Every time when comes to Windows 8, I feel sad… The reason is simple, I want the latest version, but I feel better with the earlier one. So even though I was the first group of people out there who started trying Windows 8 since Developer Preview, then Customer Preview, Release Preview, and RTM. But finally I degraded (several times) to Windows 7, which is my favorite so far.
Some people might think I am not a fan of Metro UI, but they are wrong. I am a big fan of that, and I started using Windows Phone since Mango (7.5) is still in test version. I love Metro, but as well as Aero. I have posted about this and wrote Windows 7 along with VS 2010, Office 2010 etc, as well as Windows Phone 7.5 are the highest level Microsoft had reached on UI design (of course in my personal opinion).
It was not my plan to write this post actually. I made a comparison image of the start screens on early Windows 8 concept image and Windows 8 released to public a long time ago, and I have never thought that I might be wrong. Here’s the image:
I like the earlier one (which in my opinion uses more reasonable colors) much more than the released version. No matter the color gradient or hue. But I was so confident and thought everyone will agree with me, until I sent this image in a group chat and get punched just now.
I always think I am person gifted on many, including some aesthetic feelings, and I don’t think this is negotiable. So I begin to wondering, how do most of the people judge the beauty of everything? One word I heard today was bright. So I started to thinking about all the facts that might bring visual impact just like bright colors, but may need more time to figure this out.
As far as I know, most of people just don’t care about the arrangement of colors. For Windows Phone users, a messy start screen is a proof. Also, most of them don’t care about the proportions of the elements (including text elements and images, no need to mention colors), and a proper margin between them just doesn’t matter to most of the people either, if it doesn’t make the features harder to use.
It is good to find that many IT industry leaders in China still have the first class designers so far, like Tencent, Alibaba. Actually even many start-up companies do. But what happened to companies like Microsoft and Apple? I still remember one of the reasons why I kind of liked Microsoft was that they had the best designers…
One of the reasons comes to me is, they might have valued the marketing researchers too much, and letting them manipulate designers and developers. Or maybe a much simpler answer, they just have lost the best people they had and that’s all.