Jensen Harris, the former director of user experience (UX) at Microsoft, has taken issue with the design of Windows 11's Start menu -the flagship of Microsoft's UX.
Harris, who played a key role in the design of the Windows 8 Start menu with touch-friendly tiles, reckons the Windows 11 Start menu has confusing elements and distractions and even makes it look like his PC is "infected by a virus."
And, an update: Microsoft has already gotten to work fixing some of these things.
- Jensen Harris (@jensenharris) August 30, 2022
The Bing Wallpaper ad is gone, and few of the corners have been fixed up a bit.
It is cool to see how fast they can update content server-side (the double-edged sword of directly embedding HTML.) pic.twitter.com/lUn1xbC7kb
The designer aired his criticisms in a series of tweets explaining the importance of the Start menu and pointing out some weaknesses in the design.
"The Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of," wrote Harris.
"Today I searched for 'chrome' in Windows and was shocked by the user experience."
Harris thinks Microsoft's ad in the Start menu promoting the "Bing Wallpaper app" looks like it was teleported from the Web 1.0 Geocities era. "Honestly, it looks like I was infected by a virus. The text is misaligned and it's sitting on top of a Windows Vista-era background," he tweeted.
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Beyond that, the ad's left corner is rounded