Programming Windows: Reimagining Feedback (Premium)

With the Windows 8 Developer Preview, the Windows team had finally gone public with its plans to abandon .NET and pursue a mobile and touch-first strategy. The reaction was, to put it kindly, mixed. And not just with developers: Its indefensible Windows 8 design decisions had ironically put the Windows team on the defensive.

Those decisions---which included removing the Start button and the Start menu, creating a new mobile environment in which apps could only be run full-screen, and then pushing that environment on top of the Windows desktop that everyone well understood---were objectively wrong and not in the best interests of the billion-plus customers who used Windows on traditional PCs. But what made them all the more intolerable was that they were made by a team that incessantly touted the benefits of telemetry data and feedback, two things it utterly ignored in designing Windows 8.

Given another year, Microsoft could have fixed Windows 8 and created a platform that would appeal to all users, regardless of the types of PCs they preferred. But instead of taking the time to respond to the reasonable concerns that they were hearing from customers---and, increasingly, from its PC maker partners and internal critics---Steven Sinofsky and his team dug in their heels. And in a seemingly endless parade of wordy “Building Windows 8” blog posts, they simply defended what they were doing and made no substantial changes at all.

In the beginning, these arguments were hard for Windows 8’s critics to refute. After all, the Windows 8 Developer Preview, which Microsoft had shipped in September 2011, wasn’t feature-complete and it was missing key elements of the final user interface. And so the Windows team could simply argue, hypocritically, that the complaints it was hearing were based on incomplete data.

And that’s exactly what they did.

“Discussing user interface is something a lot of people want to do, but doing so through static images very quickly misses the point,” Sinofsky opined in early September 2001. “Very much like zooming in too far with a microscope, the big picture is lost. It also surfaces the least actionable sorts of feedback to wade through of the ‘love it’ / ‘hate it’ variety.”

“To me the most interesting feedback has been about the visual overhead,” he added in a lengthy follow-up post the next day. “The role of Metro came up and how we should use a lighter graphical treatment and also just expose fewer commands because people want minimalism now. Obviously we all want less---fewer exposed features means less surface area which means less code to write, test, maintain. Minimalism is not hiding features or making useful things hard to get to. Minimalism is about stripping things down to fundamental features. The question then is really defining that set of features. Our approach to minimalism is to avoid layers of commands or hidden pockets of features (those mechanisms themselves...

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