I’ve posted on this topic before, but today I was thinking about the Start Menu again and am just constantly reminded of what a sewer it is. Granted it has improved a great deal with Windows XP and even more with Vista in some areas, but it still is guilty of high crimes of UI design. Specifically:
- Navigating cascading menus is hard. On Windows XP the Start menu is implemented as a one. Cascading menus are notoriously hard for users to navigate without a lot of hand-eye coordination with the mouse. Microsoft seems to have learned this lesson and remedied this in Vista by embedding a tree view inline.
- Every app and their cousin build ridiculously complex folder hierarchies, sometimes for no reason other than pure vanity. Having to burrow through hierarchies like this: Start->Programs->TurdSoft->TurdSoft Crapr 1.0->TurdSoft Crapr are not uncommon. How often do you really want all this junk in there? Also many Open Source tools and command line utilities that have no real front end install shortcuts to documentation here. Ick!
- Because of the crappiness of Windows’ Uninstall UI (”Add/Remove Programs”), every app feels compelled to also litter the menu with Uninstall shortcuts, causing each program to require a subfolder just for itself - its launcher and its uninstall shortcut.
- On Windows XP, the menu takes an unbelievably long time to generate. I have no idea why it’s so hard to display a list of items. For my system, the dropshadow of the menu draws then some time later the menu pops in. It can take over 2-3 minutes for the menu to actually appear.
- On Windows XP, applications starting can steal focus from the start menu and close it up. This happens at system startup if you have a bunch of apps configured to start automatically - their windows appearing cause the Start Menu to disappear, which is frustrating if you’ve just waited 3-4 minutes for it to populate!
Microsoft seems to have largely given up on “All Programs”, and have improved the usability of this menu a great deal in Windows XP with the most often used programs section. But the ghetto within is a sorry reminder of good intentions gone wrong, abuse of privilege by application developers and the shortcomings of other aspects of Windows.
