Windows 8′s New Explorer: This One Goes To 11

The Building of Windows 8 development blog has been an interesting read for a while. Hearing straight from developers and then seeing unfiltered responses from users and secondary devs is refreshing, even if the topic isn’t particularly compelling or I don’t agree with their design choices. Today is perhaps the most extreme example of this so far. The discussion of the new file manager for windows 8 is worth reading — but is the file manager worth using?

The new ribbon UI for the explorer window is so cluttered with different-sized buttons, labels, multi-part icons, and tabs that I can barely parse it. It’s more like a hall of mirrors than a task-oriented workspace. Is this really the new, streamlined Windows?

Microsoft appears to be going in two directions at once. With the sleek Metro interface that was released , they are pushing towards the full-screen, super-natural, gesture-based navigation that people have come to expect to some degree in tablets. But under the hood, it looks like Windows is only getting more and more Windows-esque. I wrote some time back that Windows is the Hummer of all OS, and this seems to support that.

At the same time, Apple is comfortably moving in one direction, not that this is better. The UI changes in Lion are questionably efficient and powerful file management is simply not a priority. I don’t want to inject my personal preferences into it too much, but I think it’s beyond dispute that for some users, this is good, while for others it is frustrating and counter-intuitive.

But is there anyone who thinks that this wilderness of buttons is an effective way to communicate options and present actions to inexperienced users? The debate about the ribbon has gone on for a while, and again, it really seems like for some it’s a good idea, for others not so much. But this one in particular seems rather overpopulated. This is mainly because of the way Microsoft has designed the ribbon — it’s not a limitation of the grouped-buttons idea itself, which is something I see implemented well elsewhere every day. Look at the sheer number of arrows! Just in the top part of the window I count three up, ten down, one up and down, four right, and two left. With different contexts, weights, graphics, colors, and purposes.