The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996)
sigchi.org
sigchi.org
Even in Windows 95, each program in the programs list didn't look like a 3D button. That inconsistency can be confusing too.
In a way, a menu is a large button with horizontally separated segments (each row of text is its own clickable area, and there's nothing else in the menu).
Something similar happens in web pages where you're supposed to click a link but the styling doesn't it allow to be a conventional link, so you don't know where to click. Interface designers have a responsibility to not break usability if they diverge from well known widget styles.
Or ... making some stuff larger but not others.
In OSX, I can use a slider to make stuff 'bigger' in Finder, but... it only increases the icon size, not the text size, which makes using the UI from a distance impossible, even though they've got "make stuff bigger" built in.
[sorry, clicked on wrong reply button]
OS X is freaking gaudy and I hate it. Apple as a whole just has no freaking taste these days. I just want a clean, intuitive interface that lets me run my programs and stays out of my way.
The Amiga Workbench (well, 2.0 onwards. The bright orange-on-blue color scheme of 1.x was rather distracting) was really quite nice.
Plus ca change...
IMO, pseudo-3D appearances like Windows 95, NeXTStep, Mac OS 8, and early KDE/GNOME were the pinnacle of aesthetic GUI design (and Windows 95 in particular is the pinnacle of UX as a whole), and everything since then has been a step backward.
I think about the only GUI aesthetic I can stand that's come out of the 21st century has been the use of transparent glass on some elements, and that fad has already died off, sadly. I have my KDE configured to look like a Windows 95-ish design (i.e. pseudo-3D and gray) for most things, but render a small handful of other things with glass, and it works pretty well for me.
While I do hope that this is "just a phase", I don't think it will pass too quickly. The one thing that flat design excels at is quickly and cheaply creating "compliant" UIs and associated elements.
A former colleague of mine sketched the situation bitterly over a few beers; ten years ago or so, he'd spend days, sometimes even a week on an OS X application's icon. It was exhausting and it was hard to convince clients to pay him a week's worth of hourly fee for a damn icon. Nowadays (well, nowadays was about two years ago, I think), he could have two or three mockups ready in an evening and the hip entrepreneurs he worked for on the side would fall off their chairs gasping at how "clean" and "intrinsically meaningful" those blobs of colour were.
We joked around that a lot of the activity could be automated by just writing clever software that takes a 3D picture or a good enough photo of something and makes a "flat" version of it, requiring only a little intervention on a vectorized version to get something final-ish. Voila, icon "design" as a service.
I don't use Windows these days, but Linux GUI programs are not as well-designed as the old Windows programs, so I find myself reaching for the mouse every now and then.
I find it slightly useful -- I can usually visually guestimate a tool's graphics toolkit and predict its behavior, but novice users will almost certainly get confused.
Like you I find environments I cannot keyboard control are hugely unproductive.
There was a classical canonical sweet spot in this era design mindset. Kinda like going into a country side cabin. No fancy stuffy, yet most things are just like they need to.
ps: It's hard to remove nostalgia / habit bias; but I consider myself far from prejudiced, having gone into almost all UX fads since I had a keyboard and a mouse. I accept qualities in all systems be it Apple, Linux, Amiga, SGI, HP handeld calcs and all kinds of different ergonomics (CAD, Compositing, Video, Audio, code, shell, IDEs, Smalltalk) ... And even after seeing all of this, Old Windows (until 2K) had a nice sweet spot feel.
It's amazing how such a dialog held out for so long resisting a change to a modern modern file selector.
Which brings me to windows 10, which has different dialogs for the same dialogs depending how you launch them. There are two different "Display Settings" dialogs depending on if you get there via the "control panel" desktop app or "Settings".
At least windows 95 was reasonably consistent, even if it feels restrictive after using windows XP and then windows 7 especially.
Let's be real, they cannot change the whole interface in a single release so they are rolling things out partially, and good application design is what allows them to do so.
Maybe it's a bit inconsistent but it's the more pragmatic approach.
Everytime I deal with MS enterprise products it just blows me over how anything of theirs actually works. There seems to be a strong empahsis to dogfood everything (okay to install this you need a .net version you don't have, a bunch of random libraries, some framework thing MS is kinda sorta pushing, a random KB or two, maybe silverlight, and then install process itself requires multiple reboots and usually troubleshooting). Then you have to install the application itself and its many hotfixes and service packs. This will definitely result in troubleshooting cryptic error codes as none of this stuff really works out of the box.
That said, while 10 and 2012 are perhaps uglier and less refined beasts, there does seem to be an emphasis on a single UI style with a real effort to hide the legacy stuff, as well as a much stronger emphasis on getting away from the GUI and just using powershell. No idea how that will ultimately pan out, but I do miss the old start menus. The 10 menu seems like it would be amazing, like you should be able to stretch it and fill it with tiles and shortcuts trivially. Instead it seems like something a little hostile to you and something MS uses to promote whatever it feels lime promoting at the time (xbox, bing, cortana, etc).
Every Windows version since has been incrementally worse. Hell, Microsoft started ruining it with Windows 98, by merging Windows Explorer and IE into something really terrible. I still miss Windows 95 Explorer. And then there was Microsoft's obsession with trying to turn the desktop into a web page... they ruined a lot of things, like the Find utility, and several Control Panel applets with that.
W95 broke its own metaphors all the time (hell, it supported both MDI and SDI!) and wasn't consistent. Sure, you can drag and drop this document icon to this window, but try to drag a document icon on top of a window minimized to taskbar and you get a popup that tells you "we know what you want to do and why, but we're not going to let you. Do something else", which is a cardinal UX sin.
Even the look, which I really liked at the time, is a shameless lift of NextSTEP (another competitor for "pinnacle of desktop UX") with other bits pinched from OS/2.
The taskbar, and more importantly the ability to minimize windows to the taskbar, was a godsend. WindowShade didn't compare (and it didn't come with the OS until 7.5), and the oddball options in System 7's multitasking menu were frustrating to deal with. System 7 was a singletasking OS hacked to support multitasking, and it really shows.
About the only thing System 7 did better than Win95 with regards to window management was that they made sure to put the close box on the opposite side of the titlebar from the zoom box and the shade box, to prevent a misclick from closing your window (I've since incorporated this into my KDE configuration).
Oddly enough, it's the technical aspects of the classic Mac OS that fascinate the hell out of me. The whole OS was made of clever hacks. Resource forks were a stroke of genius, and I wish modern OSes had them. I spent so much time hacking around with ResEdit on my Mac as a kid, and later on I learned to appreciate the subtler things about resource forks. Like how the System 7.1 (and above) Finder lets you drag and drop FONT resources between files as if they were folders (they called this a "suitcase" instead of a "folder", but the UI was identical). And then there was the brilliant -- and rather scary -- hackery of how desk accessories were implemented (something that became unnecessary with System 7, but Apple still had the sense to hack the System 7 Finder to treat DA suitcases as programs, which itself was pretty clever).
Or, for that matter, System 7's extensions were the single most flexible method of modifying the behavior of the OS I've ever seen. Mind you, it wasn't exactly stable (untangling extension conflicts was a nightmare, even after 7.5 added a utility to help with it), and it was certainly insecure, but I really miss that flexibility and hackability in modern OSes. The only thing I've seen that comes close is Android's Xposed Framework.
Honestly, if there was one thing I missed about the '90s, it was the UX design across the board. Just thinking that Windows 95, System 7, and NeXTStep were all competing with each other at the same time makes me realized how blessed that period of time was, and how things have really gone downhill since.
(You're also right about the technical aspects — Mac OS was a talking dog that also said very interesting things. Don't forget how you could install Control Panels and Extensions in the right places just by dropping them on the System Folder, or how you could make a disk bootable with just two files).
I too am pretty disappointed with the state of competition in UX right now. Man, at one point we had Amiga Intuition, SGI's Irix, OS/2, Sun NeWS, NextSTEP, Mac OS, W95 and NT all contributing pretty smart ideas to the desktop UI, and it was a genuinely exciting time. Android vs iOS is miserably dull in comparison.
Windows 95 has the advantage that tons of people used it day-to-day, where Apple's systems were less popular. But as a person who used both, I definitely preferred Apple's design, and their dedication to designing everything about the experience.
Even the keyboard layout. Macintosh was the system that logically and sensibly separated the function of "Enter" from "Return". Two functions should have two keys, dammit. Every time I have to use shift-Enter to put a newline in a IM window instead of just hitting return, I die a little inside.
> We also collected data from product support about users' top twenty problems with Windows 3.1.
As someone with a long term interest in Shell design, I'd love to know what these were ?
http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kd...
"Launching Programs: Start Menu. Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI."
Links if anyone's interested:
http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb.html
http://toastytech.com/guis/miscc.html
If you move the taskbar to the left or top, this problem is dealt with. (As is the problem that later versions of windows -- before they got rid of it altogether -- moved "Programs" below the dynamically-added links to things that Windows thinks you are more likely to use, which keeps those more-likely things farther from the start button if you keep the taskbar at the bottom.)
I wonder if the taskbar was originally planned for one of those two (top/left) locations, but got moved to the bottom later.
1968.
People going to school to learn software development don't spend a week on DOS, a week on Novell 4, then a week on Macintosh 6.0.8, then a week on Windows 98, a week on BeOS, etc. There's no history education at all. No learning from past ideas. Not even any conception of history, really.
Compare it to, for example, a film class. Students learning how to create films watch films. They watch films from the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1950s, etc. They learn how their industry changed and matured over time. They get a solid sense of history, and an appreciation for their forebears. Software developers get none of that.
Anyway, this shouldn't come as a surprise, is what I'm getting at.
...usually have offered anything that even purports to be a "software development" curriculum.
They usually have a "computer science" curriculum.
body {
width: 50em;
margin: auto;
line-height: 1.6;
}
https://userstyles.org/styles/118674/wide-reader-view
Just grab the content descriptor and apply your own styles if that doesn't suit you. The key is:
@-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader?") { ...Basically, they now have a setting for that in the toolbox to the left, so you can decide yourself how narrow or wide you want it. They also added a setting for the line height, so even though you didn't complain about that with Reader View, you can now change that, too, if you should ever need it.
IMO the issue of productivity and discoverability has still not been solved on touch based UI, even with our post-iPhone interfaces. Shame that Microsoft didn't go back to these roots and innovated on exactly these issues.
Just using most web-based UIs shows that there's almost zero usability testing going on in that field, and since more and more apps are web-based, well.
But it seems like MS at some point got on the high horse and started thinking that they can just shove anything down user's throat anyways. When they lost the entire segment of the fastest growing computing market, a competent CEO would have gone back and study why their 95 UI was so successful that everyone wanted to buy their product instead of being forced to.