I wrote the previous post, How To Shut Down Windows 8, more as a joke than an actual how-to piece. However, I’ve since updated it to have a more serious tone, since today alone, I’ve had nearly 150 hits for search terms similar to “How to shut down Windows 8″.
Surely, that level of confusion isn’t good. Especially seeing as this is a ‘developer preview’ – essentially alpha software – and the target audience for downloads at the moment is Windows developers, people who are experienced with computers and tend to know what they’re doing.
If Windows 8 was released in its current state, we’d be seeing hundreds, if not thousands, of novice users installing it, then becoming apprehensive about using their own computer. Perhaps even more intermediate users as well as novices. What is it going to do to someone’s confidence using a computer if it takes ten minutes to work out how to shut the thing down?
The problem lies not in the fact that the shut down button is buried a few levels deep, it’s that it’s buried a few non-sensical levels deep. If you’re looking to shut a computer down, would your first (or even second or third) instinct be to look under settings?
It’s not just that the option is hidden under settings, either. To open that menu in the bottom corner, you can’t click a button or press a keyboard shortcut. You have to know beforehand that a menu will appear if you place your cursor off-screen in that certain area. There’s no hint to tell you it’s there, you have to figure it out yourself.
During my initial hunt for the shut down button, I triggered that menu by accident a couple of times, but because there was no obvious path to what I wanted, I disregarded the entire menu. I only went back once I’d clicked everywhere else and found nothing.
The other issue is that nothing looks obviously clickable. There’s no texture to anything; it’s all a ‘flat’ surface. If you look at buttons on OS X, or even previous versions of Windows, they have some depth, and look as though they can actually be pushed inwards. I clicked the word “Start” at the top of the Metro view more than once, thinking it was the Start menu. It looks exactly the same as the clickable buttons in the settings pane (see above screenshot to see what I mean).
All in all, if I’m honest, the Metro UI, used on a computer rather than a tablet, sucks. If I had been using a tablet, I wouldn’t have needed a shut down button, since I would have just hit the lock button, like on the iPad. Windows 8 needs to recognise when it’s on a platform which doesn’t support touch, and adjust accordingly.
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