Fluent Design comes to Start and Action Center in Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 16215

The Windows Insider team is rolling out the Windows 10 Preview build 16215 to Fast Ring Insiders today, and this is a pretty massive update that brings several new features and improvements. The new bits also brings a fresh coat of paint to the Windows 10 Start Menu and Action Center, which have both received some nice Fluent Design touches. You can learn everything that’s new below:

Start improvements include:

• Acrylic: If you have transparency enabled for Start, you’ll notice it’s now been updated to use the new acrylic design.
• Vertical resize: No more glitches at the bottom of the frame.
• Horizontal resize: The frame now starts resizing horizontally immediately (like vertical resize), as opposed to only “snapping” to certain widths.
• Diagonal resize: The frame can be resized diagonally!
• Resize grips: It’s now easier to “grip” the edge of the frame to start resizing.
• Tablet mode transition: Smoother transition into tablet mode.

A new look for Action Center: Action Center has been redesigned based on your feedback to provide much clearer information separation and hierarchy. And the new design for Action Center also includes elements of our Fluent Design System such as acrylic! (and in case you were wondering, we’ve also added acrylic to our notification toasts!). As a reminder, you can customize the visible quick actions by going to Settings > System > Notifications & actions.

Note: we’re investigating a bug where notifications in the Action Center lose their outline if acrylic falls back to having no transparency. This will be fixed in a later flight.

As you can see in the above image, all these changes look really good and we like the new design for Action Center. Microsoft is just getting started with Fluent Design, so you can expect the new design language to pop up in new areas over the next few weeks. Let us know in the comments what do you think of the new UI for Start and Action Center.