14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft’s migration towards a modern operating system has created additional challenges for the company, as Windows 10 now needs to connect two different worlds and ensure a smooth transition between them.
I’m talking about the classic, Win32 interface and the touch-optimized one that’s powered by the Microsoft Store and Fluent Design.
As part of this effort to interconnect them, however, Microsoft got lost somewhere in between, and the result is what we can all see in Windows 10 right now.
The little details are the ones that matter, and a photo that’s now viral on reddit shows that UI consistency is something Windows 10 never heard of. The user interface in Windows 10 relies on no less than eight different shades of grey, which are implemented in different parts of the operating system.
Microsoft can’t decide on just a shade of grey
This isn’t necessarily a new problem, as Windows 10 users also found out the hard way that in the previous OS feature updates, there was more than just a single design for context menus. And this problem still exists in the April 2018 Update (version 1803), with one design when right-clicking the desktop, for instance, and another one for the taskbar context menu.
Ironically, user bluejeans7 who created the photo you see here says they had to rely on the classic Microsoft Paint for the picture because Paint 3D is too confusing. Paint 3D is part of Microsoft’s push for modern apps and it actually replaces MS Paint as the default offering in Windows 10.
Without a doubt, Microsoft is well aware of this mess, and even if it doesn’t, photos like these that go viral are obviously noticed by the company’s UI designers.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Windows 10 UI improved in the long term, but for now, this lack of consistency across the UI is part of the OS feature package.