

Why I'm No Metrosexual - ziyadb
http://kyrobeshay.com/post/37101801643/why-im-no-metrosexual

======
untog
_And to add to the confusion, why are there different sized tiles?_

Why on earth would that be confusing? When I see a double door next to a
normal sized door I don't freak out and try to break down the wall instead.

I get the point being made in the article, but I don't quite buy it. I don't
think that people understand they can press app icons on the iPhone because
they have raised shadows around them, I think they press them because they are
visually eyecatching and surrounded by areas that are not. There are many
different visual cues out there, and people adapt to new ones all the time.

~~~
scott_s
But _why_ are the titles different sizes? There may be no reason beyond
aesthetics, but that's his point: differing sizes often conveys information,
and even if it does not, it takes effort on our part to realize that size
differences does not imply functionality difference.

And if I did see a double-door immediately next to a normal sized door, I
would wonder why that was set up like that. Is one the emergency exit? Is one
the freight-entrance?

~~~
potatolicious
Tiles are different sizes depending on their intended use. App tiles on Win8
are active - i.e. the app can render new information to them. A newsreader app
can tell you most recent headlines at a glance (without having to launch the
app), your email app can tell you number of unread messages, weather can
display current conditions without forcing you to launch.

Larger tiles are used by apps that need to convey more information - your
email app that just shows an unread count probably doesn't need more than the
standard 1x1 tile, your newsreader might want a 2x1 to have room for
headlines.

I'm not a huge fan of Metro, though I have been actively devving for Win8 for
a few weeks. I don't think this is really a problem - all of this stuff is
pretty obvious to users.

~~~
wccrawford
Except that they don't really obey those rules you laid out.

Minesweeper and Solitaire are double-width tiles, for instance. Why? Because
MS wanted them to be. I haven't found another reason.

So why would developers choose to have their tiles smaller than everyone
else's? Even MS didn't choose that.

~~~
hdctambien
My experience has been that "Windows 8 Apps" default to the 2x1 tile size and
all "pre-Windows 8 Apps" default to the 1x1 tile size that displays their
"desktop icon".

So the rule could be: "All apps start at 2x1 if they have a 2x1 tile designed,
otherwise they start at 1x1"

------
steve8918
I agree. I played around with the Surface RT for over 30 mins at a Microsoft
store with the intention of buying it for my parents for Christmas, and I
walked away because even I couldn't effectively figure out what the "rules"
were for interacting with Metro. I'm sure if I gave it more time, I could, but
there is no way my parents, who still use XP, would be able to figure it out.

I wasn't sure what I needed to do to get to the "Desktop" mode where it looked
like Windows 7, or how to flip back and forth, and which things I could swipe,
etc. I felt like it was a big mess because a lot of the UI features that we've
come to expect were not there. In contrast, the iPhone and subsequently the
iPad were intuitive right off the bat.

To be fair, I'm seeing a lot of this terrible UI experience in other things as
well. For example, on Chrome when you are reading a PDF, if you want to save
it or zoom, it's not obvious how to do it. You need to miraculously hover over
the bottom right corner and then the buttons show themselves, but there are no
visual cues indicating that that's what you're supposed to do. It's fancy, but
terrible UI.

The same thing occurs on Facebook, where people are just expected to know
where to hover in order to show functionality. I don't know where this trend
came from, but it's terrible, and I think this article is showing an extension
of how we are moving away from all the visual cues and things we've learned
about UX in the past 30 years. Sure, it's different but it doesn't mean it's
better, especially when it forced people to hunt, peck, and guess for
functionality, something that UX is supposed to get rid of.

~~~
32bitkid
anecdotally, my mom really likes Windows RT. Watching her use the traditional
start menu, or attempting to navigate Windows Explorer to find something is an
exercise in pain. She, honestly, really enjoys the full screen start menu --
easier to find the app she wants to start --, the WinRT full screen apps --
doesn't have to remember/think about window/application life cycle management.
It pretty much works the way that she wanted Windows XP to work in the first
place.

When I use Windows 8, on the other hand, I spend 99% of my time on the
desktop, and the transition to a full screen start menu/screen is pretty
jarring. But, honestly, as far as the new UI paradigms go, its not that much
of a mess... Try watching a Windows user try to use a OSX for the first time.
Or vice versa. Or a mac user trying to use KDE.

I think the real world analogy of the OP is a bit flawed. Babies don't
instinctually know how to open a door, that is not something we are
genetically programmed for. They learn by watching other people do it, and you
learn by trying. There is a low penalty for trying to failing to open a door
correctly -- sometimes you push instead of pull -- and that is the point of a
good user interface. Does Windows 8 succeed at that? Perhaps, but its not a
disaster.

A disaster would be a door that killed you if you tried to open it
incorrectly.

------
kolektiv
A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with
little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks,
but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the
sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've
_learnt that they probably are_. Consistency is also important. Whether people
will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess,
but it's more complex than this.

~~~
ajanuary
I agree that it's a tradeoff.

Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about
titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't
quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and
discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at
text on the screen.

I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it"
while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if
it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a
failed action, which seems more frustrating to me.

That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply
missing affordances = unusable UI.

------
marknutter
I think the issue is that one shouldn't go too far in the direction of
skeumorphism or too far away from it. Most people are comfortable with _some_
level of skeumorphism because it can be a powerful usability enhancement. As I
type this I'm looking at the "add comment" button below here on Hacker News,
and wouldn't you know it, it's got a slight gradient giving it a bevel,
suggesting it's occupying 3-dimensional space and can be pushed like a button.

Of course this can be taken too far. When too many skeumorphic accents are
added to a design it can cause it to be rigid and noisy. As the OP mentions,
if you go too far from skeumorphism you run contrary to how the human brain
works. My favorite user interface designs usually have a very tasteful and
well placed set of skeumorphic elements with an overall minimalist design.
Tactile, not tacky.

------
kenjackson
The author doesn't get it. A lot of the way users know what to click is based
on consistency. If it's a tile on the start screen you can click it. Want to
print? It's always in the same place? Want to share? Same place. Want to close
an app? Always the same way? Want to see more options for an app? The same
way.

Now within the app one could argue there is a stronger need for affordances,
but even there I've yet to encounter a single problem in my use of several
Win8 apps.

I find the Win8 interface a lot more intuitive than the OSX interface. But I'm
sure others would find the opposite. I suspect a lot depends on your starting
point and your predisposition. My four year son figured out most of the Win8
interface in about 5 minutes (literally... at the MS store he was flying
through the UI much better than I'd ever seen him with Win7 and a mouse).

~~~
bad_user
On my iPad, my 2-year old is able to unlock the screen, go to Home in case any
app is active and then open his favorite 2 apps (a simple game for toddlers
and a painting app).

That's not saying much though, he just did what all kids do ... tried things
out and quickly memorized what worked and it was easy and fun for him to do so
because of the touch-screen. He also taught me some shortcuts I had no idea
were available, like how to do multitasking by switching between active apps
or how to split the on-screen keyword into 2 smaller pieces :-)

In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in
a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how
intuitive an interface is, because all that really says about an interface is
that it can be learned by trial and error by kinds. Regular WIMP interfaces
are indeed not intuitive for kids because the interface is often exposed
through hierarchical menus that can't be explored by children who can't read.

~~~
kenjackson
_In general, kids can learn by trial and error quite efficiently, sometimes in
a matter of minutes or seconds and shouldn't be used as a benchmark for how
intuitive an interface is,_

That seems like a great benchmark to me. If trial and error gives feedback
that allows you to qiuckly learn the UI then that's pretty useful.

At the end of the day a lot of usability is about two things:

1\. Consistency 2\. Familiarity

If trial and error is effective then consistency is in place. Skeumorphism is
about taking familiarity of the real world and applying it to the digital
world. And this actually has some use, in particular for UI that users won't
interact with much. There's no chance for users to be become familiar with
that UI. But for UI that is always there, skeumorphism becomes limiting and
can become unusable when you really want to extend beyond what you see in the
real world.

Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should
optimize for it, not just the physical world." Is Metro perfect? No. But I
think it has the right idea to figure out what works on
computers/tablets/phones first. Don't be encumbered by trying to map to
physical objects. People will spend so much time with the digital objects that
they may spend 10m doing trial and error the first time, but shortly the
digital world will be just as familiar as the physical world. Lets not waste
the opportunity to introduce the right interactions.

~~~
bad_user
So I guess you've never seen a child being able to program the clock on a god-
awful VCR from the late-eighties / early ninties.

I was that kid, when no other member of the family could and let me tell you,
it had nothing to do with (1) consistency and (2) familiarity. What's "
_familiar_ " to a small child anyway? The notion is preposterous.

No, the issue has more to do with the fact that the organization of these
interfaces on mobile-devices tends to be flat (rather than hierarchical), so
the probability of hitting something that triggers an action of interest is
really high, versus searching in a menu with sub-menus, an action for which
you need to be able to read and with transitions that are not animated and
thus boring.

As I was trying to say, using a child as a benchmark for usability is a poor
benchmark, because if you look carefully a child does not care for neither
consistency or familiarity.

> _Metro says, "The digital world is becoming so prevelant that we should
> optimize for it, not just the physical world."_

IMHO, Metro only says " _let's differentiate from iOS and Android_ ", but
that's just an opinion.

------
stephengillie
That's a lot of buildup just to say you feel the interface to be unintuitive.

We know how to interact with different items because of experience and common
signals -- not all door handles are alike, but different interpretations of
the 2 major types (knob and lever) are similar enough to visually signal to us
their probable use-case (opening a portal in the wall).

Similarly, I could go on about how the "stop, wait, go lights" at the top of
windows in OSX are counterintuitive because they are in the same location as
their Windows counterpart, but have different functions. It's not intuitive
because the same visual signals provide different outcomes.

~~~
troebr
Exactly how I felt, not to say that it wasn't well written, but it sure takes
long to get to the point of this article.

------
Killah911
Why the need to use "Metrosexual" reference? A little sensationalist isn't it?

~~~
16s
Agreed. This has nothing to do with the term "metrosexual".

 __ _"Metrosexual is a neologism, derived from metropolitan and heterosexual,
coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban, post-
industrial, capitalist culture) who is especially meticulous about his
grooming and appearance"_ __\-
Source<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrosexual>

~~~
kyro
I'm very well aware of the term and would consider myself a metrosexual in
some ways. It was just a play on words.

~~~
jessedhillon
Yes, but not a very relevant (or clever) one. Just because two words can go
together doesn't make it a fit for the article's title. Something about
Metropolis would probably have been better, as in, not being a denizen of the
city of Metro.

Also, if you actually _do_ consider yourself to be metro, then it's even more
out of place.

------
richardlblair
/begin nerd rage/ For the love of god, why the hell is your font 11px?? What
the hell are you thinking??

You know how many people here would have had to zoom in?? Are you new to the
internet?? /end nerd rage/

~~~
Lagged2Death
I zoomed. I think your criticism is valid.

~~~
Retric
11px should be readable by default. If you zoomed you should change your
default settings or get your eyes checked.

Edit: I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt see:
<http://ycombinator.com/news.css>

~~~
Lagged2Death
_I would also like to point out that HN uses font-size:10pt..._

The 10 _pt_ text here on Hacker News is _much_ bigger than the 11 _px_ text on
that blog.

My browser allows me to edit the blog's source and reload; 11 _pt_ text on
there looks fine.

 _... get your eyes checked_

This is a terrible, terrible attitude.

~~~
Retric
Actually, it's not that uncommon a problem.

I had a user in there mid 50 who kept complaining about the fonts in a custom
application. Turns out he was having vision issues and after getting some
reading glasses he stopped having any issues.

PS: I have a high resolution screen and changed my default zoom the make the
vast majority of websites readable. True, it would be nice if websites stuck
with readable percentage based fonts, but until then it's an easy change. And,
IMO far more productive than complaining on HN which the author might not even
read.

------
VMG
Nah, I don't buy it. These kinds of things are easily learned. Web links don't
have depth and we all learned pretty fast that we can click them (in some
instances they don't even have to be underlined)

~~~
pixxa
Most Desktop web browsers provide quite many affordances for links, and do so
automatically upon hover: change cursor, underline, pop up link description,
show URL in status area.

Touch UIs can't have these "introspective" affordances because hover is not
practical in a touch-based UI.

Even with all these affordances, if a Web UI didn't distinguish a link from
other content visually, it would make for a difficult interface to traverse.

~~~
king_jester
Very much this, hyperlinks are visually distinct elements in pure HTML and get
color and style change (underline) to indicate the link. One of my biggest pet
peeves are sites that alter link style in CSS so that it loses those kinds of
visual clues and makes it harder to know what can or cannot be clicked.

------
lnanek2
Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've
watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't
__*ing notice/try/use the action items in the new action bar pattern we're all
supposed to be using. This pattern has us place very sparsely decorated icons
in the top bar, generally without even text. Tons of users completely miss
them vs. big, chrome, 3D styled, pushable-looking buttons on the bottom of an
app.

Even worse, the icons aren't supposed to have text and users are supposed to
know to long press on them to find out what exactly they do. I've never in my
life seen a user do that. I emailed a Google Dev Advocate about all this,
asking if they actually had statistics and user studies to back up this new
direction they are taking the UI, if it actually helped users in the metrics
or was just designers trying to make things look pretty without actually
helping. No answer.

~~~
RivieraKid
100% agree with the icons without labels. Do you have an idea how to solve
this?

~~~
king_jester
You can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just
relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using
android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You
can also do this programmatically.

The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be
able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space
with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very
obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider
moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there
is more room for labeling.

------
lini
Nobody is born with the skills to open a door or push a button. I have a <1yr
old that still can't do either of those. That is something you learn. Metro is
just a different type of UI that you might want to learn.

"Can I click on all those tiles?" - if you try to touch or click them, you
will quickly see a 3D effect that mimics that of a push button (tile scales to
97.5% of its size similar to a pushed button). After that you will quickly
learn that you can interact with tiles.

~~~
nodata
But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like
something to push. It's learnable.

The author is making the point that Metro has zero visual clues, it's not
learnable. You don't know which tiles you can interact with until you try and
interact with them.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
>But a physical button has a shape or appearance that makes it look like
something to push. It's learnable.

And there are also plenty of things that looked like buttons when I was
little, that I thought you could push. But you couldn't. I don't really buy
this argument.

------
radarsat1
Note that he's referring to Norman's use of the word "affordance," more
correctly referred to as "perceived affordance." Both are important concepts
in design.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance>

------
zv
Another rant about Metro interface. Can we please stop it already, it's just
beating a dead horse. Sure, Windows 8 is kind of beta quality, just like Vista
was.

On a side note, comparing with door handles is just wrong. We already have a
generation who grew up with idea of abstract controls. We have a save button
which mostly looks like floppy button. How many 16 year olds know what floppy
is?

~~~
wildranter
Not many, and that's a good thing. The floppy icon only didn't represent well
the abstract act of saving files. As it turns out it's just plain better
present to users a button with the clear text inside, save. Or completely
remove it from the UI, and do auto save for users.

On a side note, Windows 8 is beta as were: windows vista, winxp pre sp3,
win2k, win millennium, win98, win95, win 3.x, and previous. Microsoft had only
two versions of Windows that were really usable, stable, and fast: WinNT 4,
and Win7.

~~~
lmm
I get frustrated when things move from text to icons. E.g. gmail (at least on
android). Studies have shown that text buttons like "mark as spam" are more
usable; I wish google would listen.

------
pxlpshr
There's very little I like about Metro, but I do like that Microsoft is
focusing on the total user experience across all its products. Perhaps they
need to divide the company into 3 components — consumer (win metro / tablet /
phone), enterprise (win office / office suite / .NET), entertainment (xbox).

I've been a Microsoft fanboy [1] but just find very little about Windows that
I love anymore. I understand they are trying to be visually different from
OSX, but I'm not sure this is the right direction. OSX hasn't deviated from
'windows-based' app management and Metro makes its history as Windows almost
unrecognizable. As a power user with 2 monitors usually running 2x or 4x in
split or quad view, I don't see a UI that will be more adaptable for
efficiency and multitasking. iOS handles it very poorly.

[1] DOS > Win 3.1 > 95 > 98/ME > NT > 2000 > Windows XP > .. converted to
Apple ..

------
nnq
Metro is pulling things in the _right direction_ I think. Hyper-skeumorphism
did immense harm in the hands of copy-style designers, allowing them to
justify their unoriginality through "I can copy that because it's actually
copying a real-life object, you can't be unoriginal if you copy physical
reality, all great artists did it" reasoning. It's better to concentrate on
the axis between obscene skeumorphism and uberminimalistic full-flatness then
to pick on any one of the extremes as they are obviously flawed.

Take for example the whole crop of metro-style Bootstrap themes and pick an UI
interaction element like the buttons, to see an example of a scale of designs
between decent micro-skeumorphism and full-flatness. This one
<http://bootswatch.com/cosmo/#buttons> or this one
[http://talkslab.github.com/metro-
bootstrap/basecss.html#butt...](http://talkslab.github.com/metro-
bootstrap/basecss.html#buttons) sport full-flat microsft style buttons, with
no hints of possible interaction, while others like
<http://inprogress.neuronq.ro/madmin/> show subtle hints of skeumorphism (you
can probably google for many other more or less metrofied bootstraps...)

------
ian00
It appears his "thesis" is half way through: "It’s because our eyes know we’re
in a 3D world. We can detect light sources, and degrees of shading, and depth.
And without any of these, we’d be absolutely lost." My first thought: I'm
reading English text, with no shading or depth, and it seems to be a pretty
effective form of communication. tldr: the article is hyperbolic garbage.

------
pilgrim689
Our ancestors did not own smartphones, so the broad evolution argument is kind
of garbage. User interfaces need to be researched before we can make
conclusions on skeuomorphism vs "pure digital".

Furthermore, the author talks about affordances and how Metro has none. This
is false. Anything that can be touched on the screen reacts to your touch. For
example, if you're scrolling down the main menu and your finger happens to
press down on a tile, the tile will be "pushed inwards" at the point of
contact (even if you haven't released your finger). It's very subtle, but it
definitely lets your subconscious know that in the future, if you would want
to press that thing, you can. Now it's not an immediate affordance like a door
knob, but a touch screen in itself is an affordance for touching, and once you
touch then the other affordances reveal themselves.

------
speednoise
This line of argument always jumps right from rods and cones to perceived
affordances without ever making the case that there's a significant gain to
perceived affordances from mocked up depth. If this is so uncontroversially
true, surely someone has done a study you can link.

------
OzzyOsbourne
Slightly OT: _"The Rods... so sensitive that they can be triggered by single
photon"_

 _This_ sort of thing is why I love HN. Irrespective of the topic, there is
always some little gem I find somewhere. I was very sceptical of this claim,
so I looked it up. Turns out it is possible:

[http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.h...](http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Quantum/see_a_photon.html)

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10800676>

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281447/?page=1>

------
pixxa
Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat
Style Reduces Discoverability in
<http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html> .

At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design
overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles
in Touch, Desktop, and Web context.

Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.

~~~
mnicole
Reduced discoverability is the exact issue XBOX Live's interface has had since
they updated it -- it's harder to differentiate between content I've paid for,
their internal marketing and external advertisements to the point where I
deliberately avoid them and just use the XBOX button modal to navigate.
There's no rhyme or reason for the element sizing, outside of [apparently]
making all of the stuff that's actually relevant to me the smallest.

------
rco8786
Is it just me or is the font size on that blog really, really small?

~~~
dbrian
Ah yes, reading about UI design flaws on blog with horrible UI design flaws.
The irony... it burns.

------
MatthewPhillips
Couldn't disagree more. We know that things are clickable when they are verbs
or icons that are well-established synonyms for verbs. Gradient isn't a
substitute for being explicit.

------
xradionut
It's yet another rant, but there's a deeper problem with GUI "thrash" at
Microsoft. One example is Outlook. The interface changed in 2010 and again in
2013. This causes confusion and doubt amoung users and distrust from IT and
the folks that write the checks. Is the new software really better, or are the
folks in Redmond just remodeling the interface to sell "new" versions?

~~~
mitchellbryson
I hope they're that smart. But I have a feeling they're just changing so often
because they don't have any confidence in their abilities to design a good UI.
On this basis, Metro has a couple of years before we see something completely
different.

------
vetler
I haven't used Metro, so I'll wait to judge how usable it is, but I love the
fact that they've gone their own way, and not created an iOS/Android
lookalike. The blog post feels too negative, and gives the impression that
it's written by an older man that dislikes breaking with the norm - though his
points are probably valid.

------
uvTwitch
Pretty sure this guy only wrote the article so he could use that great witty
zinger of a headline he'd thought up. Not gonna waste my time reading design
critique by someone using an 0.002pt font on their blog.

------
marze
It was 2002 when the last competent UI engineer left Microsoft, none of this
is a surprise.

------
cooldeal
I wish Apple was the one that came up with Metro and not Microsoft. If it did,
then many tech pundits with high readership like Gruber, Siegler et. al. would
be posting endless analysis of how Apple shook up the UI paradigm to make a
great new UI instead of going with the same old icons, toolbars and docks and
how everyone else is copying them with sparse UI. That would've led tech
minded folks to give Metro more credit than all this upvoted noise with link
bait headlines on the tech blogs with flimsy analysis of only about how it
sucks and nothing about the good parts like "content over chrome" or
"authentically digital". I think Metro is in some ways becoming victim of tech
partisanship, you can absolutely love your iPad, have an Android tablet with
ICS(I do), but still recognize some good UI work being done by Microsoft.

Edit: Something like the following post would've definitely made the HN front
page if it was iMetro or even if it was Google that did it with Android.
<http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487>

~~~
drzaiusapelord
I was thinking the same thing. Its not like iOS or Android handle these things
any better. I think this is further proof that usability is something of a
snake-oil field past a certain point and that all interfaces are learned.

Now everyone is an expert on UI/UX and the overly-reaching and never quite
defined "design." Oh well, whatever sells ad impressions I guess.

Heck, at least Metro doesn't fall for the sin of nostalgia based skeuomorphism
and other overdone cliches. Not sure how the market will respond to it, but
its a decent attempt from Microsoft.

~~~
vbl
Just FYI, UX goes way beyond affordances. That aside, there's a reason that
most of us advocate various methods of testing as part of the process.

------
recoiledsnake
The flip side is that interfaces have tended too much towards faux 3d on a
superflat 2d screen and also ignoring that the UI can be "authentically
digital" instead of being tied down to analog equivalents. I find the author's
analysis very simplistic.

Also, this is just about mostly about the buttons and links which can probably
be fixed easily in the future. Metro is much much more than that, Metro also
removes a lot of unnecessary chrome like lines around menus etc. and reducing
visual clutter which are very important on mobile devices where you're looking
for actual information in a pinch on-the-go. The codeword for this is "Content
over Chrome".

Android(starting with ICS) also is trending a bit towards Metro in things like
the weather app, Google Now and the overall designed aesthetic.
[https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN...](https://lh4.ggpht.com/p-eZmyce7_T2-_eOwltQxU6glPj6f53kDXvDvN8GPzRZXY4qe_pxHBdmXmtJeyRIZ8qA)

Anyone see the similarities between this[1] from 20 years ago and the iPhone
UI + every other mobile OS including Android, Palm, Windows Mobile < 7,
Blackberry, Meego, Firefox OS etc.?

[1] <http://img.tfd.com/cde/_PROGMAN.GIF>

Here's more information if you're interested in the design philosophy behind
Metro written by an actual designer who designed Metro like content for his
clients' websites.

The principles of Microsoft Metro UI decoded
<http://www.riagenic.com/archives/487>

Going full Metro. <http://www.riagenic.com/archives/493>

Things you ought to know when designing metro screens
<http://www.riagenic.com/archives/526>

Hopefully all this results in better UIs in the future instead of the tired
old jaded WIMP interface and Desktop on mobile yet again with some added touch
features and I think Microsoft has taken a good first step here to shake
things up.

~~~
erikpukinskis
The only aspect of W.I.M.P. that exists in iOS is I: icons.

------
jwineinger
Says the guy with the black and white blog. ZING

