14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8 was launched with a very controversial Metro environment that caused quite a lot of confusion and made the operating system pretty difficult to use especially for beginners.
Microsoft, however, hasn’t explained the reasons for making such a dramatic change in Windows 8, sticking instead to praising words which pointed out that the Start screen is a much better replacement for the traditional Start Menu.
As Neowin recently spotted, a Microsoft UX designer took to Reddit to discuss about the Metro UI, pointing out that this new environment was specifically designed for simple tasks such as checking Facebook, photo viewing or web browsing.
As far as the decision to make the Modern UI default in Windows 8, the designer, who posted on Reddit with the name “pwnies,” explained that Microsoft had to “force” users to see the Start screen because it needed them to discover the Metro UI. If the operating system was booting to desktop, just like its predecessors, nobody would have ever talked so much about Metro, he adds.
“The short answer is because casual users don't go exploring. If we made desktop the default as it has always been, and included a nice little start menu that felt like home, the casual users would never have migrated to their land of milk and honey,” he said.
“They would still occupy the desktop just as they always had, and we would have been stuck in square one. So we forced it upon them. We drove them to it with goads in their sides. In 8.1, we softened the points on the goads by giving users an option to boot directly to desktop.”
And now that everybody knows that Metro is an essential part of the operating system, Microsoft has more time to play with it, so the company is looking into ways to improve it and make the new environment much more intuitive and usable.
“Now that the casual users are aware of their new pasture, we can start tailoring. It will be a while before the power users start seeing the benefits of this (that's why I said they'd benefit in the long run). Right now we still have a lot of work to do on making Metro seem tasty for those casual users, and that's going to divert our attention for a while,” the designer concluded.