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Windows Insider podcast Episode 35 Host: Jason Howard Guests: William Devereux - Senior , 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 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 , where the Start and 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 , 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 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?

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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

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 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.

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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

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Absolutely, yeah. we see a lot of the feedback that comes in from social media, whether that's Twitter or Reddit or . 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. 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.

And it was really funny because one of the things he was talking about was the right click of are people going to figure out you can actually right click with the mouse and it's going to initiate, a little menu that pops up to do some specific actions or whatnot.

And at that point in time, there was no Feedback Hub, there was no Insider program. So, there was, in essence, a requirement that they bring folks in, put them under NDA into this tented-type environment to get some of that

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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 early feedback where they kind of show off the product. Here's the design we're looking at. Is it intuitive? Do people actually like the design – things of that nature.

And then, you kind of fast forward to where we are today. And as you were talking about, we already had some feedback. We already had some requests from Insiders, suggestions they had made.

And one of the things that, even quite literally this morning, showed up on Twitter is mockups of what people think the next thing should look like. It seems like there's this incessant flow, and there are some very creative people out there who make mockups of Start menu, of , of , taskbar redesigns, of what they think; squared corners, and rounded corners, and light theme and dark theme, and kind of every hodgepodge, match of everything you can imagine. And really, it's – it sounds like this feedback actually gets put to good use. And I mean, that's really what the Insider program is all about.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: That's totally right. And, depending on the feature, we need to get – we might get feedback in a different way. So, for example, this change was more of a visual change, so we could just show a screenshot and get feedback. Hey, what do you think? What are your first impressions? Some features that we work on, maybe where we're changing more the functionality, we really need people to try it out using an interactive prototype.

So, we get a feedback from a number of different sources. And usually, the way that we get feedback depends on the type of change that we're introducing.

JASON HOWARD: It seems very reasonable to tailor some of your intake channels for that feedback, based upon what you're actually trying to develop or design, some of the things that you're looking to change.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Right.

JASON HOWARD: So, kind of hearkening back, I guess hearkening forward to what we're talking about here and some of the more recent Start menu changes, I'm going to be – forgive me for being a little blunt, right, but I want to ask you a straightforward question. Why did we make some of these changes? Like, what was the driving impetus behind some of this revamp that users are seeing in these preview builds?

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Good question. It's a little bit of a long story, so let me – let me try to give you the short version. A little while ago, maybe a year or two ago, the Office team set out to redesign their app icons for, the Word app, Excel at PowerPoint, etcetera. And they redesigned their icons using the new , which is a little bit of a departure from the previous design system. And those – those icons had a great reception in terms of those being a great evolution of what was there today. And so, the next step, after redesigning the Office icons, was redesigning all of the preinstalled, Windows app icons. So, these are the apps like calculator or , stuff like that.

And so, once we had those icons redesign, we knew we were heading in that direction. We quickly realized that those icons were primarily designed to be rendered on a more neutral background. So, when I say neutral, I

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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 mean, just a standard light background or a dark background, and maybe didn't work as well on a more colorful background, a solid color background.

That's different than how it used to be. We used to have icons we call monochrome, which means that they're just black and white icons. And those looked really great when they were placed on that solid color background. But these new – new icons didn't look their best in that environment.

And so, when we realized that, we decided that we needed to put them on a – a more neutral background, and by using a light theme background color for the tiles or a dark themed background color, we thought that would have a great blend of being true to the new , but also making them still easy to find, not changing too much about what Start is about.

And – and the other really important thing that we considered while we were doing this is that we don't just look at Start menu in isolation. We don't just have, like, a Start menu team and a taskbar team. Like, we're looking at the Windows experience as a whole.

And one thing we realized is that the Start menu was one of the only places prominently in the Windows experience where we had these solid color back plates behind our logos that didn't exist on the taskbar, that didn't exist on the new tab page in . It didn't exist on Office.com. And so, we were kind of standing out a little bit in a bad way. And so, we wanted to make sure that when people see these icons across different surfaces, throughout the entire experience, that they're rendered in a way that feels cohesive, feels coherent, and it's not sort of unintentionally different between the two.

JASON HOWARD: So, it sounds like with – with some of these changes specifically, that they are more visual changes rather than necessarily functional changes in how things are working.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: That's right, yeah, mostly visual, just changing how things look when you open up Start.

JASON HOWARD: So in that vein, and without me getting too philosophical about things, it really seems like there was a desire to bring a bit of a modern feel, since it was on the visual side, but not necessarily trying to rearchitect what people have come to know and love, not necessarily changing what Start is actually about and what people have come to expect.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Yeah, exactly. So, with this change, we were able to sort of freshen up the design, make it more streamlined by applying these visual updates. And we didn't think it was necessarily the right time to sort of architect how things worked, change how you got to your apps, didn't feel appropriate.

And so, yeah, with this change, we were able to keep Start true to what it is today, make it maybe a little bit more usable, easier to find your apps by not having those solid color back plates, but also, at the same time, make it feel familiar and fresh.

JASON HOWARD: Even branching off of that a little bit and going back to the early version that Insiders saw, earlier this year, it appears that the original design compositions were done in light and dark themes, at least

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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 from what I recall. But that seems to have changed a little bit – and I think you touched on this a little bit earlier, so maybe we're overlapping a little bit, but I think it's worth revisiting – as compared to what Insiders seeing in preview builds now.

JASON HOWARD: Such as the accent color experience coming to the forefront.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Like you were saying, when we showed off the designs to Insiders, and when we were developing the feature internally, we create, a spec or a specification of some kind, whether that's in PowerPoint or Word, or something. we have design comps of what it's supposed to look like. And typically those design comps were the pure dark theme or pure light team experience that you might be seeing on your own build.

But what was kind of funny is that when I would do internal demos, I would demo dark theme than a demo light team. And I would say, hey, this also does work pretty well if you apply your accent color to Start, which is an existing setting. You can apply to Start or taskbar or action center.

And what I would – when I would when I would do the accent color demo, it was kind of funny because then people would get really excited in the conversation and say, “Hey, can you change the color to pink?” or, “I want to see it in green now,” and people would just shout out colors, and I would just change it for them just to see what it would look like. And I think people really liked the splash of color in Start if they didn't want just the dark or light theme.

And what I found personally is that the accent color approach works really well if you have a colorful desktop wallpaper, because then, when you have the desktop wallpaper and Start on top of it, you can create some really cool combinations. And some of the screenshots that we've seen from Insiders do leverage the accent color, and it's fun to see what color they've chosen and how that matches the rest of the system. I think there's some pretty cool combinations that people have put together.

JASON HOWARD: It's interesting to hear this, because one of the things that seems to be inherently special for people – I don't know how else to word that – is the concept of personalization, where they feel that they've taken a computer, like, say they buy a new laptop or something. They take it out of the box. They have to go through some of the setup stuff and configure their , and they get through some of the routine stuff.

But at that point, it then becomes theirs. It's the same thing with buying a new phone. You go through, you install the apps that you want to use. You set the wallpaper that you want. You configure your icons in a specific order and layout.

And really the things that you're working on and that you've discussed here is all about that personalization space. And it's, as I mentioned before, one of the very core, very iconic pieces of Windows, the Start menu, which now has been around, although it's been around 25 years, it has definitely changed over the course of time. And this modern feel on this modern adaptation, the refresh, right, but the familiarity of the refresh that you and others have helped bring to the table.

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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

It's really interesting to see that because there are some pieces of the OS where users don't want to have to make a ton of changes. They want it to just work. They want to learn how it works, and then they just want to use it that way. But you get into a space such as this and it seems like everybody wants it to be a specific way that's personal for them, and they want to have that personalization option.

And it's funny that you were talking about showing this off in demos and everybody's calling out their favorite color or a color that's important to them, because it really drives that point home of just how personal of a space this really is. And when you're trying to design something that applies to a billion plus users, there really is no one-size-fits-all formula that's going to make everybody happy.

So, introducing something like this that you, partnering with the devs and the design folks, you all have really brought something not only fascinating and insightful, but very personal to everybody who's going to use Windows. You've really delivered something fresh and awesome here.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Thanks, Jason, for saying that. And I think what we try to do or our approach with Start is have a great out-of-the-box experience when you buy a new PC, but then give you the tools to customize it to make it your own, like you were saying. And in Start, typically, we see that with people pinning or unpinning tiles, resizing them. maybe you love to see the weather tile to be – to be a large tile so you can see that at a glance.

And so, I think by adding this additional personalization option, by applying the accent color in a more uniform way, we think that it's going to make the overall Start experience just a little bit better than it used to be, because Start did have accent color before. But we think that this approach sort of blends the – the new colorful icons better with the different color palette that we have.

JASON HOWARD: I get the feeling, and this is completely just a little prognostication on my part, that even if it seems like it's a little bit of an incremental change, because there are some changes where we make a small change and the users come back to us and say, “Well, why didn't you make a bigger change?” right? But this is one of those changes I think that, even if there's a perception that it seems to be small, that the impact is really big and it's going to, like – like I mentioned earlier, and don't want to harp on it too much, it's going to be really personal for the people that choose to make some of these changes.

And it might actually get people to make some updates or some revisions to their layouts, especially for people that haven't done it in so long, because, I mean, I am a creature of habit, right? Once I set something, there's – it's that whole – if it's not broke, don't fix it type mentality.

So, I will once in a while change my backgrounds. And I will say once I turned on dark mode, I haven't turned it off? I did try out light mode for a little bit and I prefer the dark mode. But you bring some of these changes, even if they're subtle or some people perceive them to be subtle, it could potentially have a big impact.

And I think that's going to drive a lot of user satisfaction in not just the ability of, doing the customization side of things, but how connected people feel to making it personal for them. And that just drives that – I don't know, what's the right word for it, the connectedness, right? If – I feel like I'm getting too philosophical here, right?

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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

But, any time somebody wants to use a product, the thing that keeps them coming back, does it serve the needs of what they're trying to accomplish? And do they feel good while they're using it? Is it just a tool to get something done or is it a tool that helps them accomplish something that they feel good about doing?

And I never thought I would say this about Start menu, but if I have the ability to customize it, make it easy to use and make it look how I want it to look, how I feel about using it, day-in and day-out, isn't just, oh, it's a tool. I have to click here and click here to go do something. It's like, hey, this is personal. It's mine. It's laid out how I want. It looks how I want. And then, nobody better touch it because we're going to have some words. (Laughter.)

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: I think that, sometimes, it is the small changes that make the biggest impact. And people were familiar with the current Start experience, and this just makes it look a little bit better than it is today. And I think that some of those small changes freshen up your life a little bit, like maybe you – you go out and you buy some new clothes just to feel a little better or you buy some decorations for your house. And the house is still the same, but just having a little bit of extra something there just lightens it up a little bit.

And the additional personalization that we have in Start now where we apply the accent color to all of Start in a more uniform way, what that seems to unlock, what we've seen with – with Insiders and internally is that it feels like people are more likely to use that accent color setting where you can have your accent color match your desktop wallpaper, and you can use some of those Windows themes, like the pride themes that change every couple of hours to different wallpaper.

And so, I think some of these small changes have made people gravitate more towards, leaning into some of the personalization options, because they just – they just think that it looks better. It's more fresh and it's what they're familiar with, but it's also a little bit updated. And you feel like you got something new, but it's still so familiar.

JASON HOWARD: And interestingly enough, even a small change like that could potentially be an inroad to get somebody who's not necessarily comfortable with making changes to exploring something else in the OS that they haven't before, and learning something new or taking a step further, bolstering that little bit of confidence where, like, hey, I changed this and it went okay. Maybe I can poke around and see what else.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Yeah.

JASON HOWARD: I've got to say this has been a super fascinating conversation, and hopefully Insiders have learned a thing or two along the way; looking back to what they saw in January, and then, of course, coming forward to what's in the preview builds, and then some of the insights that you've shared here, there's been a lot covered.

And even if, like I said before, folks feel like this isn't necessarily the world's largest change – we didn't completely overhaul Start – there's been a lot of changes in the past 25 years, and this is just the continuation of that, that personalization, the modernization. With continuing to evolve along the way, there will be more changes that are forthcoming.

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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

And so, that leads me to what is my final question to you, which is my favorite question. So, don't get yourself in trouble here, but can you tell us a little bit about what's next? Is there anything that Insider should be on the lookout for?

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Well, Jason, I appreciate you trying to get me in trouble by asking that question. (Laughter.) I don't know if I can answer that directly, but I do want to go a little bit back to a previous topic we were talking about, which is feedback and how we use that to shape our plans. And I just want to – to just underscore what we were talking about earlier, which is that as we are building the plans for future products and features, we actually really do listen to feedback and incorporate that.

So, to be more specific, earlier I was talking about how part of my job is to pitch features. And the entire team does that, whether it's designers, product managers, even engineers, the whole team can pitch ideas. And the best pitches that I've seen, the ones that have been approved, so to speak, almost always start with some customer feedback, whether that is a customer feedback quote from Reddit or Twitter, or another social media place, whether that is a Feedback Hub item on the number of upvotes, every great pitch that I've seen has that in it.

And that feedback is coming from the people that are listening to this podcast right now. And when you write – write those pieces of feedback, and if you are specific about, hey, what is the problem that you're having while you're trying to complete a task, or what are you – what are you not liking about something or what do you think could be better, what ideas do you have, if you can be extremely specific about what would make your life easier when you're doing a task, we do listen to that. We include those quotes in our pitches, and those are the very human-centric things that get people to understand why an individual feature is important.

And so, please keep that feedback coming. It really matters. It actually makes our lives easier when we can pull feedback that's related to stuff we're working on. And so, please keep it coming. It's super valuable and we're – we're definitely always listening.

JASON HOWARD: I don't know what else to say but thank you. This has been a – a great conversation. We've covered a lot of ground here, a little bit historical, a whole bunch of current and modern. I don't think you got yourself in trouble even though I tried to get you in trouble. (Laughter.) But, you dodged it pretty well. So, I've got to give you a little credit there.

Just on behalf of the Insiders who have shared the feedback, not only back in January when they saw the initial mock ups, but to – for those who have actually run the preview builds in the various channels and are giving feedback even now, I will say thank you. You've done great work. So, share the thanks with the design folks and the dev folks that you partner with, even the folks directly on your team that you partner with. Lots of really good work. No doubt there's more to come, even if I couldn't pull it out of you.

But knowing that there is more to come, hopefully we can have you back on again, whether it's on another podcast or maybe even a webcast so we can do some live demos at some point. We'll – we'll be happy to kind of share the good news and the changes that continue to come into the future. So, again, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really great chatting with you.

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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

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: Thanks, Jason. Thanks for having me. And it was great to talk about the – the work that our team is doing on behalf of the team. And thanks for having me.

JASON HOWARD: Absolutely, man. Cheers.

ERIC PAPAMARCOS: See ya.

[MUSIC]

JASON HOWARD: William and Charles, we welcome you both to the podcast. Thank you for joining us.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Thanks for having us on. We're excited to be here.

CHARLES TAYLOR: Yeah. Thank you for having us on. I'm looking forward to the show.

JASON HOWARD: So, as we get started here, could each of you tell Windows Insiders a little bit about yourself and what you do here at Microsoft? William, would you mind going first?

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Sure, yeah. I'm a Program Manager on the Microsoft Edge team, and I actually work very closely with Charles and Greg Maddox, who unfortunately couldn't be here today, and Jason, and a whole bunch of other people on bringing new features between – improving integration between Microsoft Edge and Windows 10, including some stuff we'll be talking about later today.

JASON HOWARD: Awesome. How about you, Charles?

CHARLES TAYLOR: So, similar to William, I'm also a Program Manager at Microsoft. I get the pleasure of working in the Windows team alongside some really awesome people, yourself included, Jason. But most recently, my primary scope for quite a while now has been working in the taskbar space. I get the joy of playing a bit of a diplomacy role, so I get to have those fun conversations across all the partners and – and people that want the space on taskbar, and really trying to represent the voice of our Windows customers and end users, and making sure that they are represented in those conversations and don't get left to the side as we think about what ends up in that prime real estate.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, it's definitely one of the important parts of Windows that I think everybody, even if they don't necessarily know what to call it, everybody's used it at some point.

CHARLES TAYLOR: Yeah, yeah, that's actually really funny because we always think about that in terms of user feedback and sentiment. We're like, what are people calling this out in the wild? Some – I mean, a lot of people do call it taskbar, but you also will find random other names for it. And so, just trying to make sure you're looking for the right keywords is always fun.

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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

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, definitely. Well, both of you mentioned working on taskbar in one aspect or another in your intros, so let's just jump right in and talk more about it. You both work in this space, but as you mentioned, each of you approach it from very different perspectives. So, it sounds like these are distinct and almost different, but given both of you are working in the same space, there has to be some sort of overlap. So are your efforts running in parallel? How do they overlap? Can you talk a little bit about that?

CHARLES TAYLOR: I think they're very much in parallel in many ways. I think, from a Windows taskbar perspective, a lot of times, what we're looking at is what's the end user experience and what are the challenges people are facing in this space? What's the intent of taskbar and what's the role it plays in the system? And then, as we work with partner teams, like William's team, we're really just trying to find that sweet balance in terms of how do we make sure we can bring value to the customers at the end of the day while staying true to the goals of taskbar and providing a delightful experience.

And so, even though I think there are probably slightly different perspectives on it, I think at the end of the day, it's really sort of how we work in harmony with one another to try and provide the best experience for users.

JASON HOWARD: Anything you want add, William?

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: No, I think that's exactly it. Like, we work – we work very closely together, and while it's somewhat different spaces, we're always talking about and coordinating, and making sure we're always, bringing new enhancements to Windows 10 and to user who use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10. And it's really all about creating the best, most productive experience and most user-friendly and greatest experience we can offer our users.

JASON HOWARD: Well, obviously, given that this is a podcast, there's a bunch of questions that I want to ask the two of you. But before we get too deep, I want to talk a little bit about the evolution of taskbar over the course of time. Our last month's episode was about Windows 95, where taskbar kind of sprung to life, and this was 25 years ago, as hard as it is to believe that, because I remember using Windows 95 and well, I'm just sitting here dating myself as I'm talking through this.

But I would love to have a little bit of your take on what has and maybe hasn't changed over the course of time, and then some of the – the why behind it, things that have changed, look and feel-wise, the intent of taskbar, anything that you can share in that space, I'd love to hear more about that.

CHARLES TAYLOR: It's interesting. You've seen taskbar change in subtle, nuanced ways over the years. I think at its heart, it's retained a lot of its original feel and original aesthetic. And the way that we think about taskbar from a Windows perspective is it's your primary launching surface, your primary launching and switching surface, I should say. So, it's where you go to launch the apps that you use most frequently, and it's also that place where you quickly switch between your running applications on your machine. And that, at its root, hasn't necessarily changed a ton.

What you've started to see over different releases of Windows is certain features being brought to the taskbar space as we see investments happening in parallel across the company. Whether that's bringing

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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 integration to the taskbar, whether that's adding new features to help users navigate through the system, like and Timeline, or bringing Search so that people can more easily find the content they're looking for.

I think there are also certain areas of taskbar where you have seen interesting moves be made over the years. I think system tray is an area which is constantly sort of a struggle for us in the taskbar space, the area of your taskbar in the bottom right hand of the screen. In its inception, it was very much supposed to be a status indicator or a surface where you could kind of quickly glance and see, hey, do I have a healthy battery life, am I connected, is my volume on?

And over the years, we started to see that space evolve for better or worse, depending on what side of the fence you sit on. And we've actually seen a lot of apps start to show up there and not just as status indicators, but also as sometimes primary launch points.

And so, that's probably been one of the biggest challenges, I think, for us is rationalizing how do we balance the need for all of these apps and partners, both internal and external, who have something that is important for the user, but also do it in a way where it doesn't start to become cluttered or bloated, or feel like there's too much crammed in this space. And so, I think that's something that we continually try and look at, year-over-year.

JASON HOWARD: It's funny when we're developing features or products internally and there is the scope of something said, like we are going to work on this particular feature. This is the kind of boundaries of what we want to put together. And then there is the expansion of that from the original idea. Let's add a little more here. Oh, well, since we're working on this, we're going to toss this in as well. And you end up with this concept called scope creep. It's – it's a little bit of a program manager-type term, but it's used broadly across the industry.

It almost sounds like that's kind of what has happened down in the corner of the taskbar over there, that over the course of time, over the past couple of decades, that what it was originally set out to be is definitely different than what it has become. That doesn't mean we got it 100 percent right 25 years ago, but do you think we've taken it too far?

CHARLES TAYLOR: It's an interesting question and it's a loaded one, and I don't know that I have a perfect answer for it either. (Laughter.) I don't know if taking it too far is the way I would put it, as much as when you look at something like taskbar that is so premium in the system, it becomes very quickly a surface that becomes competitive in terms of spacing, and allocation, apps, whether it's internal or a third party wanting space there to just to keep users informed, to keep users engaged with that content.

And so, one of the things that I think we have tried to do is sort of take a step back and say, hey, over the years, perhaps we – we lost some – some control over this in some way or form as things move rapidly and people very quickly start to invest in this space. And now, we're saying, hey, let's take a step back. Let's look at where we came from, what's happened, how people are leveraging this space, what's happening in the ecosystem, and how can we sort of get control of it again and kind of balance that need – for Windows users, as well as for the partners who are in this space.

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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

JASON HOWARD: And I apologize. I didn't mean for that to come across as a completely loaded question. (Laughter.) I feel like I caught you a little bit out of left field. That was not my intent. (Laughter.) But the comment that you made about it being a premium space, because it is – because it is something that everybody sees when they log into Windows, unless they've intentionally chosen to hide it, because there are that you can adjust in that way.

But it makes absolute sense of why there would be, I don't know, almost a competition to have something appear in that space, because you get in front of users. It's something that they see continuously, and it makes things easy, right? If you're there and it's like a one click kind of one stop shop of, oh, I can just slide my mouse over and make a quick click to do something, who wouldn't want to be part of that space?

And I think – I mean, I don't want to speak on your behalf, but it's probably the reason that a lot of teams are trying to put things there, not only internally as part of Microsoft, but externally as third-party app developers and OEMs add their components to the OS along the way for devices and hardware that they release.

CHARLES TAYLOR: Exactly, exactly. It's an extremely valuable space, and I think everyone that I work with, I don't think anyone sets out to do anything that they believe to be negative or not useful to users. I think everyone starts out with very good intentions.

But I think part of the role that we've had to play and that we're increasingly trying to play is helping sort of surface, what are all the different activities happening, because for a lot of partners that we work with, it's easy for you to understand your scope and it's easy for you to understand exactly what your goals are or what value you're looking to bring to a user. But you also have to rationalize that against all the other investments, all the other partners out there that could possibly be in this space that want space here. How do you make sure that, at the end of the day, you're not cannibalizing it and overloading it with too much?

And so, a lot of times that's what we end up doing, is we try to say, hey, yes. this is great, this is wonderful. We know you want to do this thing, but how does it stack up against this other initiative or investment? How does it stack up against some other partner or app in this space? And how do we make sure that we're getting the right content there for the right people and for the partners where perhaps you don't necessarily have space on taskbar or taskbar isn't the right home for it? How do we make sure there is a space in Windows for that if it's not taskbar, then it is somewhere else? And so, I think that's also part of the – of the challenges.

Over the years, we started to see evolution not just in taskbar, but you see evolution happening in other services in Windows. You see new surfaces popping up, and one of the most important things that we're trying to do is rationalize, again, sort of back to the systems, the UX systems, what are these surfaces in Windows? What do they exist for and how are they intended to be used? And probably most importantly, how do they interact with one another? And so, I think there's a lot there that we're trying to – to reconcile and wrap our heads around.

JASON HOWARD: And with the evolution of taskbar I'm going to jump back to last episode again for one quick moment. When I was speaking with Chris Kuzak (ph) about the evolution of 95, Windows 95, that is, he talked about and that's kind of when Internet became this thing. It was like somebody flipped this light

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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 switch, and all of a sudden, everything is gaining Web components, and they're redesigning chunks of the OS to be Internet-compatible, for lack of a better way of saying it.

So, one of the things I want to ask – and William, this question is probably for you – is about the evolution of taskbar and how we've integrated that with what has become, today, an app-specific, Web-specific experience that so many people seem to be engaged in, I guess, if that's the right way to say it. So many people spend a vast majority of their computing time in a at this point. So, how does that fit in with what you're working on and what your team is trying to integrate with the taskbar space?

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Yeah, that's a great point, Jason. back in the day, most of the stuff you did on Windows was in applications and apps. But as the Web has grown and evolved, more and more things you do are powered by the Web, whether you're getting your e-mail on the Web or, working on a project or designing, on – on a website that just is as rich as a native application now.

And so, a lot of the great productivity experiences that Windows 10 offers, things like the taskbar where you can pin your favorite applications, get one-click access and see everything that's running, or – or alt tabbing between running applications, all of that is now locked away within a single app, the Web browser.

And – and so, as more and more of what you do, people do move to the Web – and to be very clear here, apps are equally as important, but people use many apps alongside many Web-based experiences now. And as a result of that, any – anything that happens in the browser, you can't leverage all the great things that Windows 10 has – has to offer. All those great learnings and productivity as we've added to Windows over the decades, you can't leverage them.

And so, what we really did is we took a step back and we said, how can we help your browser work better for you on Windows 10? How can we make it easier to get back to your – your favorite sites? How to make it easier to navigate between stuff, disambiguate between the tabs, if you have 1,500 50 or 100 tabs open, all of that stuff? How can we do – how can we make it easier for you to browse the Web.

JASON HOWARD: It's almost like you're trying to find a way to simplify a user's workflow without it feeling like the Web browsing experience is still separate and fully distinct from what they're doing inside Windows, because Web browsing has become such a big part of it that you're really just pulling these two things together.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Exactly, yeah. That's exactly it. And obviously, we want to make sure, if you love the current experience of browsing, that's great. But how can we take – make it even better for you, on Windows 10? so, that's what we've been working on.

And recently, just a couple of weeks ago, we started releasing the –first set of improvements we have planned in this space, one of those being a completely new way of accessing your pin sites on the taskbar. Pin sites have been around for a long time, right? had pin sites. Microsoft legacy, the previous version of Microsoft Edge, had pin sites on the taskbar.

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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

And they're great, and they're basically like a super favorite, right? If I go to a particular website to shop all the time, I can pin that site to my taskbar and it's right there alongside all my other apps. And I click it, and it takes me to the website, and that's great.

The problem we saw, though, is that, for many people, it's not just about getting, launching the – the one homepage, right? They want to get back to the tabs later. Like, if you're – if you're working across multiple apps, maybe you're in Office – you're in PowerPoint working on a deck, and then you go and you switch over to your – to your Web browser to – to do some research, and you want to go back to PowerPoint. You just click on PowerPoint on the taskbar and you're done.

And in Edge legacy, we did some improvements there where, for a pin site, if you clicked on the pin site, it would take you back to the most – most recent, closest match tab. But you might have – maybe you're doing some research or you're shopping for a new TV or something, and you might have 10, 15 tabs open on that site that you pinned. And previously, that was great. But like, sorry, you've got to use the Web browser at that point and try to dig through all of your tabs. And you might have, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 tabs open.

Additionally, we found that it was – it was kind of a strange experience, just from a polish standpoint, where you would click on the pin site and the pin site wouldn't get any – you wouldn't see any feedback that you actually clicked on it on the taskbar, and over somewhere else on the taskbar, Edge would, launch, right? It was – it was kind of a weird disconnect.

JASON HOWARD: It sounds like it was a little bit of a jarring experience where the taskbar acts one way in one circumstance, but you initiate this separate action and it's completely different.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Right, and it didn't feel – it didn't feel normal. It didn't feel native, like the normal taskbar. And so, we've actually done a bunch of work to integrate all of your tabs onto the taskbar. So instead of saying, you can pin a site, you click on the taskbar and it launches the tab and that's it, we kind of – we might try to find the closest match and we're done. Now, when you click on the taskbar, if you don't have any tabs open, it will launch the site.

But if you do have a tab already open on that domain that you pinned, you actually see all of the open tabs in Edge on the taskbar, just like if you had, multiple Word documents open. And – and so, this makes it really easy to find the exact tab that you were looking for.

So now, like, I use it all the time for, like, as your dev ops when I'm doing – doing work and checking, tracking bugs and – and new features we're working on, right? But I also do it for, like, shopping where, now if I navigate to, – if I'm doing a bunch of shopping, I navigate to that site in – in Edge, it lights up on the taskbar. And I see that little underline, that running state that lets me know that the program is open. And – and so, I get instant feedback that – that their site’s open on that domain. And I can click on it and I can see all of my tabs.

And that's a fairly big improvement, we hope. And obviously, you won't pin all of your – all of your favorite sites, right? Taskbar real estate is very precious, as – as Charles well knows. (Laughter.) you don't want to pin a hundred sites to your taskbar. But for the couple that you care about most, maybe it's a site you use for work all

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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 the time or you're doing a bunch of shopping, or any number of – your favorite social site, right? You can pin those to the taskbar and access them easier.

And there's things we can do in the future. you can imagine, like, maybe in the future we could show badges on the – on the taskbar. So, if your favorite site has an update. We can let right in the taskbar that an update is available. There's a lot of really cool things we can do, now that sites are even more integrated with the Windows taskbar.

CHARLES TAYLOR: And I just want to say, I think it's a – it's a really great example of partnership and collaboration between the two teams, and in the interest of helping the user, right? I mean, if you go back to, again, what I mentioned earlier about the intent of taskbar, which is being that primary launching and switching surface for your favorite content, this is an example of a close partnership that's taken something and made it even better. It's sort of taken that concept of pinning apps and expanded it even broader to sites, and making sure that people and the end users ultimately have that flexibility to truly get the things on their taskbar that they use most often and not have it hidden behind a browser.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Yeah, that's exactly it. And the nice thing is you can also – you can – you can pin and unpin at will, as well, you know. Maybe you were going to do a bunch of work for a short period. You can pin that site, and when you're done, you can unpin it and kind of be done with it. And so, it's really all about giving you more control over your taskbar and how you access all of the – the stuff that matters most to you.

JASON HOWARD: So, that leads me to ask you another question, Charles, because it seems that it is super important to make the decisions on what is actually pinned by default into the taskbar space? Obviously, Microsoft makes some decisions on certain things we want there, just that are native to Windows that are super important. And then, kind of like we talked about earlier, of course, OEMs want a little bit of their stuff there, and every – everybody wants a slice of that pie, so to speak.

So internally, how do we make that decision and are there any programmatic efforts that we're engaged in currently to kind of drive the future of what may be there or any redesigns in that space?

CHARLES TAYLOR: Yeah, no, it's a – it's a great question. And I'll say historically, we haven't always taken a data- driven approach to it quite as much as we are placing a huge emphasis on now. And I think that's just a general evolution that you will see across Windows and across Microsoft, and obviously, most companies being very data-driven and data-oriented. And that's really what we're placing our bets on these days.

And so, one of the – the things that I've had a really exciting opportunity to work on is programmable taskbar. And it's very, very specific to exactly that scenario you're mentioning, Jason, which is I have just unboxed my – my brand new Windows PC, and what shows up on my taskbar for the first time.

And historically, you're making these decisions about what shows up for so many, so many people. And what we don't want to have happen, as we look forward, is people unboxing a device and just feeling like it's not theirs, feeling like it's full of clutter and bloatware, and ads, and – trying to shove content down your throat.

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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

And it's interesting because it's something, this feature programmable taskbar that we have, we're flighting right now, in WIP. And as an end user, it's not, a ton of flashy UI. It's not like you're seeing a new surface in taskbar. It's really purely just about how we make decisions on what shows up on taskbar. And the beauty of it is that it gives us a service-driven way to make that decision.

So, today we are very tightly coupled with the OS. If we make a decision and they pin by taskbar, we can't just easily walk back from that. We can't say, hey, we put it there and we're going to take it away tomorrow. And programmable taskbar, we're really trying to lean into experimentation and move away from this mentality of a one-size-fits-all and really trying to understand how we leverage user and device signal to make a decision in terms of what's probably best to go on this particular device.

And so, looking at things like MSA, looking at, are you on a gaming PC? Are you – what's your intent for this device is something we want to lean into in the future. Are you intending to use this for – as a student? Are you intending to use this for family? And trying to make sure that based off of this input that you're providing, we're helping get you set up for success on day one and providing the content that makes the most sense.

And in turn, it's also – (laughter) – very much the counter of that, which is if we get it wrong, having a way to sort of walk back from that. I know people oftentimes talk about the Candy Crush experience in Start menu, and – and that's really something that, even though it's not perhaps a direct comparison for taskbar, it's something that we want to learn from in the taskbar space, and that's if we put something on taskbar and it doesn't perform well, or we don't see users responding well to it, we want to have a way to sort of walk back from it, and make sure that we're doing our part to put the content that makes the most sense there for our users.

JASON HOWARD: Yeah, there's a lot of pressure on making a decision that affects over a billion users of an . So, you do something like this where you pin a specific component, I'll just call it a component, or an app to the taskbar, some people are going to love it. Some people won't know what it is. Some people will say, I didn't want that there to begin with. It's – it's really hard to have a one-size-fits-all-type solution for a billion plus people. It's – it totally makes sense.

So, both of you have talked about some new things that Insiders may or may not have heard of. Hopefully they have, and if they haven't, now, they have. So, Charles, you mentioned programmable taskbar, and William, you've talked about pinning sites down to the taskbar. What do Insiders need to do to test out these experiences? How do they participate in some of this if they haven't done it so far?

CHARLES TAYLOR: So, for programmable taskbar, like we mentioned, and this is something actually I – I should have stated earlier, we were very – and I'm going to provide this context for a very important reason. When we first talked about this, we got really nervous around how to talk about this externally, not because we didn't want people to know, but because we didn't want to scare people and – and for people to think that this, all of a sudden, meant Microsoft had the capability to start messing with their taskbar and changing things around on you. That is not at all the intent.

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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

And so, programmable taskbar, it is applicable on first-run scenarios only. So, you're – you're creating a new user account or your unboxing a brand new machine. This isn't the case where you'll come in one day and Microsoft has said, oh, well, we're just going to change this thing out on you.

And so, one, I offer that context because that sort of leads into the – the answer around how you try this thing out. And so, we are currently flighting right now. If you are flighting early builds of Windows, all you have to do is create a secondary user account, or either, like I mentioned, just do a clean install of that – that prerelease build of Windows and you can try it out.

Otherwise, it's actually shipping later this year. We'll actually see it go live with the fall release. And so, we're hoping to get more widespread coverage even then, as we start to really think about trying out different taskbar layouts based off of, again, that user signal, whether it's looking at your relationship with Microsoft and how you intend to use your devices, or even just looking at the device itself, whether it's screen size and how much space you have available on your taskbar, whether you're on a certain type of machine like a gaming PC, and leveraging all these different pieces of information and signals to try and better tune your default layout for – for you.

JASON HOWARD: And so, to you, William, for the whole concept of pinning Web browser content down to the taskbar, how does a user participate in doing this? It this just like I click and drag and it just shows up, or can you tell us a little about how to start it, as well as what it means moving forward?

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, first, you'll need a Windows Insider build, which hopefully if you're listening to this, you already have it. It does work in both the dev and the – the beta channels, which is great. And you'll need the Insider version of Microsoft Edge as well, Canary or Dev.

But as long as you have that, you're good to go. All you have to do is just click on, in Edge, navigate to the site you want, click on the dot-dot-dot menu, the “settings and more” menu, and then go to “more tools, pin to taskbar.” That will let you pin the site directly to your taskbar. It will let you pick a name, if you want. And then, from there, you're good to go.

Just a small note: If you already have existing pinned sites, we're doing some work. We haven't actually – there's some additional work we're still doing on – on the Edge side to migrate those existing pins. So, if you want to try this feature, for now, you'll have to unpin the site and then re-pin it. But that won't be the case in the – in the near future. It'll just seamlessly upgrade you.

JASON HOWARD: And since we're on the topic, there's one more thing I do want to ask you, William, and that is the recent change of using alt tab. I realize a little bit outside the scope of taskbar, but it goes to the same vein of integrating some of that Web experience with the broader user-based Windows experience. So, I think it's worth talking about.

So, can you tell us a little bit about why that change was implemented, the benefit to the user, and then what it means in the context of what a user can expect if they do this?

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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

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Yeah, sure, sure. This is – this is one of those that, it's a really fun feature. And I'll be honest, when people first hear about it, they have a very strong reaction one way or another. Some people are like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I've always wanted this. And other people are like, no, no, no. (Laughter.) And – and I think as people try it, many people who are a little concerned have actually come around, like, oh, actually, I like this a lot more than I thought I would.

And for those of you who don't, I want to be really clear right up front. It's configurable and you can turn it off if you want. (Laughter.)

Basically, looking at how people use their computer and more of the stuff you do happens in the browser, imagine you're in Outlook.com, for example, and you click on a link and it takes you to PowerPoint online, right?

Now, previously, if you were in desktop Outlook and it opened up in PowerPoint on your desktop, if you want to go back to Outlook, you said alt tab, and it just switches you right back. And – and people are very used to – to alt tab taking them back to the last app, the last thing they were doing.

However, with – with Web browsers, that doesn't work, right? If it's all within the browser, alt tab doesn't take you back to Outlook. It takes you back to some other app. Who knows what app you were using last? And so, all of a sudden, you're in some random app.

And honestly, it really comes down to how people think about alt tab. And this is where I mentioned earlier, so it's – some people are have a strong reaction at first. Some people think about alt tab as switching between the last app they were doing. So, they know, I'm in Outlook, I'm in Edge, I'm in Notepad, and they hit alt tab and they know, I'm going to go back to the last app.

And so, they don't care. Like, they know if they're in a browser and they hit alt tab, they know they're – they know it's not going to take them back because they're in the Microsoft Edge app. And other people think of all tab as the last thing they were doing, right? It's like, oh, here's the last window I was in, right?

JASON HOWARD: Guilty, I'm completely guilty of this.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Right. And if you think about it as the last thing you were doing rather than the last app window you were doing, then alt tab doesn't work with websites. And people think it should, and we get a lot of feedback from people that, why the heck if I hit alt tab, it takes me back to some random thing?

And so, what we've done is we actually have the option now of showing your browser tabs in alt tab. And so, that means that they're intermixed in recently last – or the order you last recently used them, just like your apps today. And so, when you hit alt tab or if you hold it, you can see all of your tabs open. And that just means you can hit alt tab and switch back and forth between two apps to sites, an app and a site, whatever it is, and all of the stuff you use is there.

And so, we have offered a setting where you can choose to either turn off the feature entirely, or you can choose just to show the last three or five tabs that you used in Edge. And so, that at least gives you some tabs without

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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 completely cluttering up alt tab. And so, five is the default right now. But you can – you can change and pick your – your favorite setting.

And we've see a lot of really good feedback so far, and please keep the feedback coming as you all play with the feature. I'd love to know more of – of what you think. But this just really helps users who are used to alt tabbing and getting back the last thing they were doing. It really helps them leverage that with the browser.

One other thing that's probably worth noting is that both pin sites and alt tab support live previews of – of the Web page. So, if you hold down alt tab, it'll show you a preview of what you're doing. We support that. Same thing with the pin sites. If you hover over a pin site on the taskbar, the site will appear to help you find what you're what you're looking for.

JASON HOWARD: So both of you are working in very forward-looking spaces, even if you're touching a piece of technology that's been around for a while. As I mentioned at the outset of this podcast I was talking about the previous podcast was about the legacy of Windows 95, how long it's been around.

But really, what both of you are working on at this point is really the continued evolution and future of where we go next. And I've got to say, that's got to be exciting to be doing that because you really are guiding that user experience. And that's something that we all take seriously, especially on the Insider Program, because the Insiders out there that participate in this program and are running these preview builds, and hopefully using, preview builds of Edge as well, they are guiding the experience that everybody else who doesn't participate in these programs will potentially end up having.

For each of you to create these features and make these changes, be part of that process, and then deliver them into these builds that end up going to a billion plus people using Windows, it's got to be pretty rewarding and satisfying.

And so, I will say thank you for doing this. Thank you for making this time. But before we go, I'm going to ask you one more question. What are you doing next? Don't get yourself in trouble here, right? But is there anything else Insiders should be on the lookout for? Maybe a little hint or, a little nugget of some goodness?

CHARLES TAYLOR: This question scares me. (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: (Laughter.) As it should.

CHARLES TAYLOR: But – but no, I think, to respond to – to what you said, one, I think it's been amazing to be in this space and to – to work on a surface that is as visible as taskbar is. We – we have an analogy that we use sometimes, especially when we're having conversations about the future of it, is it's – it's almost like your front yard. it's like, what do you want to walk out of your front door and see sitting on your front yard?

And I think to all the – the Insiders that are that may be listening, we really do take that feedback seriously. I know Jason and I were chatting last week, and you might have seen that question on Twitter. if you had a magic wand, what would you want to see on your taskbar or what would you like to have happen with taskbar? And

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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 know that that is a tweet that I am following and I'm reading all of your responses, because we are actually looking at what, like Jason said, the future of taskbar is.

And that includes assessing how we continue to, most importantly, lean into personalization, lean into making sure that it continues to serve as a service that helps you get connected to the content that you use most frequently, and integrates respectfully, and plays nice with all the other components in Windows.

And so, please do provide that feedback. Let us know what's important to you. Let us know where you have challenges, and – and we will be reading it. We'll be using it to think about how we continue to make some of those tough decisions over the next few months and years to come.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Yeah, as Charles said, we couldn't do this without all of you, and I'm not just saying that. even going back to the early versions of, like, showing sites in alt tab, for example. We had a call with a whole bunch of Insiders where we – we actually talked directly to you. We answered your questions, and – and we really appreciate all of you who – who signed up and did that.

And that gave us a lot of feedback that we were able to leverage as we built this feature. And we had a hypothesis. We think this could help, and we talked to people. And, like, actually, yeah, we think there's a – there's a potential here.

And then, as we built the feature, we wanted to get all of your feedback on what the default setting should be. Is it all? Is it five? Is a three? Is it off? All of your feedback directly influenced the setting that we ultimately chose. Did they switch off of that setting? Did they leave the setting on? What did they tell us in verbatim feedback? We couldn't have done it without all of your help. So, it really makes a big difference. And I just want to say thank you as well.

As far as what's coming next, I teased a little bit of something earlier in the podcast. So, if you missed it, maybe go back and listen, and rewind a little bit and see if you can catch it. But honestly, these are just some of the first of many, many things that we're – we're working on to help make you more productive with – with Edge and Windows 10, and really save you time while you're multitasking. So, stay tuned for more.

JASON HOWARD: Hopefully the listeners caught it as well. And if they didn't, hopefully, they rewind and go back and listen again, and they'll pick it up the second time around. I can't wait for the first person to tweet about it, be like, oh, I know what it is, right, and then dangle it in front of everybody else and not tell them what it is. It's going to be funny. (Laughter.)

Well, hey, I know we've had a ton of fun on this. At least, I will say I have. Hopefully, both of you have had fun in this session as well. It's been great having you on. Thank you both for making the time, really appreciate it. Lots that we've covered here. Hopefully, the listeners out there have enjoyed the conversation, some of the historical perspective, some of what you're doing now, and of course, the teases into the future, even if it made Charles a little nervous, you know. (Laughter.)

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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

CHARLES TAYLOR: (Laughter.) I'm going to get fired. Somebody's going to be like, why did you say that? Don't tell them that. (Laughter.)

JASON HOWARD: Oh, my goodness. Hey, nobody's been fired off the podcast yet. I'm trying to keep that record going. So, if we have to do some creative editing, we just might have to do that. (Laughter.) Thank you both very much for your time, really appreciate you being here. And as we continue to make changes moving forward, I'll probably see about having both of you back on once again, because you're working in a very interesting space that, no doubt, there will be more changes.

CHARLES TAYLOR: Yeah, no, definitely looking forward to it. Thank you for having us.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: That'd be fun. I'd love it. And again, I'd be remiss if I didn't call out Greg again, who's been my – my partner on this from the Windows 10 side, and he's done a fantastic job as well. It was really a team – as Charles said, it's a teamwork between Windows, the Windows 10 team and – and the Microsoft Edge team, so.

JASON HOWARD: You bet. Well, hey, thanks again.

CHARLES TAYLOR: Thank you.

JASON HOWARD: And we'll chat again soon.

WILLIAM DEVEREUX: Awesome, thanks.

[MUSIC]

JASON HOWARD: And with that, Windows Insiders, this episode is a wrap. Windows 10 continues to evolve and as core features, the Start menu and taskbar are no exception. Sharing these changes with the Windows Insider audience is exciting, and we hope you take the time to explore them and share your feedback as we continue to evolve into the future.

There's much more to come in this space, and we're glad to have you along for the journey. I'd like to thank our guests Chris, Charles, and William once again for joining us and for shining a light on the path we're all taking together.

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. As always, thank you for tuning into the Windows Insider podcast. Join us for a new episode each month, and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite. Until next time.

NARRATION: The Windows Insider Podcast is hosted by Jason Howard and produced by Microsoft Production Studios and the Windows Insider team.

Listen to our previous podcasts and visit us on the web at insider.windows.com. Follow us @windowsinsider on Instagram and Twitter.

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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

Support for the Windows Insider Podcast comes from Microsoft, empowering every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Join us next month for another fascinating inside look into Microsoft, tech, innovations, careers, and the evolution of Windows.

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