The Windows Taskbar: Special Purpose Toolbars

With the release of Windows 95, Microsoft introduced the Taskbar, a clever and efficient means of managing running applications and displaying system status. Perhaps originally introduced to compete with the Macintosh OS 7 and its ubiquitous menubar, the Taskbar is actually much more useful and more suitable to a multitasking OS (which Mac OS was not at the time). The Taskbar also provided a somewhat cumbersome, but easily identifiable entry point to programs and the file system through the Start menu. In subsequent releases, the Taskbar evolved, adding a user-configurable quick start area for launching common applications and documents. The Taskbar can be dragged larger to hold more controls, and in past releases, it could be docked on either the top or bottom of the screen.

With each new Windows release, Microsoft seems to want to add something new to the Taskbar—a trend which could have diminishing returns fairly soon. But for now, the sum of this functionality makes the Taskbar a critical tool for users to manage their desktop.

In Mac OS X, we finally see a poor cousin to the Taskbar, the Dock, emerge as a standard on the Macintosh platform. Unfortunately, their implementation is heavy on flash and light on substance. Its gravest error is in poorly distinguishing between icons representing launchable applications and icons representing running processes, something the Taskbar has no problems presenting clearly.

The Start menu

As discussed elsewhere, the Start menu is primarily an entry point into a cascading menu structure of programs, settings, and documents. Its one major virtue is that it is behind a large friendly button that is almost always on the screen and is labeled Start in big letters. The problem is that once you click on it, especially as a new user, you're a bit at a loss as to where to go or what to do next. The Start menu has become more elaborate in Windows XP, and although the designers' apparent desire to segregate items into more readily understandable categories is evident, the whole effect becomes one of confusion and clutter.

One nice aspect of the Start menu has always been the capability to drag items onto it; but with the addition of the Quick Start area (described next), this functionality becomes a bit superfluous. Why put an item on an already crowded menu when you can put it on a toolbar?

Quick Start toolbar

To the right of the Start menu is a customizable area for dragging icons from the desktop. Items dragged there become butcons that launch the application or document in question. This is a great feature and well executed. If you want to remove an item, just drag it off. When you drop it, it becomes a desktop shortcut to the item, which you can leave or delete.

Some programmers may be tempted to install a link to their application directly in the Quick Start area without asking permission. This is an arrogant gesture that your users will not appreciate. You can make it easy for them to choose to do this, but don't assume they will want it there.

Window buttons

The window buttons are the primary fixture of the Taskbar; they represent every running window on the desktop. Clicking on one will open the window if it is closed and make that window the one receiving input focus. Clicking on one representing an open window will close that window. If you click on open windows, the state of the window buttons in the Taskbar mirror these selections, so that the Taskbar can always be used to tell what the current window is.

Taskbar buttons contain the application's icon and the title of the application and/or the current document it is displaying. (Microsoft currently seems to be following the standard of document title first, then application title, separated by a dash.) This works okay as long as you don't have too many windows open or too many other controls on the Taskbar because the window buttons get narrower the less space there is. ToolTips come to the rescue here.

Unfortunately, in Windows XP, Microsoft has done something which disrupts this quite workable ToolTip scheme: As space gets limited, rather than squeezing all the buttons, the Taskbar starts grouping them by application into single buttons. The ToolTip only shows the name of the application (and the fact that there is more than one window represented, which the button itself shows as well). To get a particular document from one of these group buttons, users are forced to make a menu selection after clicking on the button. This new scheme has two serious problems. First, it is now impossible to tell, in some circumstances, which documents are open without clicking on a window button. Second, the mapping between the active window button and the active window has been thrown out of kilter by the many-to-one mapping of the grouped window buttons. Thank goodness this pathological behavior can be turned off in the Taskbar properties!

The status area

Since it was introduced in Windows 95, the status area (also known as the system tray) has become the dumping ground for little controls that probably shouldn't be there. The status area was designed to provide status information about various hardware and background processes, as well as providing a switch to turn these types of things on and off. It also displays the time (and date, in a ToolTip), which is handy and which replicated a long-standing feature found on the Mac menu bar. In Windows XP, icons that have been inactive for a while are hidden in a drawer (that the user can open), and emerge when they need attention. Status area icons typically launch a small configuration dialog when clicked and a pop-up menu when right-clicked. These should both be very simple and minimal. If you find yourself designing a status bar control that launches a full application or a complex cascading menu, it is probably inappropriate to put it in the status area in the first place.

One other behavior that some status bar icons exhibit (as of Windows 2000) is an interesting, non-flyover variant of Apple's balloon help concept, but used for a totally different purpose. In Windows 2000 and XP, status area icons occasionally launch little speech balloons that act like bulletins or process dialogs (see Chapters 30 and 31 for discussion on these and other dialogs), complete with embedded termination controls (similar to, but far less annoying than Clippy's help dialogs). They behave the way system modal dialogs really should, by not getting in the way of what the user is doing.

More toolbars on the Taskbar?

In Windows 2000 and XP, the Taskbar includes other toolbars that you can reach by right-clicking on the Taskbar—one that lets users type a URL and launch a browser, one that lets you add URLs as links, and one that replicates all the users desktop icons and folders. You can even create your own toolbars based on any folder or URL. This last seems particularly egregious. Although these might be interesting to some users, Microsoft should be aware that toolbars are not the answer to all problems. This attempt to cram everything but the kitchen sink onto the Taskbar is probably what resulted in the window button mess described earlier. Was it really worth it?