As I had expected I was patently unimpressed. People kept saying that it will be vastly different from the leaked build, but I've not seen anything to suggest that so far.
1. Start Button is now centered.
This is a bad change. Fitt's Law states that accessing a particular target on screen requires two movements: one large movement to get in the vicinity, and a small movement to home in on the target. Windows XP actually took this into account as the Visual Styles for the Start menu have the hit-target area extend all the way to the edges of the screen. And Later versions of Windows followed this rule as well.
Having the start button centered means that it becomes less accessible to mouse users, particularly since it will bounce around based on how many other items are present.
Of course one can still opt to have the Start button (and other items) aligned left. But it concerns me that they would so blithely decide to violate decades of UX design research that went into discovering that "Law".
2. Start Menu is now disconnected from the Start Button. This is another UX Violation of decades-old rules. I have a Graphic design book about UX that is old enough that it uses the monochrome Mac OS for it's many examples, and one of the examples was of a poorly designed menu where the popout menu was not "connected" to the source of the menu, which was established as a rule- the source of a menu/flyout should be connected to the menu when it appears. Microsoft has decided to abandon this UX principle as well.
3. I find some facets of the new visual styles rather questionable in the same way. Most of it is fine- rounded buttons and textboxes have an unusual but not altogether invasive "highlight" line at the bottom. But scrollbars are I think bad UX. when the cursor is not over them, the arrows are completely invisible and the elevator is a thin line. When hovered over the elevator gets a little thicker and the arrows become visible. There is no reason for the arrows to ever be invisible, IMO.
Fundamentally it feels more and more that OS UX is being built by teenagers whose understand of building a User Experience centers around the crappy practices that go into designing web pages and "web apps"- it's all about animations and flash and pizazz and no thought seems to be put into the function part of things.
There is a massive deal breaker for me, actually. there is no UI-accessible taskbar setting for small icons, and you cannot turn on taskbar labels. I have turned those on ever since Windows 7 made the IMO ridiculous decision to have taskbar buttons only be a worthless, non-descriptive icon. If there is no way to address that I will probably be sticking with Windows 10 as my newest Windows OS on real hardware as long as possible.
I honestly found the presentation hilarious and boring at the same time. There was nothing remotely interesting displayed, but then you had Panos Panay basically getting all emotional (while reading a teleprompter...) about how windows was "coming home".
