Back when Microsoft’s Julie Larson-Green demonstrated Windows 7’s multitouch framework during the All Things Digital conference, many noted the different taskbar that she was using on the demo machine. When Walt Mossberg asked her about it, she smiled and replied “It’s something we’re working on for Windows 7 and I’m not supposed to talk about right now, today…” Personally, I was quite intrigued by this revamped taskbar, seeing how static and old the current one already is (Windows 95, people). Microsoft has remained mum on the issue ever since, but last Tuesday, the silence was broken when Microsoft’s Chaitanya Sareen posted a detailed entry on the taskbar on the Engineering Windows 7 blog.
The post starts with an explanation of what the various parts of the taskbar do, and a little history lesson (not unlike our own Usability Terms series). Also of interest are several little tidbits of functionality tucked away in the taskbar that some of you might be unfamiliar with. The general gist of it all is that the taskbar has remained more or less unchanged over the course of the past 15 years, receiving only minor additions and changes over time. None of them were drastic, and as such, despite cosmetic changes, the taskbar in Windows 95 is essentially the same as the taskbar in Vista. The blog post details several of the design decisions made over the past 15 years, including those concerning the start menu.
Sareen also highlights several issues with the taskbar, most notably the misuse of the notification area (also known as the system tray). “With more developers leveraging its functionality, the Notification Area has grown in popularity over the years. Some may observe that it has changed from a subtle whisperer to something louder,” Sareen admits, “Based upon the feedback we’ve collected from customers, we recognize the Notification Area could benefit from being less noisy and something more controllable by the end-user.” This is welcome news for all of us, as I believe most of us will agree that the system tray has been abused for long enough now – even by big time developers like Adobe and Apple.
Thanks to the usage data that Microsoft collects through its Customer Experience Improvement Program, Sareen can show us some very interesting data concerning the usage of the taskbar. For instance, 90% of the people have, on average, between 0 and 14 windows open in a single session (or 24 hours, whichever occurs first). Almost 50% have between 6-9 windows open, which means that as long as the taskbar caters to this group, and also works well for the 0-5 and 10-14 groups, the taskbar works well enough for 90% of the people out there.
There are more interesting statistics. Only 2% of sessions have the taskbar in a different location than the bottom of the screen. Barely anyone uses the Windows Media Player toolbar. Less than 5% autohides the taskbar. 95% Have quicklaunch enabled. Obviously, Sareen admits, the defaults shine through these numbers. “The most obvious takeaway is that most customers do not change the default settings, which are a simple right-click Properties away.”
Based upon customer feedback and real-life user testing, Microsoft has compiled a list of things it has learned regarding usage of the taskbar. Sareen presents a selection, but stresses that this doesn’t mean Microsoft will be acting upon all of these.
Please let me rearrange taskbar buttons! Pretty please? I sometimes accidentally click on the wrong taskbar button and get the wrong window. It would be great if the taskbar spanned multiple monitors so there’s more room to show windows I want to switch to. There isn’t always enough text on the taskbar to identify the window I’m looking for. There’s too much text on the taskbar. (Yes, this is the exact opposite of the previous item – we’ve seen this quite a bit in the blog comments as well.) It may take several clicks to get to some programs or files that I use regularly. Icons of pinned files [for ex. several Word documents] sometimes look too much alike – I wish I could tell them apart better. The bottom right side of my screen is too noisy sometimes. There are lots of little icons and balloons competing for my attention. How do I add/remove ‘X’ from the taskbar? I would like Windows to tuck away its features cleverly and simplify its interface.
What can we learn from this? First of all, Windows 7 will allow you to re-arrange taskbar entries, that much is clear. Spanning the taskbar across multiple monitors shouldn’t be too hard either, and I can even envision a system where each monitor gets its own taskbar, but how exactly that would work, I don’t know. Microsoft is certainly looking at the issue of identification, but what exactly they’re going to change is hard to tell from just this blog post. We’ll also get more control over the notification area; I think this will crystallise in users having to give explicit permission before applications may use the system tray.
In any case, we at least now know that Microsoft is seriously reworking the taskbar, and now we also know what the main areas of improvement will be.
Windows 7 will allow you to re-arrange taskbar entries, that much is clear. Spanning the taskbar across multiple monitors shouldn’t be too hard either, and I can even envision a system where each monitor gets its own taskbar
That’s complete speculation. If you read the Blog Post carefully, it doesn’t tell you they plan to do… They only tell you what kind of feedback they received so far.
Will they act on that feedback? only time will tell.
A) The blog is info on how the windows team works, not specifics. The team was very open with vista, and got alot of expectations raised when they talked about directions they were going, or features they are working on. They have learned from that mistake, and have gone more “opaque”.
B) The blog post was very high level about how they are thinking about the taskbar, what usage data they have accumulated, and what user feature requests are most popular. On top of that bulleted list, there is this paragraph
You don’t need to read between the lines, they explicitly say that it is just user requests that they are listing, not a feature list for windows 7.
Edited 2008-09-25 19:15 UTC
There is a free utility for Windows XP (dunno about Vista) called Taskbar Shuffle that allows you to rearrange your taskbar items. It is very cool.
EDIT:
http://www.freewebs.com/nerdcave/taskbarshuffle.htm
Says it works with vista too.
Edited 2008-09-25 20:24 UTC
The problem with addons is, that most of the time they work badly.
Take for example virtual desktops.
Practically every Unix and Linux desktop nowadays has it, and it is very useful if you are part of the “has more than 9 applications open” crowd. People who don’t need them can switch them off (reduce the number of virtual desktops to one).
There are several applications which try to mimic this behavior under Windows, but all of them ultimately get in trouble with the MS Office MDI philosophy. All open MS Office Documents of one kind can only be on one virtual desktop.
Which is completely killing the concept of virtual desktops. They are needed whenever I have one “USA”, one “France” and one “UK” Project, for each Project I open one Spreadsheet, one Word Document and one Presentation, and 5 other Programs.
Gives me a total of 24 open Windows, 8 for each Desktop. I can make a fast and easy switch from one project to the next one in case a colleage busts in and urgently needs to know something, and don’t have to search through 24 Windows, which are NOT groupable by project.
So for me THE killer feature of any new taskbar would be virtual desktops.
Making the system tray less noisy (and less spac-wasting) would also be a good idea.
(or maybe it should be named windowbar?)
the first idea/problem there would be, what if one could hook up multiple displays and inputs to a single machine, and have each set control a separate user session?
hell, the same user could run as a common user in one session and admin in another, so no need for role escalation (or whatever its called).
but the problem, for microsoft, with a setup like this is that of licenses. if a home user license can do what one need expensive multi user licenses for in the office they may implode their own market.
iirc, that was what killed of the “partner” to the tabletpc, the “smartdisplay” (a wince tablet with the ability to access the windows desktop by wifi).
The data on the non usage of the media player toolbar, is cited by microsoft as evidence that they’ve done some thing wrong int he presentation of the feature. I think a more likely cause, borne out of the data they’ve collected is that most people don’t want it.
People don’t want it because the taskbar is already filled up with other stuff and it just doesn’t scale well. I would gander to say that quite a few people would love to have their media player at their fingertips like that, just not at the cost of making their application buttons that much smaller.
Media players that don’t suck have global hotkey support, so you can control them across the OS. Plus, most keyboards these days have the media keys built right in, which kind of makes the toolbar unnecessary.
Media keyboards are always poorly implemented. They require a resident service running in windows to interpret the key presses into media commands. Most computers i see that have them, don’t work due to crappy software or media player incompatibility. Most people queue up a playlist and go. Not much of a need to have a series of short cuts. Any adjustments that need to be made usually require more of the full interface to choose a different playlist or what not.
Resident service? Not really…
You must buy shitty keyboards
And anyway, I prefer the global shortcut keys myself.
So you don’t ever have to pause the audio, adjust the volume, skip to next track, etc? Really, I shouldn’t have to bring up the player just to do these things.
they should just copy the Mac OS X taskbar and be done with it
That would be pretty boring… not to mention the fact that some people don’t like the mac way of doing it.
just being sarcastic…:-D
I get the sarcasm, but the truth is that Windows taskbar is somewhat better then the Mac OS X Dock.
I use both Macs and Windows for many years now… but that’s just my humble opinion.
Yes, I’d agree in that the dock is not all that great on it’s own; it’s Expos~Af^A(c) that makes me prefer OS X.
I believe this is an interesting point.
What’s a better path, improving the taskbar, or reducing the need for a taskbar?
The obvious answer isn’t “both”, because if you reduce the need for a taskbar, you can replace it with other functionality. E.g. the Mac dock seems to be superior to quicklaunch for task launchers, and superior to the system tray for displaying task status.
Is it just me, or does it seem that all of those features at the end have already been covered in Gnome and/or KDE? I can rearrange my windows on my panel by clicking and dragging, Compiz gives you thumbnail previews when you hover over a task, and it’s a simple matter to get Gnome and KDE to only show the tasks on the current desktop on the panel; although I’ve never used multiple monitors, it seems to me that that wouldn’t be too different to the additional desktops Linux users are used to.
Compiz copied the feature from Vista, which first had it demoed like 2003-2004 time-frame.
And even before there were already a taskbar for KDE3 which did exactly the same.
http://www.kde-apps.org/content/show.php/Taskbar+v2+(flat+%2B+t…)?content=16261
which is from 2004. I cannot remember any similiar feature in Longhorn builds.
Reminds me of an old screenshot taken by someone searching for info on getting rid of cockroaches. Because of the number of entries in his taskbar, Windows truncated the title to “Search for: cock…”
I just hope they get rid of the butt-ugly Vista sound and network icons in Vista. I mean, come on, white/flat icons when everything else has a little color and shadow to it? It looks terrible, it sticks out like a sore thumb. It totally shows how unfinished Vista truly is.
Looking at the data, nobody turns on autohide, and many people turn off having the taskbar on top, ergo…
Doesn’t compute. Most people aren’t using the taskbar at all!
Your conclusion can not be substantiated with the available data.
According to the graphic, 99.1% of people have the “keep taskbar on top” option selected. So if by “many people” you mean 0.9%…
In many computer labs and libraries I’ve seen, the settings are locked or automatically reverted so users can’t customise much of the user interface. If you ask me, it’s not that users are necessarily satisfied with the defaults. They could be, but they might not have a choice anyway.
So I wonder if that data is also sent to Microsoft. They said it’s volunteered, but I don’t know much about it other than that.
Full disclosure: I barely scanned the original article.
An extract of the blog:
[[As an aside, Windows XP had Quick Launch turned off by default in an attempt to reduce the number of different launching surfaces throughout Windows. Based on your feedback, we quickly rectified this faux pas]]
Uh what? Quick Launch is the first thing I disable on a new PC: I need space in the taskbar for *tasks*, if I want to open frequently an application: I put a shortcut on the desktop and use Win+D to iconify all the windows to access the shortcut: very easy and I can put more shortcuts in the desktop that in the quick launch bar..
On the other hand, the first thing I do on a fresh WinXP installation is to make the Quick Launch pad visible and store my most frequently used programs there.
I don’t use the desktop at all. I store my documents into folders. I admit though that I am a minority: most users fill their desktop with a lot of documents.
Quicklaunch is there to be always present. In order to get to Desktop, you`ve got to minimise everything, with QL, you don`t. That`s the whole point. It`s like MacOS` top bar.
Most of my users live by the quick launch bar. Most normal users don’t tend to care about the taskbar, they use ctrl-tab, at least the ones I work with.
No bluescreen in the demonstration.
Sorry i couldn’t resist
Bluescreen during the Windows 98 presentation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGLhuF3L48U
*yawn*
Why is the windows task bar limited to a single entity with everything required to be on it? Why can I separate the notifications area and put it in a different place? Why can’t I use all four edges of my desktop for different items and control them separately?
Most of the time, I use a laptop with both the built-in screen and a larger LCD. I do most of my work on the LCD, and have lesser used things on the laptop screen. Particularly in that mode, I’d like to have the task band on the larger screen, but leave the notifications and QL on the laptop screen (although I wouldn’t mind pulling my clock off notifications; I ended up installing FoxClocks so I had a clock on my browser, its better but not perfect).
One thing I think is good with what I’ve seen of Vista is that there is only the Windows logo for the start area, not all the wasted space of the word. But, again, every keyboard built in about the past 10 years has a Windows key on it, why does the Start button need to be anything more than a QL icon?