"When icons in the taskbar and Start menu are different styles, it creates more cognitive load to scan and find applications." "Flat, monochrome icons look great in context of colorful tiles, but as more icon styles enter the ecosystem, this approach needs to evolve," she wrote.
Microsoft's creative director, Christina Koehn, earlier this month explained why Windows 10 tiles don't really fit with its shift away from flat icons. SEE: Microsoft is discontinuing Cortana consumer skills starting with Windows 10 20H1 Without the tile, each app's icon stands out and is more obvious to users. In Microsoft's before-and-after demonstration, it's clear why the company's designers want to veer away from solid blocks of color.įluent Design icons for apps like Edge, Word, and Outlook are overshadowed by each tile's dominant colors. Microsoft has been toying with the idea of removing Live Tiles for at least a year, well before it revealed Windows 10X for the Surface Neo and other dual-screen Windows devices. The design change is meant to offer better support for system-wide light and dark modes, offering users a cleaner design in either mode. The new Start Menu would introduce a more "acrylic, fluent theme" compared with the bright, solid colors that aren't consistent with its Fluent Design System. It also wants to introduce the change without annoying Windows 10 users who like Live Tiles. The idea is to present a visually unified design for the Start Menu compared with what Microsoft says was "a somewhat chaotic color". Microsoft currently plans to lets users turn off Live Tiles to reveal the new icon interface. It would also bring the desktop interface in line with Microsoft's dual-screen Windows 10X Start Menu, which eschews Live Tiles for app icons.
SEE: 20 pro tips to make Windows 10 work the way you want (free PDF) However, the demonstration suggests Microsoft could soon diverge from the original concept of Live Tiles introduced in Window 10 in 2015. I remember setting it at 125 at the time I upgraded from 8.1 to 10. I changed it from 100 to 125, and now the Weather Live Tile is working as it should.
A few of the others were hit and miss, working some days and not on other days.