Yes, Windows 10 for phones is a big mess so far, but we were kind of expecting that. The public preview released on February 12, 2015 is the earliest Microsoft has ever released a testing version of their mobile phone operating system. I’ve been privately & publicly beta testing software products since the mid 90’s, and in using this, it really seems a long way from an official release. Naturally this means there will be plenty of bugs, but what worries us the most is that so much of the new operating system is going in such an odd direction.
Our fears were correct, as many Windows 10 complaints were about its poor user interface design surfaced as soon as we saw video demos of the update. Luckily, this preview version seems to be in the early stages, and hopefully we can convince Microsoft to wise-up. Microsoft is actually soliciting feedback and has even included a feedback app right on the phone that will easily allow you to send in messages and screenshots so that they can sort through all the bugs and complaints.
I think Microsoft feels that Windows 8 on the desktop was a mistake because the design was so so much different from the normal start-menu user interface that everyone had been using since 1995. Personally, after I learned how to use Windows 8’s UI, I found it to be quite efficient and easy-to-use. That’s often a totally different animal when compared to “easy to learn” or “familiar” which is what all those “start menu” fans were looking for. The new interface was too new and nobody wanted to put in the effort to figure it out.
Windows 10 on the phones is different still. Microsoft may be giving up on “good design” that is both “easy to learn” and “easy to use” in favor of the bad design that is so poplar on Android and iOS phones only because it will be more familiar and “easy to learn” for people who are already used to those horrible user interfaces. One Microsoft employee sort of confirmed this direction on Twitter. By making everything just as difficult to use as it is on iOS and Android (mystery meat buttons where you can’t reach them, etc), people will be able to switch platforms without much difficulty. Okay, but then there’s no reason to switch if the alternatives are just as bad! We don’t want “just as bad,” we want better.
Remember back in September of 2005 when Apple partnered with Motorola to make a phone that was just as bad as everything else… er, rather consistent with the user experience expectations of mobile platforms (just as Microsoft is doing today)? That’s right, nobody cared. It wasn’t until Apple did something unique with the iPhone were they to be successful.
Anyway, let’s get back to the Windows 10 Preview on phones and take a look at the state it’s in right now.
The Good
While not much is new in the current preview version, one excellent new feature is in place on the software keyboard. There is now a microphone button in the text prediction row at the top of the keyboard! You can still slide it to the right to get the paste button, by the way. Pressing the new microphone button will go into dictation mode. This is not a hands-free speech interface like Cortana, mind you. It’s just a dictation mode where you can keep talking and the software will constantly convert your speech into text and pour it into whatever text field you have selected. Other platforms have had this type of thing for a long time, so really this is just a catch-up feature, but we’re glad to finally see it here. It works quite well, too. It can understand pauses as the end of a sentence and even adds question marks to the ends of questions. If you speak the name of a punctuation mark, it will often forgo the pause prediction punctuation and enter the punctuation you named.
The keyboard also now has a little circle with a colored dot on it between the Z and X on the bottom row. It’s impossible to understand what this does simply by looking at it or even touching it. Touching it does nothing at all. Holding your finger on top of it makes the rest of the keyboard change its’ tone to a darker grey and tiny four-way arrows appear beneath your finger where you can’t see them because your finger is covering the screen right there. Yes, it’s pretty confusing, but it’s very useful once you figure out how it works. Holding your finger and sliding it left, right, up, or down will move your cursor within the text. This is a lot better than the old way of doing it where you had to move your hand all the way to the top of the screen, touch & hold, wait until an I-beam icon popped up, and then drag it around until it fell into the place where you wanted to put the cursor. The cursor still has a little handlebar on the bottom when you’re in a text field so that you can grab that and drag it to the place you want to put it too. So both ways are acceptable.
Another great addition is new personalization options for the start screen. Now the start screen style is much more like the Xbox One. Hopefully Windows 10 on PCs will follow soon. Regardless, the theme’s accent color is back to filling the live tiles, but they’re now transparent. Your chosen background image appears behind and between the live tiles (as well as the programs listing). Now, if you use a photo of your family or a person, it’s probably going to look extremely busy. Things are going to be difficult to read. So, I highly recommend creating something more subtle to keep your start screen looking good.
The “Quick Actions” in the notifications center have been updated. There’s now an “Expand” button that gives you three rows of quick actions to choose from. Unfortunately, their placement is still at the top of the screen and out-of-reach for one-handed usage… thus making them not quickly accessible at all, though it’s still better than having to dig into the Settings section. Notification pop-ups are larger now too and they can include actionable items. For example, you can reply to text messages right within the pop-up notification. There’s no way to get notifications to show up on the lock screen, glance screen, or within a live tile though.
The Calculator and Alarms apps have been updated. There’s a lot more functionality now, but the new user interface design is really bad. They look like they were made by the same guy that did the photos app (see “the bad” section below). The good thing here is the new capabilities.
There’s no longer any setting for turning on the text messaging speech interface where messages are read aloud when they arrive. If this feature were to be removed completely, that would be a really really bad thing and we would all get into car accidents, but my hope is that it will return in the Notifications section where EVERY app that is capable of triggering a notification should have a “Read aloud” checkbox in its notification options that will then enable Cortana to read the notification aloud when it happens and activate Cortana’s speech interface for subsequent actions (like I suggested a year ago). In other words, all apps should be able to communicate and interact through the central speech interface. If Microsoft can do this, they’ll have a huge lead over other speech interfaces.
There’s a Geofencing setting that we haven’t seen before. It looks like this will allow you to set up particular geographic locations where certain apps can have certain functions. Windows Phone 8.1 had the ability to turn WiFi on when your location was near certain favorite places. With the new Geofencing setting, it sounds like you’ll have much more robust controls over what your phone can do in specific places.
“Resuming” screens and useless splash screens seem to have been greatly reduced. Launching MSN News goes almost straight to the news app where it will download the news right away. No longer is there a useless splash screen with a solid color and ambiguous icon. Hurray! Well, it does flash between my theme accent color and my theme’s background color for a split second, but I’m assuming that’s just a bug. I haven’t been able to get any long drawn out “resuming” screens to happen on the Lumia 635 either. Switching between apps using the task switching UI will blank-out the screen for a split second but then load the app straight away. I’m sure Microsoft will be able to make this even faster and more refined in the final version. That will be excellent.
One last thing that I really love is what Windows 10 does when you shut down. Normally it would just say “Goodbye” and be done with it after a while. Now it says, “Goodbye. Don’t forget…” and then lists your next appointment information. How cool is that? It reminds you of the next thing you need to do as you’re turning your phone off. Very nicely done.
The Bad
The worst thing about the Windows 10 preview for phones is the new Photos app. It feels like a student developer threw it together as an exercise in learning how to make Windows phone apps. You know… somebody that doesn’t have much experience and doesn’t know anything about user interface design. There’s a hamburger button in the top left (which has been proven over and over and over to be a bad idea when it comes to UI design) and not only is that mystery meat navigation, but it’s at the top of the screen where you can’t reach it. There’s also some other mystery meat icons at the top… guess what, it’s a second smaller hamburger icon with two checkmarks next to it! Then there’s an ellipses button at the top right. As most users of the Roman alphabet (or Japanese, or mathematics) know, the ellipses is a standard symbol for “more” and it’s supposed to be on the bottom right which is where the eye goes to last for left-right-top-bottom language-speaking users. Unfortunately, the ellipses doesn’t behave properly in the Windows 10 photos app. Instead, it simply shows a row of text that labels the one mystery meat icon that it’s next to. Confused yet? You should be.
The other hamburger button in the Photos app pushes the screen to the right and opens a menu where you can switch between “Collection”, “Albums”, and “Folders”. Only the collections section is functional, but what’s confusing is that those are all different words for the same thing. My albums should be in folders and that’s my collection. All of these buttons are again, located at the top of the screen where you can’t reach them while holding the phone with one hand.
There’s also a very weak settings section in the photos app which is using awful tiny oval shaped on/off toggle controls that seem completely out of place because they’re not like anything else that was ever part of this operating system (nor are they anywhere in Windows 10 for PCs). They’re very awkward and cause more confusion within the UI.
The photos app also loses all remnants of the photos hub that was so amazing on Windows Phone 7-8. Now it only shows OneDrive and local photos. There’s no more integration with Facebook or Twitter or any other photo services, and of course the beautiful panoramic design is long gone as is the easy-to-use horizontal pivots that were in the Windows Phone 8.1 photos app.
Photo editing has turned to garbage as well. On Windows Phone 7-8.1 you could access all sorts of 3rd party image editors right from within the native photo viewer. 3rd party developers could add their app names right there for very easy access. All of that is gone and the photo viewer can now only rotate or crop photos. Even the awesome “autofix” feature from Windows Phone’s old native editor is gone.
There is now a File Manager app included with the operating system. You can’t uninstall it and it is difficult to use. It uses a completely different design that’s kind of in between what “metro” is supposed to be, and this awful new hamburger button menu stuff. So yes, there are controls at the top and bottom of the screen and you can’t reach both of them with one hand. The hamburger button only lists two items, too. They’re both out of reach, but luckily nobody should need to use this app so it’s probably fine to ignore. The file folder icons don’t match Windows 10 on the desktop either, so really this is just another example of developers at Microsoft just doing whatever they want with no real overarching plan for consistency, design, usability, and ergonomics.
A few things are not working quite right either. Logging in with my Microsoft ID has broken most of my contact links on my other phones and Windows 8 devices. I have to re-link them to their Exchange, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, & Skype profiles. My contact groups are not syncing either, so I can’t pin my “Favorites” or “News” live tiles.
The Ugly
Oh and there is plenty of ugly! Let’s start with the new settings dialogs. They have new icons which are all outlines instead of solid shapes like on the start screen. The settings icon at the top of the screen doesn’t even match the settings icon on the live tile. They kind of go along with the settings dialogs in Windows 10 on the PC, except they’re all blue on black instead of black on white. Either way, they look out of place. Some settings dialogs have white backgrounds and small fonts while some have the much more readable large metro-style dialogs that just haven’t been updated with the new bad design yet. Everything that’s been updated seems to ignore the system theme settings. If I choose orange as my accent color, there shouldn’t be any blue. If I choose black for the background color, everything should have a black background. All of that should apply to Windows 10 on the PC, too. And shouldn’t the settings in Windows 10 on the PC match the settings in Windows 10 on the phone? Or at least be organized in the same way?
Some of the new settings dialogs have a 3rd style of on/off toggle switches that are similar to the Windows Phone 8 style, yet different from the Windows 10 Photos app oval-shape style. The oval ones are probably the ugliest.
Then there’s the new Cortana. The microphone button doesn’t work at all on my Lumia 635 and her interface is horrendous. It’s a white background (again even though my settings are set to black) and the links are blue, but my preferred accent color still shows up in certain places. It’s a mess of clashing ugliness. Then there’s the new mystery meat hamburger button in the upper left which actually generates a pop-over menu. That’s right, it behaves completely differently from other hamburger buttons within the operating system. Who’s in charge here? The only thing worse than mystery meat is inconsistent mystery meat, and Microsoft is doing everything wrong here (so far).
Conclusion
This initial preview version of Windows 10 for phones still has a lot missing. It’s still using the old email app, the old calendar, the old people hub, the old Office, etc. Most of the features of Windows 10 are being put into separate apps that can be updated individually instead of requiring a core operating system upgrade. That’s a good thing. Most of the core apps are being rewritten as universal apps that will be able to adapt to all the different Windows 10 operating system flavors. They should all work on phones with small screens, larger tablets, laptops, desktops with multiple monitors, and even large screen devices and the Xbox One in the living room. That’s another extremely good thing.
Having consistent applications that all have the same features and functions on a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop and even Xbox is extremely compelling. Let’s just hope that it’s all consistently good, not consistently bad!
So far there isn’t anything terribly special in Windows 10 for phones though. For the most part, important differentiating features (hands-free text messaging, ergonomic one-handed usability) are being removed… while boring catch-up features are being added (dictation mode on the keyboard, background images on the start screen, etc.) Hopefully Microsoft is saving the really impressive stuff for later.
In the meantime, I wouldn’t recommend installing the Windows 10 preview for phones on your primary device. However, if you like to complain about stuff and would love to contribute your thoughts and ideas to the development of Windows 10 for phones, you can probably find a Lumia 635 for less than $50 and test away.
Originally published on Pocketnow on February 19, 2015.