In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications.
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In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident. -
In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.@kirb "This design guide was created for Windows 7 and has not been updated for newer versions of Windows. Much of the guidance still applies in principle, but the presentation and examples do not reflect our current design guidance."
No shit! -
In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.@kirb that's a really good document, I think this more closely matches what gnome actually does today than what Windows does now. Even windows 10 was way more "chatty" than this suggests.
"In these examples, Windows XP is ostensibly attempting to assist users with their initial configuration. However, these notifications pop up far too often and well after they are useful, so they are little more than unsolicited feature advertisements."
Oh the irony...
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In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.@kirb are we just not gonna talk about the big bold "Don't use notifications for feature advertisements!" with an exclamation mark
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In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.@kirb “I bet someone got a really nice bonus for that feature ” https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061101-03/?p=29153
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In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.@kirb The worst part is if you click "Yes" Windows 11 just opens the list of printers and that's it. No prompt to remove specific printers, not indication of which printers it thinks are "unused". It just shows all the printers you have configured, as though to say "you figure it out from here".
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In 2009, Microsoft made it a focus of the Windows 7 user experience guidelines to reduce pointless notifications. They point out notifications like the classic “There are unused icons on your desktop” as being in the Windows XP Hall of Shame
. Seriously, it’s in there: https://learn.microsoft.com/windows/win32/uxguide/mess-notifIn 2026, Windows interrupts you to ask if you want to clean up printers you haven’t used in a while. The intent is unclear (which printers?), there are too many choices, and it stays visible until you click an option.
For a good while, Microsoft were limping their way to good UX, and this doc was finally a clear set of guidelines. Now, it feels like they’ve slipped back into the Windows XP Hall of Shame
era, and any good UX they happen to come up with is an accident.welll
EVERY TIME you add a new account to Teams, they decide to AGAIN tell you about ALL the features in Teams, until you have pressed "Got it" - as if you were an idiot, which welll using Teams we obvs know that I am, since I am using Teams
