Things I would like to see in Windows 8 – Part 2 – The Control Panel
So, this is a tougher one to write about.
Microsoft have struggled to simplify the control panel for the past several years and iterations of Microsoft Windows.
Things got better with Windows 7 as they have made several improvements and it looks a lot more intuitive.
Screenshots below…
Windows 7 control panel 1
Windows 7 Control Panel 2
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that there is still way too much going on in the control panel.
My cousin was telling me the other night that he was at some Microsoft event and the Microsoft employee giving the presentation had trouble locating a feature in the Control Panel.
I don’t have the perfect solution proposed but I do know that for Windows 8, it needs to get simpler.
There are way too many things going on in the control panel right now..
What do you guys think?
Filed Under: Development • Wishlist
I agree!
That has been the Achilles heel of Windows since the 90′s.
It’s a difficult problem to solve though and I am not sure how to simplify the control panel either.
Maybe the solution is to make Windows more modular so that different sections of Windows have their attributes modifiable only in that area?
Well, first off, they should put all the settings in one place, not scattered all over the place in deeply nested submenus with tabs and more submenus with more tabs etc. All should be on one level, therefore the control panel should be organized as a tree view, like in TweakUI. Second, the control panel should be searcheable, so that each option accessible from the control panel can be located. This is necessary because we some times remember the name of the option (e.g. we could type "speed" to locate the "Mouse pointer speed" setting) but not where it is. So if I type "speed" and hit Enter, I would be taken straight to the first setting that has "speed" in its name. Hitting Enter again would take me to the next setting with "speed" in its name, should there be one, and so forth.
The control panel is searchable. In windows 7 you just have click the start menu and type speed.