Across Tribal our developers, designers, consultants and commercial staff sat down to watch the introduction of Windows 8 at Microsoft’s Build conference.
It’s the first time we’ve ever tried something like this and we captured the team’s feedback in realtime, which we’ve summarised and published. We wanted to share our thoughts, excitement and concerns over changes that will affect us and our customers.
Microsoft have just made this short highlights video available:
…or you can now watch the full keynote video yourself or read a transcript.
User Interface
The new tiles, 'touch-first' interface added in Windows 8
This was a topic we kept re-visiting again and again…
There was some confusion about the difference between ‘Metro-style’ apps and ‘Desktop-style’ apps initially as the presenters didn’t really touch on this. We were also left wondering how existing applications might be split to offer the benefits of the Metro style (like ‘glance-able’ tiles’) parallel to a traditional mouse-driven interface for more complex tasks.
Other commenters wondered about the need to switch between mouse / stylus / touch and back in real-world use. Will we all be swiping on our desktop monitors by next year?
Touch-first and Metro-Style
This change in focus also got a lot of comments and was another theme returned-to repeatedly in our comments during the keynote. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the new look and feel – it was seen as new, innovative and appealing to look at.
One of our team commented that the user experience “looks like a single app, not an operating system”, summarising the views of many others. Others liked the common UI across mobile, tablet and desktop computing.
However, there were concerns too… Whilst ‘pretty’, concerns were expressed that the new Metro design could be too stylised to be useful in real-world situations. Others wondered whether enterprises would welcome the new look – needing to train and support their users in it – or would prefer just to retain the traditional ‘desktop-style’ interface only. A developer also wondered how challenging it would be to build both docked and full-screen interfaces for applications – could this increase the workload and discourage development of Metro-style apps?
No-one liked the name ‘Charms’ for the ‘pop-up’ action buttons, but there was plenty of enthusiasm for the ‘system-wide services’ like searching, sharing and spell-checking accessed this way.
Development Tools
Visual Studio 11
There was plenty of enthusiasm for the Visual Studio 11 from our developers who already use its predecessor regularly… The new HTML lay-out capabilities (for “avoiding CSS headaches”) and the window-size testing tools were both commented on, having been recent irritations. The need to keep Visual Studio and Expression Blend as separate tools did confuse some though.
Windows Store
The Windows application store got a good response – commenters immediately recognised that customers would soon expect ‘zero hassle’ installation with small (or zero) footprint. Several people thought the ability to list applications not available to download directly would also make it relevant to more complex and legacy applications. This – surely – will be the way to discover Windows applications in future?
The certification process for applications (and the ability to do the technical steps ourselves pre-submission) was well received as was the range of options for publishing and licensing.
Live Connect
Trust issues were our first thoughts when the close integration of Live as a way to synchronise data, settings and authentication credentials was announced. Some commenters had remembered previous privacy, usability and even availability issues with similar systems for consumer users and wondered if others would be keen to trust such a service.
Others noted the ease with which Live provided access to both personal and enterprise data across multiple devices and wondered if businesses would see sufficient value to allow this or favour the more conservative approach of keeping all their data ‘behind the firewall’. Certainly the controls and management of data shared in this way was something we were all left wanting to know more about…
Roll-out
Microsoft showed Windows 8 on prototype tablet devices and existing laptops currently shipping with Windows 7, but when will its adoption in the public sector and enterprises become wide-spread?
Towards the end of the keynote our conversation turned to user adoption. Windows 8 is a huge change with opportunities and improvements across many areas including hardware, user interaction, identity management and visual styling, but when would users – especially users in the public sector organisations we build specialist software for – adopt this platform to make investment in evolving and innovating new products and services inspired or enabled by it?
We’ve now downloaded the developer preview and are attempting to answer some of our questions now. If you have any comments we’d love to hear them below as we start the learning process together…
Image credit: All images from Microsoft