With the Microsoft trying to make it mark again in the market with its upcoming windows version – the Windows 8 – as the company is preparing for its late-February beta release. The company unveiled changes that according it is based on the feedback it gets from early testers.
The changes it mention aren’t pretty exciting – one is about identifying duplicate files during conflict resolution, other is about system changes, handling confirmations and interrupts, navigation pane scrolling issue and ribbon changes – which will replaces the traditional Windows file menu, are more fundamental.
Microsoft says the ribbon change is about “reducing distractions and trusting users to discover functionality on their own.” The company has decided to minimize the ribbon by default – earlier the Windows 8 ribbon was maximized and it took up a significant chunk of screen space.
According to Microsoft in its blog:
“We’re able to catch a glimpse at the data-driven process that fuels most of Microsoft’s design work.” Our view is that we do need to move the user interface forward and accept that a vocal set of customers are just not happy with the direction we’re going. When looked at broadly, that is balanced out by a majority of people who are happy and more productive with the changes.
We remind folks that there are third-party tools available (likely the tools being used by this set of people), that provide a number of different interface paradigms. We do embrace the notion that third-party tools play an important part in the Windows experience.
Ribbon also includes the changes – visible hotkeys when users hover over specific functions, the ability to roam your Windows Explorer settings to other Windows 8 PCs.
(Image Source: Microsoft blog post, Microsoft Windows logo)
