120982 Windows Insider Podcast EP35 Devereaux Taylor
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Windows Insider podcast Episode 35 Host: Jason Howard Guests: William Devereux - Senior Program Manager, Edge Charles Taylor - Program Manager, Windows Eric Papamarcos, Senior Program Manager WINDOWS INSIDER PODCAST – EPISODE 35 – REDEFINING THE FAMILIAR [MUSIC] JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider podcast, where leaders from Microsoft and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers and innovation. I'm your host, Jason Howard. This is Episode 34, Redefining the Familiar. But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to our website, Insider.Windows.com and register for free. Insiders get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer. All right, on to the show. In our last episode, the Start of Something Different, we took a walk down memory lane to look at the 25-year anniversary of Windows 95, where the Start menu and taskbar features were introduced. Time marches on, of course, and this month, we'll peek behind the curtain at the modern evolution of these features. We have a great group of guests joining us this month with Eric Papamarcos discussing Start menu, and the dynamic duo of Charles Taylor and William Devereux to share insights into taskbar. These features have seen significant changes across two and a half decades of development. So, as we examine the philosophy driving their modernization, we'll also explore the craftsmanship aspect, which provides the basis of a fresh look and feel while retaining the core functionality Windows users have come to know and love. Without further ado, let's get onto the show. Welcome to the podcast, Eric. I appreciate you joining us. ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Hey, Jason, thanks for having me. JASON HOWARD: Can you tell Windows Insiders a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Microsoft? ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Sure thing. So right now, I am a Product Manager on the Windows Experiences team. You may also know this team as the Shell team. That's what it's historically been called. And so, basically my job on a day-to-day basis is to figure out which features should we work on for Windows, then pitch those features to our team internally, basically explain, like, hey, why should we do this, why are they important? And then, once they get approved, I work with our designers and engineers to actually build those features, design them, release them out into the wild, and then track success of those features. And I've spent the majority of my career working on the Start menu. And so, I'm excited to talk to you about that today. JASON HOWARD: Awesome, and super glad to have you here. A little bit more about you, real quick, if you don't mind me asking. How long have you been with Microsoft? And you mentioned your current focus is on Start. Have there been any other products or features that you've worked on during your time here at the company? 1 Windows Insider podcast Episode 35 Host: Jason Howard Guests: William Devereux - Senior Program Manager, Edge Charles Taylor - Program Manager, Windows Eric Papamarcos, Senior Program Manager ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Well, I've been here at Microsoft for a little over eight years now, and the time has gone by a super-fast. And one fun fact about me is that, even though I work as a Product Manager now, I was actually hired as an engineer, which means I wrote code during my day job when I first Started. But I did end up transitioning into the PM role. It was just a better fit for me, and the PM role that I had at that time was on the Windows Phone team. So, I started back when we were focusing on phone, and yeah, like I said, I've been working on the Start menu on again and off again throughout that time. There's been a couple of minor things along the way related to notifications and stuff like that, but it's been primarily about how we launch apps on the system. JASON HOWARD: Yeah, it's always fun when somebody mentions Windows phones, because there are some Insiders out there who still use them. That's near and dear to their heart. And, although those days are long gone at least looking at it now, I guarantee you, you've brought back some – some fun memories for some of the listeners out there. ERIC PAPAMARCOS: That's right. Yeah, there's a good group of us on the team right now that worked on phone, and we definitely have fond memory – memories of that. JASON HOWARD: Well, as you mentioned, you're working on Start-related efforts within Windows, and doing a little throwback to the last month's episode where we talked about the history of Windows 95 where taskbar came about or Start menu came about. There's a lot of history there. And for Insiders that are on the beta channel right now, they’ve seen some really interesting changes in the Start menu space in the recent past and some builds that we've released. And I get the distinct feeling, given what you've already said, you had a – you had a hand in some of that, right? ERIC PAPAMARCOS: I did have a hand in that, yeah. So, we released a feature that we call theme-aware tiles in Start. A lot of you are hopefully trying it out right now. And so, this change included a couple different aspects to it. The first thing that we did was related to the apps list, so the list of apps that appears on the left side of Start. And what we did there was we removed the colorful backplate, the solid color backplate behind the logos in the apps list so that those logos set directly on the Start menu frame. And then, for the second part of the change, we changed up the look at the tiles a little bit by applying a uniform, partially transparent background color to the tiles. And so, the reason we call it theme-aware tiles is because, instead of them just always being, blue or whatever your default accent color is, it instead adjusts to your theme color, so whether you're using a dark system theme, a light system theme or even a colorful theme. So, we think it turned out really well. JASON HOWARD: And I'm assuming that came from listening to feedback and other sources of Insider input, in addition to just some ideas that you had from a design perspective anyway. 2 Windows Insider podcast Episode 35 Host: Jason Howard Guests: William Devereux - Senior Program Manager, Edge Charles Taylor - Program Manager, Windows Eric Papamarcos, Senior Program Manager ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Absolutely, yeah. we see a lot of the feedback that comes in from social media, whether that's Twitter or Reddit or Feedback Hub. And we wanted to rev on the design a little bit based on that feedback. JASON HOWARD: So, talking about feedback, right, I actually want to dig in a little bit right there, because back earlier this year, I think it was January, we hosted one of our Windows Insider webcasts where we have some of these types of conversations in a live environment. And part of that discussion was with folks from the design team. And during that broadcast, they surprised, well, I think pretty much everybody with a refreshed Start menu mockup. And, it kind of went viral by itself very quickly across Twitter and tech blogs, and things like that. And I've got to say that that mockup was pretty well near universally applauded. People were super excited about it, not only within the Insider community, but even beyond that user base for other people that happened to read some of those same journals and articles. What did you think of the feedback that came from that mockup? I know you said that feedback had influenced some of the design work itself. But were there other kind of nudges or did you use some of that feedback that came from the webcast in what Insiders are now seeing on their builds in the – in the beta channel? ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Yeah, absolutely. So, like you were saying, we don't normally preview designs before we release them into the builds. But because we had gotten some feedback from Insiders, in particular, about how our refreshed icons were looking in Start, we just thought it was a great time to be transparent, say, hey, here's what we're working on. What do you think about it? And, during the webcast and afterwards, the reaction was super positive, and quite – quite frankly, the feedback that we got, because it was so positive, it sort of accelerated the development of the feature internally, because we already had feedback that said that people liked it. And so, instead of us having a design behind closed doors where it's like, hey, we think people will like it, but we're not really sure, the fact that we had feedback on a specific design really made things go – go along a lot faster. And so, that – that feedback was tremendously valuable. And so, thank you to everyone who – who sent in feedback about it. JASON HOWARD: Let me take a step back to our last episode again, if I may. Part of what we talked to Chris Guzak about was when they were doing the origination of Windows 95 or what became Windows 95, they had done Start-related mockups, and they actually brought people in to do user experience testing.