As more and more screenshots and previews of the forthcoming Longhorn are released, I cannot help but wonder what has happened to it’s user interface. Windows XP always served me well. It was easy to find my way around, and everything seemed to be in the correct place. I came across the screenshot this morning, from the new Windows Explorer in Longhorn:

I can’t help feeling that somewhere down the line, the Microsoft interface design team lost their way. Let’s take it in stages:

Colour
There are so many different shades of blue and purple?! in that window that it looks disjointed and messy. They should definitely have stuck to the blue and green theme from Windows XP, which looked fairly acceptable (if a little garish).

Search Bar
Jacob Nielsen would have a field day. The text on that search bar is bearly readable, and mixing grey with a mauve colour is a bad combination. On top of that, they seem to have taken “inspiration” from the way Apple’s search works - neatly placed in the top right corner, with a magnifying glass…

What’s New?
I can’t help wondering, looking at the content of the screenshot, what new features have been added. It seems to me that Explorer has just been repackaged, the look and feel changed a little (for the worse) and a new “reference” column/attribute been added. How useful that will be to anyone will remain to be seen.

Don’t get me wrong - I know that there is a long time between now and the release date (a very long time), but I hope for everyone’s sake that they can come up with an interface which is more inginuitive than that one before it hits the streets.