4

With public availability of the Windows 8 Community Preview (aka Beta), we can now get our hands on, and interact with, Metro style desktop applications for the first time.

I'm sure that we could, as a community, gleen a lot of useful information from an in depth examination - identifying things in the preview applications that work really well, as well as things that work ... less well.

How would you suggest I go about asking such a question?

Why it belongs on UX ...

  • Windows 8 is coming, and Metro apps are coming with it, for good or for ill.
  • Metro "thinking" is already having an impact on websites and other applications
  • It's too big for one person to do - details I might overlook would be noticed by someone else, things you think trivial might be considered important (and voted up) by many.
  • I believe we could identify definitive answers that would be helpful for future developers and designers to reference

Why it might be a problem ...

  • How do we avoid a parade of people proclaiming that it's a grand mistake and we should stay with the way its done by Windows 7, Mac OX X, Macintosh System 6, BE OS, OS/2 Warp, Lisa, AmigaOS etc
  • How do we keep answers more to the objective end of the spectrum? I'm
  • By focusing on the Win8CP, is it too localised in time?
  • I'm sure there will be entire books written on Metro design, so perhaps this question would be too wide in scope?
  • I know that List questions are generally frowned upon, for obvious reasons.

Update 11 March: I've taken the plunge and posted the question. I'm eagerly anticipating the answers other people put forward.

1 Answer 1

1

You should definitely do this.

  • Don't worry about the problem areas. We avoid subjective answers by downvoting, post noticing, and ultimately deleting them if they don't answer your question.
  • Answers should generally be objective anyway, so anything that isn't risks being removed.
  • You don't have to focus on Win 8 CP since most of what is in it will be in the final version of Windows 8, so it will still be a relevant post in the future.
  • You can break up your question into multiple questions to prevent it from being too wide in scope.
  • Don't phrase it as a list question and it won't be a list question!

This could also be a great candidate for a blog post. This week Super User wrote a blog post about using Metro with mouse and keyboard and while I was reading it I realised that this could be a great topic for us to talk about from an informed, expert UX point of view.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .