My point is you shouldn't need any training or as little as possible i.e. learning the English language. Yes metro is pritty simple I give you that, I'm off topic I hate MS's incarnation of windows and that's what I'm ranting about. I think metro's ugly but that's a subjective opinion. My home project was creating an english - machine interface for an off the shelf humanoid robot so I could speak to it and teach it to do stuff in english. It worked, now if I can achieve that in my spare time in 6 months why can't we have better machine - human interfaces from the big guns.

It should be as easy as saying "record Fringe episode 6 season 4", "set the time to..." we have the technology to do this, hell I've prototyped code that does stuff like that round my home. Because MS has stunted good UI design for so long people now expect unintuitive UIs with bad human-machine interfaces to be the norm. You forget where windows came from, Xerox Park tested many UI designs on kids (should have tested them on more adults) and the one with Windows was the most intuitive and easy to pick up. That's why MS and Apple nabbed it off them. Unfortunately now MS takes an ok UI concept and makes a hash of it. You shouldn't need to train users to use your UI. Did you read a whole training manual before you played Angry Birds?

Pete O'Hanlon wrote:

it's pretty darned good once you get used to it

That's where it fails a UI should be intuitive enough that you don't have to "get use to it" or "learn how to use it". Microsoft has never understood this principle.

MS UIs often aren't sleek or intuitive. It's not surprising to see many of the MS MVPs I work with and those I've seen at TechEd now have mac's as a result of Fista and it's upgrade Win 7. The tiles on metro are very ugly compared to the UI's of Android and the IPhone where things generally are where they should be, you can fit more app icons on a non-tiled screen and have a nice desktop pic behind them. To find a setting and change it on these devices 90% of the time doesn't require you to google how to, unlike Windows 7's control panel which I find kinda confusing.