Microsoft Killed the Start Menu Because No One Uses It 862
An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft recently killed the Start Menu, and their explanation for it seems fairly straightforward: no one used it. This may be a bit of an exaggeration, but Microsoft explains that use of the Start menu dipped by 11 percent between Windows Vista and Windows 7, with many specialized Start functions — such as exploring pictures — declining as much as 61 percent."
Launchy did it for me (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I started using Launchy [launchy.net] that pretty much took away my need for the Start button.
Launchy plus the Quick Launch toolbar (for Windows XP) pretty much does the job.
Once in awhile I go to Start and am surprised by how much stuff I have installed.
Re:Launchy did it for me (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, I keep 3 programs pinned to the taskbar, but I use the Start menu all the time since I don't want my taskbar or desktop cluttered with shit. Also, I'm a big mouse user and don't want to type what I want to run.
Re:Except for when you need it (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not, since it doesn't look only in command names, but also in their human-readable descriptions; and not just from the beginning, but a match anywhere in it. It also searches other things that register with it, e.g. Control Panel applets (pretty handy - you can type something like "make text bigger", and it'll get you to the DPI settings; on the other hand, if you type "fdisk", it opens the partition manager, even though that's not called fdisk - so apparently there's some keyword-based system there). I believe it also looks in the standard Documents and Pictures folders.
I think KDE had something similar since 4.x, though.
A baffling mystery (Score:1, Interesting)
I've been in various IT roles that involve direct user support and to my experience the Start button is a box of secrets of mysteries to average users. They don't use it and have no real interest in even trying. If they don't have an icon on their desktop, then the software/word document/powerpoint/whatever simply doesn't exist. There is a staggering number of people who don't even understand how to use the primary input device on their laptop. Every day I have walk-ins who report issues only to discover it's because they're trying to operate the touchpad by randomly banging on it like a bongo drum. Even after you politely explain to them the very complicated concepts of left click, right click and scrolling. Or they've decided to only use the right button under the touchpad- just because. "Why does it keep bringing this menu up?!? It's broken!"
Reminds me of that Star Trek:TNG episode.
"It doesn't go...can you make it go?"
Re:Indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
People seem to want symbolic icons that represent the programs they want to run; they don't want to look through a long menu and read a bunch of text.
Want and use are two different things.
Its been proven by human interface design studies people have been trained to desire, even demand squigglie icons, but in actual use they simply read the text.
Some of it is cultural. If you live in a culture where literacy = two dozen or so glyphs, you probably don't use icons and just read the text underneath them, or, frankly, guess based on location and tool tip popups. If you live in a culture where literacy = ten thousand different glyphs, then you probably actually use icons.
Do you visually scan for an orange slime trail underneath and over a white blue circle, or the words "Firefox"? Most people look for the words.
Re:This is like GM removing the spare in trunk (Score:5, Interesting)
So much easier to keep people inside a walled garden if there are no doors or ladders. It's called behavioral shaping [wikipedia.org] and it is much more profitable when your customers' options are limited and locked.
Re:...the dock. (Score:4, Interesting)
Windows + TAB + TAB + Enter = Shutdown
Actually, no - it's the last action you performed from the submenu. If that was a restart, it will restart instead.
The reason why people don't use the start menu anymore is twofold, and both reasons are due to Microsoft, not the users:
1: The menu is inconsistent. Things move around. People choose options easier by spatial cues than by reading the text every time. "Smart" menus are anything but. (This goes for the godawful "awesomebar" in Firefox too)
2: The user should not wait for the UI, but the other way around. To have to hover and wait or click again, and then find and hit little arrow keys to scroll through the full list, you slow down the user, without adding anything of value.
I've tried Windows 8 preview, but it took me half an hour to find out how to shut down, and I still haven't figured out how to navigate to and bring up the program I want to run. It's just not intuitive. "Try to look like an iPhone" is a recipe for failure unless you are an iPhone. This is why Gnome 3 fails so badly too.
Re:This is like GM removing the spare in trunk (Score:4, Interesting)
And the problem fundamentally isn't that the Start Menu is too complicated. It's that they've never provided a good tool for *managing* it. So the average person, being unaware that it's just a bunch of directories and shortcut files, suffered with the floor-to-ceiling scrolling menu from hell. M$, on noting their complaints, responded by taking away most of the menu. This led to a different set of complaints, since now no one can find anything and the reaction is to give up on the start menu entirely.
But it still didn't solve the real problem, which as I said is still that there's no good tool that average non-savvy users can turn to for *managing* the Start Menu. How hard could it be to make a nice little interface (not relying on drag-and-drop in the live menu, which in my observation is usually a disaster) geared toward letting average folks sort out their programs into reasonable hierarchies, so the Start Menu isn't always One Huge Mess??