A couple of the UX people who worked on Win8 told me that some of the UX study results were faked to give the desired results that justified the new Win8 design changes.

Def the sort of stories you hear at at a bar after work.

how do you go from

> the users don't focus on this menu much

to

> therefore we need to make this menu as large as possible

shouldn't the conclusion have been "the start menu is so great the user doesn't even need to focus on using it". it feels like desperately trying to make the data fit the predefined conclusion, despite the data screaming and kicking.

You’re not wrong that they aren’t directly correlated. I can see the argument though that making Notes look exactly like a yellow legal pad was not an automatic gain for usability compared to say, wordpad.exe with its super simple toolbar that showed you every option.

I think a fair take is that going full skeuomorphic may take some options off the table for you because they would conflict too much with the metaphor you’re leaning hard into.

I’m still 100% Team Forstall though, considering the massive violence that ios7 and its copycats have wrought on usability.

Some skeuomorphism is user-friendly, like buttons that animate like they're clicked when pressed down. Other skeuomorphism was user-hostile, like the various mouse-only interfaces where everything had to be dragged around to work.

Skeumorphism where "things look like real things" can be fine. Complete skeumorphism where "things act like real things" is user hostile.

The poster boy for that is the old QuickTime Player, which had a volume wheel and a drawer for shortcuts. https://www.johnforde.com/teaching/shame/qtime.htm