) do not strive for consistency across disparate properties or apps, and the shell of a browser does little to prevent a jarring effect as you switch tabs (or apps). We’ve long embraced apps that have palettes or toolbars, full screen / windowed / MDI, built-in controls or custom controls. The mechanisms to implement this variety are part of the desktop heritage. Some wish for more uniformity or policing. As a member of the team that built our early Windows tools, I know we tried. Even in the most homogeneous platform, developers will strive to differentiate and build their user experiences for specific purposes and experiences will diverge from commonality Commonality was an answer to complexity in another era–today we are surrounded by digital experiences of all different types and we readily adapt (just as people adapted to a wide variety of print formats or video formats as these technologies improved from their first generations). The answer today is whether the design works in the context for which it was intended.
That diversity allows us to say with confidence that going from Metro style to the desktop will be harmonious—as harmonious as switching apps or sites is today. It will take orchestration at the top level to make moving seamless—that’s why you see things like switching between apps, snapping apps, or even using ALT+TAB between apps, and the desktop itself, all mechanisms that just work. The animations will work. Copy / Paste will work. Even bridging between “legacy” control panel applets will work.
There’s a lot more to this topic, as I said. I wanted to touch on some of the feedback and play back some of what has occurred to me and other folks on the team as we read through the dialogue. I think we need to do more in terms of showing the product and maybe we erred on the side of too much transparency too soon, but we’re on board and moving forward. BUILD is just a few days away.
