Windows 8 Officially Sucks. But So Does Every Other PC Interface

The verdict is in: Windows 8’s redesigned user interface stinks. Usability expert Jakob Nielsen issues these verdicts every time an innovative piece of software gets loosed upon the world. His tastes are unpredictable and sometimes weirdly at odds with how everyday users react to these products. The iPad? Riddled with problems. But that much-loathed “ribbon” in Microsoft Office? Genius! So I read his lengthy takedown of Windows 8’s tiled interface (once called Metro, now called Modern UI) with my usual mixture of interest and bemusement. Here’s the tl;dr version: Windows 8 is full of unfamiliar things and unfamiliar things are often a pain in the butt to use. 

But here’s the thing about PC desktop interfaces: they’re ALL a pain in the butt to use. If you’re a Mac user like me, you probably think OS X is a paradise of usability and intuitiveness. Guess what? It isn’t. I had this plain fact thrown in my face recently when I gave my old Macbook to my mother-in-law as a gift. She had been using a Windows PC for years so she wasn’t starting from zero; heck, she loves Pinterest. Still, it took a surprising amount of effort to simply walk her through basic things like launching and quitting applications, downloading and finding files, and connecting to the internet. I was left with an inescapable feeling that, even after 20 years of graphical user interfaces and the WIMP paradigm, pretty much nothing about using a personal computer is “intuitive”; it’s merely familiar or unfamiliar in the details. Would my mother-in-law have found a Windows 8 PC, with all of its usability “sins”, any more annoying to use at first than the Macbook I gave her? Honestly, I doubt it. 

This isn’t to say that user experience research is a red herring and sweating the small stuff in UI design is pointless. But the differences in usability between, say, Mountain Lion and Macintosh System 1.0–or Windows 8 and Windows 95–are pretty incremental. What really pushes human-computer interaction forward are updates to the basic underlying metaphors. Does Windows 8 muddle the difference between clicking and touching screen elements in confusing ways? Sure. But it’s still a familiar WIMP metaphor tricked up in some unfamiliar (for now) window dressing. Meanwhile, consider the difference in usability between Windows 8 and a command-line metaphor like MS-DOS. Windows 8 doesn’t seem like such a steaming pile anymore, does it?