About That New Start Menu (Premium)

It’s been a tough month for Microsoft fans. Between Apple’s blockbuster Mac announcements and the respective closings of Mixer and the Microsoft retail stores, we’ve been reeling from hit after hit. And then the Apple developers leaked benchmark scores for prototype Apple silicon-based Macs, demonstrating that the performance of this system is, as feared, dramatically better than that of Microsoft’s Surface Pro X. Surely there’s some good news out there.

That good news seemingly arrived yesterday in the form of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 20161, which features what Microsoft calls a “freshening up” of the Start menu in which the “solid color backplates” that have been used behind icons and tiles is removed, creating what it says is “a more streamlined design.”

Many believe that good design is in the eye of the beholder, but I as noted to one commenter the other day, it’s equally possible that good design is just good design, and that if someone doesn’t like good design, you know, maybe they just have bad taste.

The question, of course, is whether this is good design.

My answer may confuse you. The refreshed Start menu is not a “design” at all. Instead, it’s just a minor change to a design that debuted in 2015 with the original release of Windows 10. It’s so minor, in fact, that it doesn’t even rise to the level of “lipstick on a pig.”

Let me explain.

For those who haven’t heard this story, the designer of the Microsoft Office ribbon once confided to me that Microsoft used to refer to previous Office UX overhauls as “lipstick on a pig.” That is, with each new version of Office, Microsoft would semi-arbitrarily change the look and feel of the toolbars and menus, not to make them better or prettier, but just to make them different. The idea was that you could look over the shoulder of someone using Office and immediately tell which version it was by the look and feel. Lipstick on a pig was about making life easier on support personnel and not about making Office better. (Though there were often functional improvements, too, of course.)

So lipstick on a pig is one level of design. It is, at least, different from what came before. But the new Start menu isn’t even different enough that most people would see the difference. If you looked over the shoulder of two people using two different Windows 10 versions, one with the refreshed Start menu and one without, you’d have to be really paying attention to see the differences. From a distance, you’d never spot them.

More important, this change doesn’t alter the functionality of the Start menu in the slightest. There are no new features, just a subtly changed look.

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