Project NEON is an Important Step Forward for Windows 10 (Premium)

A long-rumored user experience update called Project NEON is coming to Windows 10 in a future release. It can’t happen quickly enough.

We’ve been discussing Project NEON since the beginning of 2017 thanks to a credible leak that displayed many of the coming changes. Put simply, NEON is the first major UX change to Windows since Windows 8. And as such, it is arguably overdue. But is nonetheless quite welcome as well. Assuming Microsoft gets it right, of course.

I have reasons to fear. Microsoft’s history with user experience changes is checkered at best. The first major change in the modern era came with Windows Vista, which introduced Aero hardware acceleration and the kind of transparency affects that Mac OS X had pioneered on the desktop several years earlier. We can blame the lengthy development of that release—codenamed Longhorn previously—on its lateness, but it arrived with a thud when many discovered that the integrated graphics in the PCs of the day didn’t support the new effects. And Microsoft didn’t help its case—or its customers—by saddling those users with the ugliest Windows UX ever created, called Aero Basic.

Fortunately, Microsoft improved both Aero and Aero Basic in Windows 7, an incremental update that basically cleaned up the niggling issues in Windows Vista and was successfully marketed as a major new version to an unsuspecting public.

But there were bigger changes coming. Thanks to the rapid and unexpected success of Apple’s iPhone and mobile in general, Microsoft was forced to restart its phone efforts from scratch. And the small Windows phone team wisely elected to forego the outright copying that Google was doing with Android and really think through mobile usage cases. Part of the resulting work was an innovative and user-centric new UX called Metro.

Speaking of copying, Microsoft’s bigger Windows team then basically stole Metro from Windows phone and adapted it to its own needs without ever consulting again with the team that invented it. The result was the biggest disaster in Windows history, Windows 8, a release that was tailored for “touch-first” interactions that users never embraced.

But even the Windows team’s terrible unilateral strategy couldn’t destroy some of the benefits of Metro, which later needed to be rebranded when a German conglomerate sued Microsoft over the name. (It’s resulting names were legion and need not be repeated here.) The result was a hybrid UX that retained the desktop paradigm of the past while adding a new flat and modern layer on top.

Put simply, though, Windows 8 was a mess, with two separate types of interfaces—desktop and Metro—that never meshed well together. So when the team responsible for this debacle was scattered to the winds and replaced, irony alert, with the team responsible for Windows phone, it was apparent to everyone that the Windows UX was about to get a lot better.

And then that never really happened.

The Windows 10 UX is in fact just a minor evolution over what was offered in Windows 8, and while there have been some useful changes—the return of a real Start menu, for example—it retains the weird hybrid look and feel and functionality of Windows 8. That is, there are still separate desktop and modern UXs mingling together in a fairly disharmonious way in Windows 10.

To see what I mean, consider a simple example: The old-school File Explorer, which retains the Win32 look and feel of Explorer UIs dating back decades, and a modern Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app like Groove, which utilizes a flat, Metro-style UX. They are not visually related in any way whatsoever, despite sharing some common UI conventions.

It is not clear yet whether NEON will address this problem, but to be fair to the current Windows team, they have been working—slowly, but working—to remove or obviate legacy UXs as they push more and more UWP experiences to replace them. You can see this most clearly with the UWP Settings app, which is slowly replacing Control Panel. It gets a bit closer with each Windows 10 revision.

But legacy UXs are all over the place in Windows 10, still, and File Explorer shows no sign, yet, of being replaced by something more modern looking. My hope is that Project NEON takes this necessary step.

Regardless, the flat Metro look and feel is starting to feel outdated, with Google and even Apple both copying and extending it on their own mobile platforms in recent years. It is time, once again, for Microsoft to move the needle forward and advance the state of the art for PC user interfaces. Apple certainly isn’t doing so on the Mac, after all.

As Brad noted yesterday, Microsoft this week teased the coming UX changes. Sadly, they used an app, Groove, which was previously leaked, so there’s nothing really new to see here. And it’s not clear, again, whether this UX change will be applied to Win32 UIs.

This consistency is necessary. Yes, moving past the Metro-style Windows 8 UX is important for the UWP world. But this UX needs to be applied everywhere. So cross your fingers. Because consistency is what Microsoft has always screwed up.