What My People Says About the Windows 10 UI (Premium)

This week, Microsoft finally provided its first public peek at My People, a new Windows 10 feature that will debut in the “Redstone 3” update that is now expected in September. Does this feature even make any sense?

I first wrote extensively about My People back in November, in Creators Update Marks a Welcome Return to the People-Centric Focus of Windows Phone. At the time, Microsoft intended to ship this feature in the Creators Update, but it later delayed the release to “Redstone 3.”

“We are placing people at the center of Windows,” Microsoft Principal Program Manager Lead Allison O’Mahony said at that October event, explaining the complexity of the patchwork of applications and services we use each day to connect with others. “[But] most of our communications happen with a few key people. These are the people who matter most in our day-to-day lives.”

Putting those people front and center makes some sense, though of course non-Microsoft platforms don’t offer much in the way of people-centric UIs. For example, on iPhone or Android, you pretty much work with apps. Do you want to call someone? Use the phone app. Text message? Messages. And so on.

I’ve always liked Microsoft’s friendlier approach, but with Windows 10 relegated to PCs and a few niche devices, that’s sort of beside the point unless you adopt solutions like Microsoft’s Arrow Launcher for Android, which, by the way, does offer a people-centric interface. Samsung’s Edge interface on newer Galaxies also lets you put people, if not front and center, then at least just a swipe away.

But a lot of us, several hundred millions of us, still interact with the world via traditional PCs every single day. So it’s understandable that Microsoft would bring its people-centric user experiences to its flagship PC platform too. The theory here is that you can think about a person first, and not an app, and then choose from available communication choices. For example, you might want to tell your spouse something, so selecting them—via some icon-based representation—and then going from there makes sense. It could be logical and efficient. In theory, anyway.

As first demonstrated in October, the interface that Microsoft has come up with is called My People. It’s accessed via a new button in the Windows 10 taskbar, and you can pin your favorite contacts—or at least “the people who matter most in our day-to-day lives”—to the taskbar as well.

We’ve waited a long time to try My People, but as you may have seen, Windows 10 Insider Preview build 16184 is the first to let testers try it out. (That said, Rafael previously provided the first-ever look at this feature, as well as a neat follow-up in which he actually got the hidden work working prior to Microsoft’s official unveiling.)

In use, My People has a few rough edges. It’s not as refined or attractive as the October demo: The people cards that pop-up when you click taskbar-based people icons are just normal rectangles and not the more attractive, non-rectangular shapes Microsoft highlighted then. It’s also kind of busy and inconsistent, and it takes an already over-crowded taskbar and adds yet another area of icons or buttons that don’t resemble, in any way, the other icons and buttons that are already there.

On my Surface Pro 4, I can also only see the first three people I pin to the taskbar. I’ve pinned a fourth, but I have to open My People to see that person, adding a step. By the time I can see the choices for that person, I could have forgotten why I’m there in the first place.

Available communication choices are slim: Just People (the Windows 10 contacts app), Mail, and Skype are available in this first preview. Naturally, it’s an open platform, so any app can add itself to this list. But it’s also Windows 10, and uptake on new app features is light. Using the app store or the Edge extensions library as a guide, I think it’s fair to say we’re going to be stuck with the basics here, possibly forever.

But the central question, of course, is whether My People actually makes any sense. That is, does putting “the people who matter most in our day-to-day lives” right into the taskbar actually … work?

Maybe. But I feel like this feature says more about a central failure of the Windows 10 user experience than it does about people we care about. That is, the entire tiles-based UI in the Start menu is a sham, and having lives tile on a panel you never look never made any sense. I would remind people that the original plan was to just let you pin your favorite people there, and I will further point out that the arrival of this new feature proves that that system did not work. It certainly doesn’t work for me.

So My people makes more sense in that, yes, your favorite people really are up front and center: After all, the taskbar is there all the time and is pretty much always visible. But I feel, too, that our PC usage patterns are a bit calcified. I actually use pinned taskbar apps regularly, but this feature debuted in 2009 in Windows 7, and plenty of Windows user still don’t do this.

Tablet mode is an issue, which is odd since you might assume that a touch-based UI would work better for a feature that sort of debuted on mobile. Because the taskbar in Tablet mode hides icons by default, you have to tap on the My People button to access your contacts, an extra step.

And while running apps, people cards appear in a Windows 8-like snap view. Yikes.

I’m concerned about the clutter, too: The taskbar is now overflowing with stuff, much of it added since Windows 10 first launched: My Surface Pro 4 has superfluous buttons for such things as Cortana, Task View, Windows Ink Workspace, Touch Keyboard, and Action Center all vying for the diminished on-screen real estate. I’m not sure it can handle any more stuff. I’m not sure that I can.

And since so few people remember this, I’ll point out that Microsoft’s notion of removing apps from the front line of user interaction isn’t new. It isn’t even new to mobile: One of the core user experiences in Windows 95—yes, Windows 95—was a document-centric user interface in which we were all going to stop thinking “Microsoft Word” and start thinking “that project I was going to work on with Bill.” Or something. It doesn’t matter, as it never really took off: Over 20 years later, we’re all still launching apps first and going from there.

I like that Microsoft is still trying, though I feel obligated to wonder aloud if news of that Windows 95 feature will be news to the folks at the company working on My People. That is, I don’t believe there is a rich continuum of work happening here over 20 odd years. Instead, it just seems that different people keep trying the same thing, over and over again.

A good idea is a good idea. But as the success of Android and iPhone proves, good ideas are only theories if there’s no usage. And today, the “whack a mole” approach of a grid of app icons has won, as painful as it is to say that. It works for billions of people every single day. And while I like the notion of My People, appreciate the humanness of it all, I’m not sure this is going to work. Or matter.

By which I mean, I’m not sure that anyone will ever actually use this feature. And that, ultimately, is what matters most of all.