A friend pointed me in the direction of this blog entry as a demonstration that Microsoft’s UI designers are moving in the right direction. To a point I agree, it certainly looks nicer than Windows FP even if we ignore the worrying similarities to a deviantArt hax0r’s Mac skin for Windows. What’s actually bothering me here though is the usability. This interface uses what I call “secret tabs”, notice the titles of the un-selected tabs just floating in mid air with no indication as to what they actually are. You don’t know that’s a tab until you click on it, by which time it’s too late. It might turn out to be the “erase my harddrive” button, or a goatse hyperlink. Considering all the freely available resource material on how to make an application GUI work for the user, this is well slack.