In a recent post on Building Windows 8, Steven Sinofsky enlists the changes in Windows 8 Task Manager.The Task Manager is one of the most widely used apps, and it has a long history. It showed up in early versions of Windows as a simple utility to close and switch between programs, and has had functionality added to it through several releases to make it what it is today.
As of Windows 7, you could use Task Manager to close applications, to find out detailed data about your processes, to start or stop services, to monitor your network adaptor, or even to perform basic system administrator tasks for currently logged on users.
Sinofsky explain,”This data is pretty interesting. What it shows is that people are spending most of their time using the first two tabs, which are pivoted around views of applications and processes.So next we looked at what actions people take in Task Manager.”
It can be determined that the most common usage of the tool was to simply end or “kill” an application or a process.
He adds,”Based on all of the data and our background research, we decided to focus energy on three key goals:
- Optimize Task Manager for the most common scenarios. Focus on the scenarios that the data points to: (1) use the applications tab to find and close a specific application, or (2) go to the processes tab, sort on resource usage, and kill some processes to reclaim resources.
- Use modern information design to achieve functional goals. Build a tool that is thoughtful and modern by focusing on information design and data visualization to help achieve the functional scenario goals.
- Don’t remove functionality. While there are some notable core scenarios, there is a really long list of other, less frequent usage scenarios for Task Manager. We explicitly set a goal to not remove functionality, but rather to augment, enhance, and improve.
A key issue we intended to address was how we could add all of the interesting new functionality without overwhelming users. To solve this, we pivoted around a “More/Fewer details” button similar to the new copy file dialog model.”
Default View
Detailed View
Sinofsky states,”This model allowed us to optimize the default view (“Fewer details”) around the core scenario of finding an application and closing it. It also allowed us to add much more detail in the other view because it would only show up when someone asked for it. In the “More details” view we decided to stay with the existing tabbing model of Task Manager and focus on improving the content of each of the tabs. This would help us to augment, enhance, and improve what we already had, without removing functionality.”
When we compare the new Task Manager to the Windows 7 Task Manager with the same applications and windows opened we can easily see the difference:
Windows 7 Task Manager
Windows 8 Task Manager
The most noticeable difference in the new processes tab is the new heat map, which represents different values with color. The nice thing about a heat map is that it allows user to monitor anomalies across multiple resources (network, disk, memory, and CPU utilization) all at the same time, without having to sort the data. It also allows user to find the hot spot instantly without needing to read numbers or understand concepts or specific units.
One of the biggest causes of PC performance issues is resource contention. When a particular resource is being used at a rate above a threshold number, the column header will light up to draw your attention to it. Think of this as a warning indicator, letting you know a good place to start looking if you are experiencing performance issues. Below, you can see that the CPU column header is highlighted to draw your attention to the fact that you may have multiple applications competing for CPU time.
The new Task Manager also shows processes grouped by type, so it is easy to keep these separated while still providing an ungrouped view for situations where users need it.
With the new Task Manager, all of the services are grouped by process with friendly names for each of them, so users can instantly see what is going on when an instance of svchost is consuming a lot of resources:
He finally concludes,”As you can see, we added quite a lot to the new Task Manager (and we only showed you the first tab!). Task Manager was a unique opportunity for user experience designers and researchers working together with technical program managers and engineers to create a clean, organized, and efficient design. We made it more streamlined for mainstream users, and more detailed for power users.”
