Submission details
Tighten up the positioning of icons in the System Tray
The System Tray (sorry - "notification area") of Windows 7 needs some aesthetic work. The displaying of icons is really kind of haphazard.
In Windows XP, icons were displayed in a nice little grid with even spacing, presenting a very clean user interface.
In Windows Vista, the arrangement started to look a little sloppier: for some reason, the gap between rightmost column of icons and and the column just to the left of it was a little larger than between the other columns. (I never figured out why this was the case.)
In Windows 7, the arrangement is now sloppier than ever. In the image I've attached, three oddities appear:
(1) There's a HUGE horizontal gap between rows of icons.
I know that the point of this is to show an arrow under the icon when I cursor over the icon. But, frankly, this is stupid. First, you're leaving space around an icon that's ALWAYS shown in order to display an arrow on the VERY RARE occasion that I cursor over it. Second... on virtually every Windows machine, THE CURSOR IS AN ARROW. Do users really need a SECOND arrow pointing to an icon that I'm already pointing at... with an arrow? PLUS, I'm often blocking this highlighting icon with my cursor, so it just looks like clutter.
(2) There's a big vertical gap between the icons and the display of the clock. This sticks out like a sore thumb when the tray contains many icons.
It sort of resembles the gap between David Letterman's front teeth... and is just as distracting!
(3) The arrow for "More Icons"... is this really necessary??? This arrow is just an icon for a set of icons that I asked to have hidden. Guess what, guys - there's a reason I asked to hide them: I didn't want these icons taking up space in my tray. So why would you replace them with ANOTHER icon? Wouldn't it be better to design this as a right-click/"Properties" interface?
Tighten up the spacing of icons in the tray.
Remove the "under-arrow" tray feature, as it is redundant with the mouse cursor.
And replace the "More Icons" drop-down icon with a right-click tray option.
Low
Low
Not fixed
Bun-Bun wrote on January 25, 2010, 5:48pm
I agree except the icon to show the hidden icons. Although an option could be added to hide this as well.
I am very disatisfied with the new systray (notification area). I don't understand how people can say Windows 7 is so polished and complete yet something that is on the desktop all the time looks like complete crap.
Vista's systray was much more visually appealing and functioned properly except for the system icons which were spaced apart from the rest and could not be hidden like others (could only disable them thus they did not show when clicking the temproary show button)