This Concept Artist Fixed Windows 11 Start Menu

Source: Daniel Rubino / Windows Central

Windows 11 Start menu sucks. At least in my humble opinion. The lack of customization is a travesty for a company as large as Microsoft, especially when working on such an important and integrated feature as the Start menu.

In Windows 11, Microsoft is removing the Live Tile system from Windows 8 and 10, in favor of a simpler, phone-like app icon interface with a recommended box that displays files you can (or do not). can not) use. I understand why they did it this way – the Live Tile interface was too complicated for regular users. Finding apps that properly supported Live Tiles wasn’t easy, and even then configuring them to actually work for you. you can be a chore. As an IT specialist in a previous life, I know all too well how hardly anyone in my organization bothered to customize their Live Tile configurations, which ultimately led to me disabling them through Group Policy. .

What if there was another way, however? One way that could bridge the gap between personalization and functionality? This simple but obvious change was explored recently by Gusion Claude, who sent us this compelling concept below.

In my previous post on the subject, I lamented that much of the at-a-glance information from Live Tile that I have enjoyed in the past several years is moved to a separate panel, which I’ll probably end up never using. I argued that widgets should be present in the current Start menu, and Claude basically delivered this idea.

By removing the horribly unconfigurable recommended box, Claude’s Start menu vision bridges the gap between the sleek simplicity of Windows 11 and the configurable and informative design of Windows 10. Many applications simply don’t need live tiles, like Microsoft Word, Photoshop, etc. But I really liked the Weather tile, the Photos tile and the Calendar tile in particular. Some of those features remain in the new Windows 11 Widgets panel, but like I said, it’s an extra click and it is unnecessary.

I’m not sure if Microsoft even built the Start menu with those kind of capabilities in mind, but if their design teams had thought about it in advance, this is exactly how the Start menu would work in Windows 11. Give me the ability to combine the widget panel and the start menu into one customizable feed, you know, like my phone that you’re clearly trying to emulate.

If you want Windows 11 to be familiar to phone users, where I think part of that design ideology comes from, you have to make it as customizable as my phone, Microsoft.

I’m sure none of this will happen in real life, with the most likely outcome being that Microsoft will end up killing the widget panel because no one will be using it. I’m sure people would use widgets if they were part of the Start menu, however. Alas, we can dream.