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UI expert says users will hate Windows 8 interface

posted on Aug 21st 2012 by

In case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of critics saying negative things about Windows 8. We’re not surprised, and we expected a lot of it. When a company as big as Microsoft changes so much there is bound to be some friction. The new “Modern UI” of Windows 8 is one of the main things critics have been talking about.

Raluca Budiu, a usability expert of the Nielsen Norman Group, had a lot to say about Windows 8 and what consumers will think about it.

“Windows 8 is optimized for content consumption rather than content production and multitasking,” he said. “Whereas content consumption can easily be done on other media… production and multitasking are still best suited for PCs. Windows 8 appears to ignore that.”

He does have a point. In my experience with Windows 8 I’ve found productivity to be the most difficult. The question is whether or not content consumption will be more important to consumers than productivity.

[via BGR]


  • blackjesus

    Why would you even question that consumers would worry more about production than consumption. Most machines running Win8 will at best be used for some email because that is what most average pcs are used for now. Go back and read the early Win8 design blogs about all of the telemetrics and usage data they used to design win8. Most people do very little production and very little multitasking. So MS said let’s focus on the stuff that will be done. MS isn’t saying that they aren’t focusing on business because that would be bad business, but it is true.
    All that taken into account, I’ve been using it since MSDN released rtm and I don’t find it to be less productive mainly because it runs incredibly fast. I was really wanting to replace my work machine but now that i have win8 on it, it feels like it is a brand new machine.

  • Sunovavic

    Crazy… how hard is it really to be productive on Windows 8? Seriously? If you are lazy then it will be hard to be productive. Maybe Windows 8 will weed out the lazy people who makes excuses not to be productive.

  • TomProfan

    Im an IT pro and I use almost never the startmenu in windows 7 since years (in xp it was the same). all programs i need frequently are in the taskbar as shortcuts.
    I use the searchfield, cmd field or use the keyboard commands cause its much faster then menus. I dont click through 5 windows if I want to start the services app. I press the windows button and type “services” and it shows me services.exe which opens when i press the return button.
    So for me its no difference to work in windows 7 or windows 8. Just that there are more keyboard shortcuts in windows 8. And any good software developer is working this way….

  • Raluca Budiu

    I have been paid by Apple to spread out this $H!+

  • CX1

    Who pays these idiots?

    I am a bit perturbed MS decided to hide the ability to pin “All Apps” to the task bar in the RTM. It did save a click or two.

  • https://market.android.com/developer?pub=Ender's+Games+and+Apps Brian Ouellette

    hard to be product in Windows 8?
    Office 365 with lots of features. Check. (I can edit PDFs!)
    Outlook. Check.
    Photo editing. Check (Gimp)
    Remote Desktop. Check.
    Visual Studio. Check.
    Web of course. Check. (IE10 is sweet! I forgotten about Firefox)
    I think most people are forgetting that behind that wonderful start screen is a desktop.