WINDOWS 11’s NEW DESIGN
However much smart code might lurk below the surface, the most obvious change in any operating system is the way it looks and feels. Its overall design affects every program you run, and often how you interact with it. There’s a lot riding on Windows 11’s new ‘material’ design, then, which may look radical but, when you dig deeper, is more of a smartening up and slimming down – bringing order to the slightly more cluttered areas of earlier versions of Windows.
Microsoft has used two digital ‘materials’ in the new design, called acrylic and mica. Acrylic, which is semi-transparent, is used for transient objects, like clickable menus that pop out from buttons, then disappear when they’ve done their job. Mica (in the real world this is a natural mineral that was superseded by the artificial Formica – popular in kitchen worktops – in the construction of electrical components) is opaque, but subtly shaded to match your desktop background. This is used for permanent working surfaces, like toolbar backgrounds. Mica is what Microsoft calls ‘mode aware’, which means it comes in both light and dark versions, and swaps between them as you switch between light and dark modes.
We’ve illustrated the difference between acrylic and mica in the screenshot top right. On top are Windows 11’s widgets, which appear in acrylic ( 1 ). Through the semi-transparent background you can see the desktop, and File Explorer – which shows the solid mica style 2 .
Then there’s ‘smoke’. This isn’t a new material as such, but a tool used to dim underlying elements when Windows needs to grab your attention. It’s always dark grey, whether you’re using light or dark mode, and appears when important notifications pop up on screen, like warnings that you’re about to make a significant change to your system.
Microsoft has more information on the design philosophy of acrylic, mica and smoke at www.snipca.com/39768.
Interacting with Windows 11
In practice, you won’t think about any of this as you’re using Windows 11 (which is a sign of how well designed the system is). Smoke isn’t a radical concept, and neither are transparent interface elements. The level of transparency has been carefully balanced, and the result feels less glassy than Windows Vista, less showy than Windows XP, and less fiddly than Windows 7. It’s also a slight improvement on Windows 10 (‘slight’ because Windows 10’s design didn’t need much improving).
Transparent areas are light and muted, as though they’ve been frosted, so it’s never difficult to spot their contents within their surroundings, and the elements they’re overlying don’t show through so much that they’re hard to read.
The windows themselves have rounded corners, unless they’re full screen, with subtle drop shadows to pull them up from the desktop and programs sitting behind. It’s an attractive arrangement, but take a screenshot of the active window using the Snipping Tool and you’ll simultaneously capture a few pixels of the background at each corner. You’ll need to trim this in an image editor if you want your screenshots to look their best.
Some on-screen elements take up a lot of space on smaller displays. We’re writing this review on a laptop with a 1920x1080 resolution which, while not ultra HD, is still decent. However, when setting the display to Windows’ recommended zoom level (150 per cent), our taskbar and browser tabs feel like they’re taking more than their fair share of pixels. It’s fixable (we reduced the overall zoom and bumped up the text size to compensate), but options to tailor this would be welcome – as would an easy way to set your preferred direction of movement when using the mouse wheel. Doing this for the trackpad is easy: you just select from a dropdown menu. Doing the same for the mouse requires editing the registry.
Revamped taskbar and centred Start menu
One of the first things you’ll spot is the revamped taskbar. In moving the Start menu and icons to the centre (see screenshot above right), Microsoft is breaking with 25 years of tradition. It looks good, though, and makes sense in the age of tablets and touchscreen laptops, where centred elements are less of a finger stretch from working areas. In our screenshot, you can see the following icons, left to right, on the taskbar: Start menu, Task View, Widgets, Chat, File Explorer, Firefox, and Word 1 .
It works just as well on a traditional PC or laptop, too. Here it opens a revamped menu that does away with live tiles and demotes alphabetised programs in favour of pinned software – reminiscent of the icon-based menus on smartphones – and a section for recommended files and locations. These persist, even if you move the menu back to the left.
Pinned software 2 is an extension of the icons you can pin to the taskbar, giving you fast access to your most-used programs. It’s supplemented by an ‘All apps’ button 3 that opens the full list of installed software, effectively delivering a three-tier system for organising software into essential (taskbar icons), important (pinned programs) and everything else (‘All apps’). This should help you find what you need more quickly.
It’s tempting to put too much in the pinned section (which you can do by right-clicking an icon and picking ‘Pin to Start’), so a little discipline is required to get the most out of it. It’s something you’ll quickly get used to. Now that we have, we wouldn’t go back.
The ‘Recommended’ section, below your pinned programs, isn’t so flexible, as it self-configures based on the files and folders you’ve recently used. You can hide items, and a ‘More’ button opens a longer list, but there’s no way to permanently fix a particular file within the section, as you can with pinned programs. This is a missed opportunity, because being able to pin a file that’s buried several folders deep and get to it with a single click would be the perfect way to break the habit of saving on the desktop.
File Explorer’s smaller right-click menus
Tough choices must be made when designing something as extensive as an operating system, and although we think Microsoft has largely got it right, we’re less impressed by the File Explorer’s slimmed-down context (right-click) menus. Granted, these could get unwieldy in Windows 10 and earlier editions, because installed programs added their own options. But hiding non-core features behind a ‘Show more options’ link ( 1 in screenshot below) risks hiding options users click most often.
In Windows 10, our right-click menu gave us direct access to a range of options for sharing files and saving online (to the ‘cloud’). They’re still there – behind the additional link – but further away (however, turn to page 46 for a trick to revert to the Windows 10 menu).
Likewise, the File Explorer ribbon has disappeared, replaced by a simplified toolbar ( 2 in screenshot below). This is more attractive than its predecessor, so it scores design points, but some tools work best when function trumps form, as should be the case here. At least, we think it should be possible to tweak either of these elements to suit your own requirements without having to edit the registry.
Clearer separation between Action Centre and notifications
There’s a clearer separation between Action Centre and notifications in
Windows 11. Clicking the clock opens your notifications, without showing the buttons for Wi-fi, Bluetooth and so on that accompany them in Windows 10.
These buttons are in the refreshed Action Centre, which you access by clicking the combined Wi-fi, audio and battery icons ( 1 in screenshot above). They continue to perform two functions: displaying their status and giving you access to settings when clicked. There’s also a quick link to the full Settings tool.
If you’re playing audio, Action Centre will show controls (play, pause, back and forward) in a floating panel ( 2 in screenshot above), which makes a lot of sense on two fronts: as well as putting them in the same place as the volume slider 3 , it saves you hunting through buried windows until you find the one that contains the controls for a service or program, like Spotify or Audible.