Ugh. This looks like MS trying to one-up Material Design (itself already on the rich side), and in so doing I think they've gone a step too far.
It does look good, in a sci-fi movie UI kind of way. But it would be a nightmare if many of the apps I use day to day started to look this way. All the animation, depth, texture - it's too attention grabbing, self conscious, and annoyingly, deeply, branded.
Software is not supposed to be a high-design object, taste is very individual and any object with so much aesthetic weight imposes on our consciousness. While highly designed things can bring us a lot of pleasure, we should be free to judiciously choose them for ourselves.
Many pieces of software are non-negotiable high-use tools. They should be, first and foremost, highly usable - and if there's an insistence on imposing an aesthetic experience on the user, it should be acknowledged that the user likely has no choice but to use the software, and may be temperamentally or socioeconomically unlikely to appreciate the aesthetic experience being thrust upon them. (I wonder what my 75 year old Russian mom would make of all the depth effects, Windows 10 already confuses her and hurts her eyes.) So if we're going to insist on infusing our software with some particular design aesthetic, it should at the very least be light, minimal, and easy to ignore for those who aren't interested and just need to get their work done.
It does look good, in a sci-fi movie UI kind of way. But it would be a nightmare if many of the apps I use day to day started to look this way. All the animation, depth, texture - it's too attention grabbing, self conscious, and annoyingly, deeply, branded.
Software is not supposed to be a high-design object, taste is very individual and any object with so much aesthetic weight imposes on our consciousness. While highly designed things can bring us a lot of pleasure, we should be free to judiciously choose them for ourselves.
Many pieces of software are non-negotiable high-use tools. They should be, first and foremost, highly usable - and if there's an insistence on imposing an aesthetic experience on the user, it should be acknowledged that the user likely has no choice but to use the software, and may be temperamentally or socioeconomically unlikely to appreciate the aesthetic experience being thrust upon them. (I wonder what my 75 year old Russian mom would make of all the depth effects, Windows 10 already confuses her and hurts her eyes.) So if we're going to insist on infusing our software with some particular design aesthetic, it should at the very least be light, minimal, and easy to ignore for those who aren't interested and just need to get their work done.