"Having a more unified and consistent experience is growing in importance"
This is very true, but you're making the wrong things consistent.
Users on a platform want their applications to be consistent with each other, i.e. with the other apps on that platform. You should be making VS consistent with the standard Windows look & feel, and the visual style and colour choices made by the user and respected by well-written software (i.e. very little of what Microsoft have produced lately, sadly).
You are making the Lotus Notes mistake of thinking users want consistency with apps on different platforms, which they either do not use or are already accustomed to behaving differently. That consistency is not useful.
This is part of Microsoft's biggest problem at the moment, from Windows, to Visual Studio, and even to the Xbox One: You are confusing what *you* want with what the user wants. You want everyone to adopt all your different platforms and to drive adoption of them by making them seem familiar. We do not want that. It has no value to us, and most of us do not use your other platforms and have no reason to want to use them.
If you really want Windows desktop applications to be consistent with Windows Phone or tablet/Metro apps, do it properly by introducing a visual style which does just that. If the visual styles/themes system isn't up to the job at the moment, improve it. (The Windows API is a pathetically bad system for drawing UIs in 2013, given it still doesn't even let users choose the colours of things! But you could improve it instead of letting it rot.)
I don't really have the energy to say much more. There are so many good things happening on the C++ compiler side of Visual Studio, it is such a shame that the UI/UX team continue down this path and continue ignoring feedback. It feels like a lost cause even writing this brief comment, given you still have the all-caps menus by default, which almost everyone who saw them hated. (They are not the biggest problem, but they're the easiest to fix, and they show that you simply are not listening to us, or do not care about what we think. It's pig-headed arrogance, and the only reason we put up with it is that there is no competition, unlike what just happened with the Xbox One where the whole world has jumped ship to a competitor after being insulted by Microsoft's plans & attitude.)
Partager