I agree that thousands < millions, but was there a study to see how those millions feel about the UI? The change was from beta to RC. Was there really a study done in such a short time to ask those millions? If such studies exist then why even bother asking for feedback in a public forum? Anything you'd get would be statistical noise.
Since the changes were quite drastic between beta and RC, my guess would be no, there was no study. If there was a study then I would question the competency of the people of carried out the study given how off the mark the results were (VS beta UI).
My guess is that the UX/UI people didn't really know what they were doing. They saw the massive backlash and went "Oh OK, I guess we were a little bit off. Let us remove most of these upper case captions, but we can't get rid of them entirely, so let's change the menu to upper case." When the second wave of backlash came (over the menu) the UX/UI people already had their pride bruised so they couldn't back down again.
>When the second wave of backlash came (over the menu) the UX/UI people already had their pride bruised so they couldn't back down again.
Possibly, but I suspect it is, as they have already stated, driven by the desire to align some UX look and feel consistency across 'major products'. I don't know if I quite 'buy' the idea that all caps menus in VS and all caps menus in Office give you any 'alignment', but you know, I am but a dev not a UX person :)
You do not need that study of millions. Let's say you talk to 100 customers who you think to be a representatieve sample. One or two make a remark on the issue. Two weeks later, you ask them about it, and they say it grows on you.
Now, you send out the beta. You expect 1-3% or so of your customers to make a remark on it. Maybe 1‰ will contact you or write a blog post. Should that worry you? No.
And of course, you should be even less worried if you had measured performance related to the issue, and saw no differences.
In short: those thousands are self-selected and not representative of the audience. On top of that, all reviewers have to have some critique. Critisizing (nicely symmetrical, with all vowels being i's, and the symmetry of consonants; but I am digressing) such an obviously visible feature is easy.
Listening to customers is not the end all or be all of UX or product design and neither should it be. It should be taken into account, but UX experts surprisingly know better much of the time. The one constant is that people don't like change, whether good or bad, and that decision cannot be made by listening to a vocal group of commenters.
Since the changes were quite drastic between beta and RC, my guess would be no, there was no study. If there was a study then I would question the competency of the people of carried out the study given how off the mark the results were (VS beta UI).
My guess is that the UX/UI people didn't really know what they were doing. They saw the massive backlash and went "Oh OK, I guess we were a little bit off. Let us remove most of these upper case captions, but we can't get rid of them entirely, so let's change the menu to upper case." When the second wave of backlash came (over the menu) the UX/UI people already had their pride bruised so they couldn't back down again.