What I was trying to get at is this: MSFT has billions of dollars, tons of smart people, and years of development lead time, but they can't figure out a control panel with a single consistent great aesthetic. My theory is that this is because (as far as I know) no single person is god of Windows UI design.

Here's a screenshot of what the Windows 7 Control Panel looks like: http://screencast.com/t/uX7mDlgrlbGP

I can make Mac OSX look ugly, too, if I view plist's in text mode. The default Windows Control Panel doesn't look like Nathan's screenshot, and it's reasonably difficult to get it to look like that if you want to.

For average users, do you think they really want to weed through 50+ icons? Keep it simple.

For average users, do you think they really want to weed through 50+ icons? Keep it simple.

The problem with the default category Control Panel view is that it doesn't make a ton of sense and it looks sloppy (see my comments to Owen). On reflection I believe this is a symptom of Windows' mixing *preferences* with *utilities* in one big pot, which has gotten unruly.

Windows' problem is that there is so much user and institutional inertia (think of all the certified sysadmins for example) that Windows can't rework something like Control Panel with all those moving parts underneath. Instead they add more and varied views and ways of finding things, which only adds more confusion.

Like you, I believe in OS search (I live by Quicksilver), and while I didn't play with Windows 7's search, there's no excuse for having a messy UI and saying “search will fix it”. Also users have to know what their searching for. Browsing is still vital in OS design.

That's what I tried to do here: http://www.pleaselistencarefully.com/2009/06/ph...

It's clunky because of nomenclature and emphasis problems, and the categories are generally sloppy and seem arbitrary.

Also look at the Category View. See how some icons are top aligned, some center, some bottom? And they're all kind of different sizes and shapes, and not aligned in a solid grid with the associated link text. It all adds noise, clutter, and uncertainty.

The default control panel vew shows the most frequently used actions in clear text. Clicking on any of the headers in the default view (e.g. System and Security) brings up category views. I've used these for a year, and never had a need to go to the All Items view. It took me a little while to find it just now.

Also, there's little need to go to the Control Panel these days, since you can bring up any actions via the Start / Search feature – you just hit the windows button and type “print” or “printer” or “fix printing”.

What if one of Microsoft's “hard decisions about what's best” reduces usability for blind users or people with diminished vision? Should I be completely unable to configure how fast my mouse cursor moves and let MS decide the “best” speed for me? MS used to decide for me that every user was an Administrator; this is horrible from a security standpoint. Should they also not let me configure my password?

Control Panel is the one place you go to change system settings. The only inappropriate choices I see above are the Boot Camp, QuickTime and vmWare application settings that are crammed in there; funny how two of the three poor choices were made by Apple.

What's your proposed solution to this problem? How do you provide a single place to allow users to configure settings like DPI resolution or whether to enable a screen reader that don't have a “best” value?