[memnips]

>> In all, I can see 41 app tiles without scrolling, both large and small, all of them are easily identifiable and relatively easy to reach.

In practice, I find seeing so much quite overwhelming. Is seeing 41 app tiles - many animated - actually a good thing? My ability to scan and make sense of the Start Screen is quite low. I find it grades on my senses as time passes and every visit to the Start Screen becomes less and less pleasant.

And regarding scrolling, on the desktop are we not used to vertical scrolling? I find it odd when my vertical scroll wheel action results in a horizontal scroll. It's harder to scan while scrolling.

Lastly, regarding have to "dexterously following a series of menus" using a mouse - is it really that hard? Did the MS research say users are unable to use a mouse effectively? I assumed the tiles are huge because a finger is much larger than a mouse pointer, and the Start Screen UI is designed as a touch-first experience.

[sukuriant]

My start menu has 2 live tiles, 3 if you count the store (it has a little number in the corner for how many apps have updates). I haven't tried with lots of live tiles; and I could see where having too much random activity on the screen could be a bad thing (unless you had them centralized or something; but I haven't tested this use case, so I have no idea).

That said, in my experience, I've only been confused/disoriented/had my senses degraded from looking at too much data when all the tiles are unorganized. If you have a single, giant group with 40 or 50 or who knows how many tiles, and they're all random, that would be, to me, a very confusing scenario. Indeed, if all the tiles I have on my start screen were all in the same group, I'd be confused; but, with groups, they're very easy to distinguish and differentiate. Again, it's like having many many icons on your desktop; or, having icons on your desktop grouped into clusters.

Scrolling. My start screen I try not to scroll. I personally feel that if you're scrolling on your start screen, you're taking too much space and you should tone down the number of quick-access apps you have -- you probably don't use all of them with regularity. That's my personal, private opinion. I am not on the team that worked on the Windows 8 user interface, so I have no idea. That said, I don't know why we're doing horizontal scrolling versus vertical scrolling and anything I said here would be pure speculation. In a column-friendly format, like the start screen, it's not that disorienting, though, because information naturally becomes columns versus rows. That could have been a design feature that came from the horizontal scrolling, I certainly don't know.

As far as the "Dexterously follow a series of menus" and the big buttons on the start menu are concerned, I have to put a disclaimer here: I only have as much knowledge on this as has been displayed on the internet from Microsoft, I wasn't a part of that team. BUT, I do have a grandfather; and I can anecdotal-ly remember him trying to maneuver his mouse and occasionally losing it in menus or miss-clicking because his hand would shake. As computer scientists and engineers and computer/modern-tech savvy people, our hands and fingers are more dexterous than others, I imagine, because we use them for these meticulous tasks all day long. For use cases like that, this new, large-button interface would probably be much easier. I have not had a chance to let him test the UI, so I can't say; and as my co-workers often remind me, my needs and wants are, often, not normal to computer users at large, so I could be very off.