And how good-looking it is depends on your tolerance for change.

Initially, this user interface design was thought to be one of those many prototype creations that designers behind Redmond walls continue to work on. After all, Windows 11 itself is rapidly evolving, more so at the UI level that the company continues to refine and polish.

But when Zac Bowden got wind of it, he confirmed that this is likely an early UI exploration prototype that Microsoft is working on for the next version of Windows.

The software titan is hard at work on the next iteration of its OS, which some believe to be Windows 12, while it is internally referred to as Next Valley. We know that the company has returned to a three-year development cycle for Windows, which means that this next release may be here sometime in 2024.

Bowden talks about how he’d already seen this design (above), shown in a brief cutaway at Ignite 2022.

According to his sources, the UI briefly shown off at Ignite yesterday is representative of the design goals that Microsoft hopes to achieve with the next version of the OS.

And since the UI mockup shown during Ignite was of very low quality, Bowden went ahead and recreated the design to provide us with a better idea of what it is supposed to look like:

Hmm, very Interesting!

He says that he has seen different variations of this design layout, including one that houses the system icons and system elements along the top in a translucent bar instead of simply floating on the desktop, as illustrated in the image below.

And since things are at a very early stage, the company is readying more sweeping UI changes that were obviously not shown at Ignite. These include a new lock screen, login prompt, notification center and more.

Apparently, Microsoft aims to achieve an interface that is better optimized for touch without diminishing the experience for mouse and keyboard users. The idea is to scale this new UI across desktops, laptops, and tablets for factors, foldable displays included.

All said and done, these are still very early days for Next Valley, and this is just Microsoft exploring. The real interesting question is why such a confidential prototype ended up in the main keynote of a high-profile conference.

Guess we all know the answer to that!

Rounded corners were also a part of what seemed to be a redesign.

It was quickly shot down by Microsoft, who disappointingly termed this just as a bug.

Well, it looks like the bug is back!

For those of you who liked that design, there still may be a little hope that Microsoft is exploring something like that. While we may not get an indication from the company, it certainly seems to be trying out this radical shell redesign internally.

During its annual Ignite 2022 conference, the software titan showed off a screenshot of Windows 11 that was a complete departure from how things currently are in the operating system.

See:

The taskbar here is floating and has rounded corners, while all the indicators from the notification area reside at the top of the screen instead of the bottom-right corner. A search bar and a weather widget also sit at the top, leaving a whole lot of blank space to the left and right of the taskbar.

This definitely is a strange-looking user interface, and it begs the question of why exactly Microsoft would create such a thing and showcase it at such a high-profile event.

Something must be cooking!

Sure, it may be a teaser of the upcoming changes, or it could just be one of the many UI prototypes floating inside the Redmond labs.

Even if this turns Windows 11 into an Ubuntu clone.

In other words, don’t be surprised to see certain newer additions in the older, vanilla version of the OS.

This is being suggested by leaksters and users alike after discovering new features in their current 21H2 builds.

A feature that you may be familiar with is one of the first ones to make the apparent jump. I’m talking about the new Search button styles in the Taskbar that Microsoft added to the platform back in July with the arrival of build 25158 in the Dev channel of its preview program.

As can be seen below, this particular feature has shown up all of a sudden in a 21H2 build:

I suddenly received the new search button in the taskbar on Windows 11 21H2 pic.twitter.com/mbxtLWTzWA

— Mauro Huculak (@Pureinfotech) October 4, 2022

This news spread like wildfire, and other leaksters picked up on it, including one that goes by the cool as ice alias of PhantomOcean3, who found out that Microsoft had indeed brought in under-the-hood changes like these to Windows 11 22H2.

The screengrabs below show the three different taskbar Search styles in Windows 11 21H2 build 22000.1042 (KB5017383) alongside the winver dialog box that shows the build number.

It certainly seems like Microsoft is interested in bringing a selection of these features to older versions of the Windows 11 OS, as well. This was not always the case with the previous operating systems as almost all of the notable new changes were reserved for the latest release.

And since these additions are still being tested, they remain hidden for now.

You can enable the new Taskbar search styles on your machine in Windows 11 build 22000.142 by using the ViveTool utility. Just extract it, run Terminal with Administrator privileges, and execute the following command by navigating to the folder containing ViveTool.

vivetool /enable /id:39263329 /variant:X (1, 3 or 5)

Restart your computer, if you want, to enable your choice of Search button style in the Taskbar.

And while Microsoft has made a number of welcome changes to the Start Menu over the past few months, the company now seems to be focused on the taskbar. Over in the right corner, we have the system tray area, and it is seeing some action.

Long overdue action, at that, as this side of the OS still makes do with old legacy components.

Redmond has been trying to modernize the tray area of the taskbar in Windows 11 for some time now.

In fact, the early builds of version 22H2 carried a couple of changes in this regard, but the company decided not to proceed with them as doing so would have meant sacrificing certain features.

As you may recall, build 22581 introduced some of these changes to the system tray. However, they were soon reverted after users complained about the lack of functionality in moving and changing the position of the icons.

In the latest preview builds, Microsoft has once again started working on a cleaner and more modern look for the system tray area.

The idea here is to overhaul the underlying components of the system tray so that they benefit tablet users while allowing users greater control over notifications.

For this reason, the system tray area of the taskbar now uses modern flyouts when a user hovers over the icons.

This GIF shows the work being done:

To make the UI more suitable for tablet users, Microsoft now provides the ability to entirely disable the tray menu and its icons. This can be done by locating the new option added in Settings > Personalization > Taskbar > Other system tray icons and toggling the “Hide icon menu.”

Doing so will disable all the icons, leaving only indicators like network/WiFi, volume, battery, and input language visible on the taskbar.

Of course, this change, once again, removes the ability to rearrange the order of the taskbar icons via drag and drop. However, since Microsoft still appears to be working on this idea, there is a chance that this functionality will be restored before the wider rollout.

Since Windows 11 does not have a dedicated tablet mode, these are the best options we have for owners of Windows-powered slates.

In fact, the company has just added one more element into the mix.

It comes in the form of Mica Alt.

This is what the company has dubbed its latest creation, which is a material that will be used to design the user interface and various apps in the new OS. It joins three other materials that were already available in Windows 11, namely Acrylic, Mica, and Smoke.

Famed Microsoft watcher FireCube was the first to spot this recent addition.

As noted, the new Mica Alt material is generally meant to be used for tabbed instances, and the company’s guidance for this new design choice confirms this. Redmond talks about this in the App layering section of the guidance document.

This is how Microsoft recommends developers to use this shiny new material:

“Mica Alt is an alternative to Mica as a foundation layer in your app’s hierarchy with the same features like inactive and active states and subtle personalization. We encourage you to apply Mica Alt as the base layer of your app when requiring contrast between title bar elements and the commanding areas of your app (e.g. navigation, menus).

A common scenario for using Mica Alt is when you are creating an application with a tabbed title bar.”

Spot the differences between the two variants of Mica in the screenshot below:

As the image shows, Mica Alt is simply a Mica variant and very similar to the parent design material. But the tinting of the desktop background color in this new one is much stronger than the original.

The idea, clearly, here is for this visual material to provide a deeper visual hierarchy than Mica, which is why Microsoft wants this to be applied to the backdrop of a tabbed app.

In other words, Mica Alt will serve as an alternative to Mica as a foundation layer in the hierarchy of apps with the same features like active and inactive states and subtle personalization. This is ideal in cases where the application requires contrast between its various sections.

Mica Alt is available for apps that use Windows App SDK 1.1 or higher and run on Windows 11 version 22000 or later.

Redmond believes it is a great piece of engineering, but many users think that this OS marquee feature could be a lot better. A former Microsoft executive is in this camp, too, as he makes clear that he is not a fan of the Windows 11 Start Menu.

The company’s former Director of User Experience, Jensen Harris, reveals how he was shocked by the design of the operating system’s Start Menu.

The Start menu is Microsoft's flagship user experience. It should represent the very best UI design the company is capable of.

Today I searched for "chrome" in Windows and was shocked by the user experience. pic.twitter.com/GZq386qqzK

— Jensen Harris (@jensenharris) August 29, 2022

He then went on to describe his grievances in a long Twitter thread that is very much worth a read if you want some insider insights into all that is wrong.

One of his more pressing criticisms is for the banner advertisement for the Bing Wallpaper app that he says looks like a virus, has a dated background color choice, and the text is misaligned too. Additionally, the left side of the banner has a rounded corner, while the right side has straight edges.

Clearly, someone had not been paying attention!

He also highlighted several other bad design choices and inconsistencies that he believes should not have made it out of the walls of Redmond. Likewise, he says that banner ads in the Start Menu cheapen people’s experience in this high-touch UI piece.

Harris then dived into the history of the Start Menu, explaining how the previous iterations were built with so much thought and effort put into the intricacies of the design of what remains the most used feature of the OS.

Finally, he concludes by saying that he is not a fan of the Start Menu being moved to the center, as it also goes against Fitts’s law’s recommendation.

Jensen is quite an authoritative figure in the domain of UI design, having devoted 5 years in his role at the company, where he spent 16 years in total.

He was also responsible for the famed Ribbon UI in Microsoft Office, which stands as one of the company’s finest and most innovative pieces of user interface design. In addition, he was at the company during the development of Windows 8, which gave us some radical UI changes.

Do you agree with Harris and how he is making his feelings known to the public? Or is the revamped Start Menu your jam and you are okay with how it is designed? Let us know in the comments below!

Dynamic ones, at that.

Dynamic wallpapers are a personalization feature that MacOS has and Windows users lack. The Apple desktop operating system neatly cycles through different wallpapers that adapt to the current system time, thereby creating an immersive and beautiful desktop background experience.

While there were rumors that Microsoft was considering implementing similar functionality in Windows, nothing of substance emerged from them.

That said, dynamic wallpapers are a possibility on Windows, thanks to a third-party app that goes by the convenient name of WinDynamicDesktop.

The app has received an update to version 5.10 today, and this latest release arrives with new wallpapers and other improvements to the program itself related to the user interface and application of themes.

You can check out the changelog for the full details.

It is worth mentioning that version 5.1 ditched the Sync Virtual Desktop script that was responsible for changing wallpapers on all your virtual desktops. According to the developer, the script used an experimental API that was too unstable to support.

Still, restoring this deleted feature by installing the script is possible.

As for the app, WinDynamicDesktop is a free application that contains many free dynamic wallpapers, mostly the ones included with macOS. You can also buy additional packs from the app’s repository here.

You can download the program from the Microsoft Store or directly via GitHub.

Windows 11 build 25188 contains a neat UI change that you will be delighted to know about.

Microsoft has been testing animated icons in the Settings app.

As spotted, this is a small little change in the user interface of the OS, but one that could be the harbinger of bigger things to come. UI has been one of the primary concerns for Microsoft lately, and it aims to truly streamline the user interface of its flagship operating platform Windows 11.

To that end, these slick new animations are now part of the package:

These new animations can be viewed when clicking any primary sections of the Settings app. Redmond calls these subtle animations “unexpected moments of joy with purpose”, which is a weird way to name things.

But there you have it.

These little animations appear across the operating system when you minimize an app, click a button in the control center, change volume or brightness, or select items from dropdown menus.

Basically, all the casual things you do in Windows 11 all through the day.

The software titan has not officially announced the new animations for the Settings app, likely because they are currently in the earliest stages of testing. However, you can enable them using the always reliable ViveTool app.

Since Windows Terminal has now taken over proceedings in Windows 11 starting with this build, you will need to launch it as Administrator and switch the app to the Command Prompt profile.

Navigate to where you have extracted ViveTool, type the following command, and hit the Enter key.

vivetool /enable /id:34878152

This should bring a little eye candy to the Settings app, which you can view by hovering over and clicking through its primary sections.

Do keep in mind that these new icon animations are just an experiment for now, meaning Microsoft can pull them out of the operating system at any time. It has done it before and can do it again. Still, for the time being, you have the option of trying out these slick little animations on your test installation.

For the most part.

Their arrival was marred by controversy, however, as soon after they were unveiled, did we get confirmation that Windows 11 was not getting these 3D designs. Instead, the OS received those traditional 2D creations.

What we did get on the latest Windows operating system were much simpler and plain designs, albeit with Clippy for company replacing the paperclip emoji.

The 3D designs graced other Microsoft apps and services like Teams earlier this year.

But these are not the only places where you will find these Fluent Design System-inspired emojis. You can now also finally incorporate these 3D creations into your projects without any limitations. That’s because Redmond has announced that it is open-sourcing these emojis.

All 1,538 are now available under the MIT open-source license. Additionally, creators on both Figma and GitHub will be able to customize and remix them based on their preferences.

Talking to The Verge, Jon Friedman, the CVP of design and research at Microsoft, explained the idea behind open-sourcing these 3D emojis:

“The idea kinda just started popping around, and it aligned with our belief and perspective that the more open source we are internally and externally, the more product excellence we can build, and the more relevant we can be for all of humanity.”

Good, we need more such ideas!

Keener eyes among you may notice that three emojis are missing. Clippy and two additional emojis that bear the Windows logo. This is due to the fact that these are trademarked.

Microsoft has not yet indicated whether the emojis that creators recreate across these platforms will be widely available. But they are welcome to customize them to their heart’s desire in order to express themselves through their work and change the designs how they see fit.

Great development, this!

As you would expect, the new animation is more fluent and fluid.

Before we get into the details, the official changelog of this new preview build mentioned that it only contained general bug fixes and improvements. But some Windows Insiders quickly noticed something unusual happening on the taskbar.

That unusual thing, it seems, is Microsoft testing new icon flyout animation as A/B testing.

Luckily, users can force-enable it on their system using ViveTool, a third-party tool created to help enable hidden Windows 11 Insiders features ahead of their release for end users. Of course, more on that later, but first, let’s take a look at the new animation.

This should serve as a good showcase:

No variant has to be specified for the ID. Since this ID is used for A/B testing, that explains why some people see it and others don't.

I made this (not so good) video showing the animation used dependent on what the state of the 39072097 ID is: pic.twitter.com/MDUJB9rW8u

— phantomofearth (@phantomofearth) August 11, 2022

Looks slick!

The new taskbar animation ditches the old fly-up style in favor of a zoom variant. This is obviously a very subtle UI change, but one with the potential to generate varying opinions among the Windows community.

User interface changes almost always do.

Recall the icons fiasco in those very first Windows 10 preview builds?

Like with other A/B experiments in Windows 11 preview builds, only a select few users can enjoy the new animation. That is, unless you use some software hacks and tricks to unlock the new features in testing on your system.

To do that, you enable the new taskbar animation in Windows 11 build 25179 using the following ID after installing ViveTool and launching it as an Administrator.

vivetool /enable /id:39072097

Enter the above command, and hit the Enter key. Restart your computer to apply the changes, and watch the taskbar load with a new animation after the system boots back in.

After you do, be sure to let us know how you like the new effect in the comments!