LogInFormer Microsoft director of user experience Jensen Harris criticized the new Start menu in Windows 11 saying that he got "shocked by the user experience" the operating system's new release offers.
Jensen Harris, former director of user experience at Microsoft who led the team tasked with the redesign of Windows software user experience, recently took to Twitter to share his opinion about the reworked Start menu in Windows 11.
The ex-Microsoft employee shared that the idea to discuss it came to him spontaneously when he entered the query "chrome" in the search box and he got "shocked by the user experience." What he especially didn't like about the new interface was the right side of the Start menu which, according to him, looks like Internet Explorer toolbars in 2008 as there were too many elements on the right side of the menu that can distract the PC user from the main thing – search results.
Harris took a closer look at some of the interface elements and found several flaws in them. Most of all, Harris did not like the banner of the Bing Wallpaper application. The developer noted that the text in the banner is not centered and is "sitting on top of a Windows Vista-era background."
In addition, he noted that this banner has different corners – the left ones are rounded, while the right ones are just sharp corners. Besides, he pointed out that the bottom-left corner has a very strange rounding, not similar to the perfectly-rounded top-left corner.
Additionally, Harris stated that he considered Microsoft's decision to move the Start button to the middle of the taskbar as "not a good move." Previously, the button was always located in the lower left corner, allowing users to open the menu without aiming with the mouse course. Harris noted that corner location had "decades of muscle memory" as well as explained that when creating the previous Start button, the developers, among other things, applied Fitts' Law.
"Design matters. Details matter," Harris concluded. "Especially in UI as iconic as the Windows Start menu."
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