There have been recurring questions about our re-design on the beta newsgroups. And yes, I know a lot of users liked our old Start Menu model which consisted of a homepage containing links to experience specific homepages. However, our homepages were bursting at the seams. For many homepages, we could no longer add any more buttons on the left hand side. For many locales (i.e. Germany) the string containers on those pages weren’t large enough to support the longer text. For many OEMs and third party add-ons they did not like how far away their applications were from Media Center’s core experiences. And so we sought to re-design the Start Menu to address some of those concerns.

To respond to one of the threads I pinged one of our lead designers to get his thoughts on our redesign. This is what he wrote:

There are three key decisions we made in Vista that dramatically change the
way MCE 2005 worked from the start (pardon the pun).

1. Content is king – We want to get you to your content quickly and leave
   you in your content. This means less navigating around multiple home pages
   and menus to get you to what you want. It requires more work on the user’s
   part to find the right link at first but the end result is greater control
   in the long term.
2. Context is king – To reduce the amount of navigation up and down the UI
   hierarchy the Start menu is now context sensitive. The Beta version doesn’t
   reflect this yet but future versions will allow the Start menu to be
   “sticky” thus allowing you the ability to transverse the current experience
   easily and more efficiently within your current experience.
3. Vista is more scalable – The start menu and galleries accommodate partner
   integration and expansion better than MCE 2005. We can expose the user to
   richer content in context of your experience.

Over time Vista MCE will grow and accommodate user needs better.

And I agree with many of you that the new design isn’t as simple as the old design but the more you use it the more I think you’ll find that as our designer points out above, it is much more powerful. Now are we making the right trade off between simplicity and powerfulness? I think we are but we don’t base decisions like that by just listening to our designers, program managers and developers (someone on the newsgroup asked if our product was designed solely by develoeprs). We also have a large usability team who validates the decisions we as a group make on real end users (most of whom have never used MCE before) to ensure that we are indeed making forward progress.

In the end I hope you will all come around to liking the changes if you don’t already. If you don’t, well, there’s always MCE 2005 :).

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Julie at CE Pro has an article out on a new Dell remote featuring a LCD screen, Dell Ships MCE Remote with Two-Way RF and Metadata.

What you probably haven’t seen is the awesome universal remote that comes with the Media Center Edition (MCE) computer.

The Premium Remote Control that comes with the M2010 receives metadata from the MCE so users can browse their music libraries, searching for artists, songs, genres, playlists, the usual. Just click to play. It even works when the M2010 is closed up and stowed away.

The remote looks really cool, I hope they sell a standalone version.

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