Can you expand on why you say the usability is terrible? I understand people didn't like the Win8 start menu, since it was only accessible in full screen and would hide your desktop entirely, however I never heard any one give a reason why they would think tiles in general are terrible.
I personally love the concept. I spent some time on Windows Phone too and the live tiles were the best thing about the OS. Also, you can unpin all of them on windows 10 and resize the start menu to only keep the app list (but I have no idea would anyone would do that).
> I understand people didn't like the Win8 start menu, since it was only accessible in full screen and would hide your desktop entirely, however I never heard any one give a reason why they would think tiles in general are terrible.
Tiles increase the space taken up by each item, which increases the likelihood of needing to scroll or page menu items, which is okay UX on mobile (though moreso on phones than tablets, IMO), but pretty bad on desktop (extra bad if it is side scrolling.)
OTOH, Tiles are a great UX for quick at-a-glance access to information and access to frequently used apps; sort of a dashboard interface. Its actually not a bad thing to have such a configurable dashboard, it just serves a completely different need than the pre-Win8 Start Menu, and doesn't make a good substitute for it. There's probably a good UX design possible for providing desktop and dashboard interfaces on the same device, I just don't think Microsoft has nailed that yet.
They take up a lot more screen space. Netflix is a clear example of this problem, sure showing pictures is nice, but scrolling 3 pages to the right just to look at a list is annoying.
The 'real' advantage is displaying status information, but most applications like calculator / Photoshop / Skyrim don't have status information. Further many things like weather might seem like the current status are useful, but knowing the current temperature outside or a what the stock price was 15 minutes ago is generally fairly useless and wastes screen space.
Consider, the screen shots showing the current user's name. Unless I forgot my name I can't think why displaying it is helpful.
PS: Don't get me wrong having a sperate 'tile' menue that's differnt from the start menue like a personal home page might be useful. But, I suspect it would rarely be opened by most people.
So make them smaller, or remove the tiles you don't use often. Did they remove those options in 10?
>but most applications like calculator / Photoshop / Skyrim don't have status information.
So don't put them on your start page
>scrolling 3 pages to the right just to look at a list is annoying.
From what I've read, this isn't the intended use case. The idea is to set up the start page like, as you put it, a personal home page. That's what it's for. The all apps screen is the one with everything on it (extant 512 app limit bug notwithstanding).
>current temperature outside or a what the stock price was 15 minutes ago is generally fairly useless and wastes screen space.
>Unless I forgot my name I can't think why displaying it is helpful.
In any case it's no worse that the old start menus that did exactly the same thing.
Between icons on the desktop, pinned programs on the taskbar, pinned programs on the start page, the all programs page, and typing to search all programs when on the start page, you'd think everyone would be able to work out a balance that fits their usage pattern.
So make them ... Forcing me to curate a list is a usability failure. I can pin things just fine, what I need is a reasonable default to find programs I have not used in 6 months.
So don't put them on your start page. The point is fast access, anything getting in the way of that is a huge failure.
isn't the intended use case. Several MS videos show people scrolling though tiles on their phone so it is expected behavior. Even though paging allows for much faster access to large lists.
I personally love the concept. I spent some time on Windows Phone too and the live tiles were the best thing about the OS. Also, you can unpin all of them on windows 10 and resize the start menu to only keep the app list (but I have no idea would anyone would do that).