Microsoft’s ‘zombie moat of the dead 8 pixels’
During an interview with a major software company, I couldn’t help but give the hiring team a rundown of problems with their operating system software that I considered critical. I thought I was dead in the water.
They surprised me.
“Which of our software products do you like best and why?”
After a long, awkward pause, I still had nothing.
“I’d like to help make your software better.”
After the off-hand admission that I wasn’t a big fan, I offered to share critical insights into the user interface of their flagship product instead of praise.
When the team agreed the first thing I pointed out was the 8 pixels of dead space around the branded navigation button in the interface that didn’t accept clicks.
This dead moat meant that customers couldn’t take advantage of Fitts’ law, the rule that says that “the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target”. This means that large targets that are close to the mouse arrow are easiest to click which is obvious, but it also translates to the fact that buttons are easier to hit if they are placed at the corners of the screen.
If your design takes advantage of this the operator can slam their arrow into a corner and click the button without having to aim or slow down much. This is because the corners of the screen funnel the arrow toward the target to make the button virtually infinitely wide and high on two sides. (All of this only applies to specific input devices — not touch screens.)
Historically, Windows never took advantage of this. If you push the mouse into the lower left corner on Windows 95 and later, you'd have to move the arrow back every time you overshot the target — both on the bottom and the left side, which slows people down a lot, potentially many times in a day.
This may not sound like a big deal. But it is.
“Since Windows 95’s intro of the Start button the ‘moat of the dead 8 pixels’ was in production for over 14 years until it was finally fixed with the advent of Windows 7, only to come back alive in 2021 with Windows 11 — now fully qualifying it as the ‘zombie moat of the dead 8 pixels.’”
You may discard milliseconds as unimportant, but at scale, the productivity lost by tech workers and anyone using a computer around the globe is staggering.
“Just imagine how much time this interface wasted for people working over a billion Windows devices in use at any given time, in over 5500 days.”
(AI bot tried to estimate the damage in the notes.)
So what’s the solution? Simple: Just look to 1984 and make the hit area larger than your button.
(Another detail — see how the mouse cursor sits in the very top left corner on startup? This means you can click to get the Apple menu without even having to move a pixel. This was more useful then, than now, since the dock became the primary driver for launching applications in Mac OS X in March 2001, but the positioning is still the same.)
Speed isn’t just a question of computational efficiency, it's just as much about reducing friction in the user interface, and the psychological well-being of your customers. You don’t want them feeling at fault, ever. They should feel empowered not doubting themselves. And your product team needs the time and space to be able to pursue relentless attention to detail, especially if you’re shipping at scales like this.
The critique didn’t end there, but it was the most important point I wanted to make and the simplest bug to rectify that I could imagine.
I have to admit, it takes guts to be able to listen and embrace this kind of feedback, and not look at critique as negative, but rather an asset that can drive the product forward, and customers’ productivity, up.
So, I have a lot of respect for the team to have the galls to invite me back. ;)
—F
Ps: While the Mac has done menus right since 1984 (Susan Kare introducing Macintosh / YouTube), jump on an iPad with a Magic Keyboard today and you’ll find that the designers forgot their history. Slamming the trackpad cursor into the corner to click only works sometimes, and it’s not pretty.
Pps: The bomb icon came to the Mac with the release of System 6 in April of 1988. It was shown during system crashes. While those were really annoying, at least the representation of the error was refreshingly honest. Designed by Susan Kare.
Ppps: Here are some more laws of user experience design .
Microsoft’s ‘zombie moat of the dead 8 pixels’
During an interview with a major software company, I couldn’t help but give the hiring team a rundown of problems with their operating system software that I considered critical. I thought I was dead in the water.
They surprised me.
“Which of our software products do you like best and why?”
After a long, awkward pause, I still had nothing.
“I’d like to help make your software better.”
After the off-hand admission that I wasn’t a big fan, I offered to share critical insights into the user interface of their flagship product instead of praise.
When the team agreed the first thing I pointed out was the 8 pixels of dead space around the branded navigation button in the interface that didn’t accept clicks.
This dead moat meant that customers couldn’t take advantage of Fitts’ law, the rule that says that “the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target”. This means that large targets that are close to the mouse arrow are easiest to click which is obvious, but it also translates to the fact that buttons are easier to hit if they are placed at the corners of the screen.
If your design takes advantage of this the operator can slam their arrow into a corner and click the button without having to aim or slow down much. This is because the corners of the screen funnel the arrow toward the target to make the button virtually infinitely wide and high on two sides. (All of this only applies to specific input devices — not touch screens.)
Historically, Windows never took advantage of this. If you push the mouse into the lower left corner on Windows 95 and later, you'd have to move the arrow back every time you overshot the target — both on the bottom and the left side, which slows people down a lot, potentially many times in a day.
This may not sound like a big deal. But it is.
“Since Windows 95’s intro of the Start button the ‘moat of the dead 8 pixels’ was in production for over 14 years until it was finally fixed with the advent of Windows 7, only to come back alive in 2021 with Windows 11 — now fully qualifying it as the ‘zombie moat of the dead 8 pixels.’”
You may discard milliseconds as unimportant, but at scale, the productivity lost by tech workers and anyone using a computer around the globe is staggering.
“Just imagine how much time this interface wasted for people working over a billion Windows devices in use at any given time, in over 5500 days.”
(AI bot tried to estimate the damage in the notes.)
So what’s the solution? Simple: Just look to 1984 and make the hit area larger than your button.
(Another detail — see how the mouse cursor sits in the very top left corner on startup? This means you can click to get the Apple menu without even having to move a pixel. This was more useful then, than now, since the dock became the primary driver for launching applications in Mac OS X in March 2001, but the positioning is still the same.)
Speed isn’t just a question of computational efficiency, it's just as much about reducing friction in the user interface, and the psychological well-being of your customers. You don’t want them feeling at fault, ever. They should feel empowered not doubting themselves. And your product team needs the time and space to be able to pursue relentless attention to detail, especially if you’re shipping at scales like this.
The critique didn’t end there, but it was the most important point I wanted to make and the simplest bug to rectify that I could imagine.
I have to admit, it takes guts to be able to listen and embrace this kind of feedback, and not look at critique as negative, but rather an asset that can drive the product forward, and customers’ productivity, up.
So, I have a lot of respect for the team to have the galls to invite me back. ;)
—F
Ps: While the Mac has done menus right since 1984 (Susan Kare introducing Macintosh / YouTube), jump on an iPad with a Magic Keyboard today and you’ll find that the designers forgot their history. Slamming the trackpad cursor into the corner to click only works sometimes, and it’s not pretty.
Pps: The bomb icon came to the Mac with the release of System 6 in April of 1988. It was shown during system crashes. While those were really annoying, at least the representation of the error was refreshingly honest. Designed by Susan Kare.
Ppps: Here are some more laws of user experience design .