Is Microsoft’s Metro UI the real problem?

Two weeks ago InfoWorld debuted Windows Red, our reimagining of Windows 8, which proposed splitting Windows 8 in two — the Windows Desktop for PCs and laptops, and Metro for smartphones and tablets — while preserving some interoperability between the two. Given the dismal response to Windows 8, the basic idea seemed pretty obvious to us.

But is the mashup of two UIs the only problem? Or is Metro — aka the Modern UI — the elephant in the way of the adoption of Windows 8? After all, neither Windows smartphones nor Windows RT tablets are exactly flying off the shelves compared to Android or iOS devices.

A recent post by Wes Miller of Directions on Microsoft in his Getwired.com blog inspired me to revisit this question. He argues that Microsoft’s pitch for Metro centers on live tiles, which he believes are often not that useful.

The tile trade-off

Miller says Microsoft’s live tiles draw too much attention to the OS and distract from the apps. I’ve seen Steve Ballmer make the opposite argument: A customized Start screen with live tiles gives you a dashboardlike readout of information from the apps you use most without the user having to click anything.

Both have a point. There’s something about live tiles that reminds me of the early days of the Web, when home pages went wild with spinning, flashing doodads. On the other hand, I personally know fans of the Metro UI who like having that top level of information on display.

The trade-off is this: Tiles already take up a lot of room compared to icons, and if you like live tiles, you’ll probably want them large-sized so that they’re big enough to convey useful information — latest messages, weather, and so on. Obviously, this means many fewer apps visible on-screen at a time, although it’s easy enough to scroll horizontally to find them.

You could chalk this all up to a matter of taste. Except for one point: If the chief selling point is a Start screen of live tiles you’ve tweaked to display just what you want, customization should be much easier.

Magic fingers

It’s easy enough to drag tiles around with your finger and arrange them the way you want. But to unpin a tile from the Start menu, change its size, or turn its live functionality off or on, you need to swipe down on the tile to pop into edit mode.

Swiping down is Metro’s equivalent of a right click. But for new users, there’s no way of intuiting that gesture, just as in the famous Dad test there’s no way of guessing without being told how to make the Charms bar appear.

Simply put, gestures are a problem with the Metro UI. Here’s how the UI expert Jakob Nielsen put it in a post last November:

The tablet version of Windows 8 introduces a bunch of complicated gestures that are easy to get wrong and thus dramatically reduce the UI’s learnability. If something doesn’t work, users don’t know whether they did the gesture wrong, the gesture doesn’t work in the current context, or they need to do a different gesture entirely. This makes it hard to learn and remember the gestures. And it makes actual use highly error-prone and more time-consuming than necessary.

As an extreme example, Nielsen mentions the gesture to reveal the list of currently running applications, which requires a sort of finger pirouette. Me, I find creating a new group of tiles a little taxing. The first step — dragging a tile all the way to the right until a gray bar appears — can be tricky. Nor would I have randomly guessed that zooming out and swiping down would serve up an option to name that group.

I could go on. Few users seem to like the Metro version of IE10 and its minimalist UI with URLs arbitrarily on the bottom. Fewer still like the Metro Xbox Music app. Plus, Bing gets pushed in your face a lot, and as CITEworld’s Matt Rosoff pointed out recently, Bing still can’t hold a candle to Google search.

There’s more, but it’s not necessary to the obvious conclusion: Metro itself is an inhibitor to Windows 8 adoption, not just the mashup of Metro and desktop.

Tweaks and promises

Windows 8.1 (aka Windows “Blue”) addresses some of the drawbacks — for example, 8.1 adds the ability to sort tiles by most used, date, and category. Of course IE11 is on its way, along with improvements to other fundamental Metro apps, including the Xbox Music app.

To be fair, I have little doubt that some of the resistance to Metro is simply because the UI is truly new. Microsoft partisans shriek loudly that those who refuse to spend time learning their way around Metro are simply Luddites who are too blind to see the beauty of a fabulously fresh UI.

Perhaps. But to get users to climb any learning curve, you need a reward at the end of the rainbow. Today, Metro apps do not exactly amount to a pot of gold — and as yet we’ve seen little sign that third-partly developers will flock to a platform that has yet to prove itself in the marketplace.

This article, “Is Microsoft’s Modern UI the real problem?,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Eric Knorr’s Modernizing IT blog. And for the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld on Twitter.