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Comment by alxlaz | Hacker News Reader

Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:

- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless

- Good contrast

- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else.

- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus

- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.

The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...

I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!

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"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent."

Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work.

One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...

What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.

The other thing about OS X is that command-shift-/ opens a little search box in the help menu and then you can pick any menu item by typing a few characters and selecting it with the keyboard.

Very underrated feature. Last I used Ubuntu's Unity it had a similar feature.

I wish Alfred had a plugin to do this on Mac OS. I remember Quicksilver had something.

Alfred does have such a workflow: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10231-faster-menu-search/

What baffled me is that if you have a mouse with side buttons you just cannot use them in any type of shortcut.

Mouse support is generally terrible in OSX.

Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades.

> Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades.

I'm kinda out of the loop, do they still sell mice with only one button?

Sort of. Their desktop mice have two buttons, but only a single plastic shell. This seems to follow Apple's design guideline of wallpapering over complexity, rather than admitting that it exists.

Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media/vc/75a2caed-...

> Their desktop mice have two buttons, but only a single plastic shell.

I'm not sure where you're getting that from, since Magic Mouse only has one button: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Magic+Mouse+2+Teardown/51058...

It may physically only have one button, but functionally it has two (left and right click) as well as gesture support. Magic mouse takes a bit of getting used to (it's very flat), but it is a fantastic mouse once you have.

Functionally, it has as many buttons as you'd like, since it's a multi-touch mouse. It's like a trackpad in that sense: you can configure it to do certain things when you use it a certain way, but physically, it's nothing more than a multi-touch surface and a single click button.

There's a lovely piece of software called SensibleSideButtons to deal with that. Back in the day, everybody used USB Overdrive to overcome OS X's shortcomings with the mouse. Alternatively, BetterTouchTool is a nice little piece of software for setting custom shortcuts with any mouse button and/or trackpad gestures.

I still use USB Overdrive to make a physical scroll wheel work without crazy acceleration. Without it, macOS seems to scroll just a pixel on the first click of the wheel, maybe two pixes on the second click, but if I scroll a bunch, it jumps half the page. With USB Overdrive I can set it to just always one or two lines of text per click.

Dang right! It's like half the programmers of today have forgotten keyboards are a thing.

For growing numbers of people they aren't.

As an exercize, I very seriously embraced touch a few years back.

I will not give up keyboard plus mouse, but I am also amazed at what really can be done with touch keyboard and pen.

Lots of people want to expand on that because it expands on phones and tablets.

I have a Note 8, and can content create on it to a level I did not think possible a few years ago.

I use touch keyboard, voice and pen.

At times I carry a small bluetooth keyboard with touch mouse pad. It is not as fast, but is more robust.

I put up with touch keyboards because real ones are not very portable. It's good enough to get by, but it's not good. The same with touch interaction -- selecting a range of text is an exercise in frustration. I don't want that interface on my desktop.

Just because a thing has a CPU and operating system does not mean it needs to have a unified user experience.

And many others don't even realize that investing a bit of research on better keyboards would bring us to much better use experience. I don't mean changing the typewriter style keys, those are ok, I mean all other keys; why there is no standard for a reduced keypad with the bare minimum for menu navigation and data entry? Unfortunately the arrow keys are a half solution by not implementing yes/no and other control keys. Why there's no contextual Info key to show information/help pertaining the current task? The computer keyboard as we know it has to be extended, not taken away as the WIMP culture before and touch screen after attempted to do, with disastrous results so far.

I would welcome a kit made of say 120 key modules (one key per module, real clicky keys, please!) all with the same pinout, and normal+2x/3x/4x keycaps, special "key" modules such as trackballs, Thinkpad "nipples", analog knobs etc. then a breadboard-style carrier board where i can stick them as I want, plus a decoder board. Then, once the keyboard is ready, I can send a file describing its details to some high quality 3D printing assembly to purchase a pcb and case for my prototype keyboard and turn it into a real one.

>The computer keyboard as we know it has to be extended(...)yes/no and other control keys.

The Macbook Touchbar is pretty much exactly this, it shows e.g. dialog options as keys. I know it's not what you want (I like mechanical keys too), but it's the first actual extension of keyboards in a long time and it's convenient sometimes.

There is also the Optimus keyboard that sounds more or less like what you want built.

>Why there's no contextual Info key to show information/help pertaining the current task?

Usually F1 brings up relevant help on Windows. The actual implementation in most apps is useless though.

>Optimus keyboard

I’ve had that page bookmarked for like 5 years now, and its never changed/stopped being out of stock. I’m starting to doubt it ever physically existed..

> Unfortunately the arrow keys are a half solution by not implementing yes/no and other control keys.

Wouldn't "yes" and "no" be redundant with "enter" and "escape"? Most situations I can think of where you can confirm or abort an action, those actions will map to enter and escape.

Yes and no. Functionally yes because every keyboard has them but I'd like specific function keys to be part of the "arrow keys section" so that users become accustomed to them and one day if I have space constraints I can implement just the arrow keys section and expect the user to be able to input anything without looking elsewhere, including text if I implement a virtual keyboard the user can navigate using arrow keys. I'd like keyboards to have sections that can be snapped together, say the typewriter section on the left, then the arrow keys section, then the numeric keypad, all independent each other. In this context we could envision keyboard addons such as for example customized function keys for very specific operations and or modifier keys which aren't mapped to the usual shift/alt etc. If every key (sensor/knob/transducer, etc) was a module which initializes itself according to its capabilities and once snapped in with others uses a common bus for communication, we could build on the fly haptic interfaces a hundred time more powerful than any "modern" touch screen out there.

When I bought my first computer (which came with Windows 3.1), it didn't come with a mouse. User interfaces back then were designed to be usable without a mouse, because many people didn't have a mouse - it was optional, and used up one of the serial ports.

I gave up trying the get my first mouse working after hours of tweaking win.ini...

Yup, I started out with win 3.1 without a mouse. You could do pretty much anything except use paint.

Both your comment and the article use the phrase “real work”. What do you meany by that? And is there “fake work” that Windows fails at?

> One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts.

I actually find that's what I miss when I use Windows. Windows' universal keyboard shortcuts seem to be limited to window management and some basics like new files, save, cut, copy, paste, etc.

On the other hand, just about every macOS has the same shortcuts for actions within applications as opposed to without. For items without shortcuts, you can define your own quickly and easily in System Preferences, and those custom shortcuts can apply to just one app or every app.

Not only that, every macOS app puts the shortcuts in the same place, the menu bar. They're all searchable via the Help menu. On Windows, there are more often than not keyboard shortcuts that aren't listed in any menus, so one would have no idea what they are without looking them up. Further, because Windows software tends to be developed in any ol' framework with any ol' user interface, lacking in any consistency, quite a lot of programs don't even implement the standard, universal shortcuts.

All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design. UX apps of Win98 era were much more consistent, and especially the rule that all commands and shortcuts must be in the main menu was usually adhered to, at least by apps that respected the official platform design guidelines.

The idea of a drop-down main menu with all commands comes from CUA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...

> All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design

I was going to say "not on macOS, they aren't" because this isn't true for any apps that use Cocoa or Carbon (which is to say, all of them). The only apps that exhibit any weirdness are ones that use cross-platform frameworks like Qt, GTK+, or wxWidgets.

But nowadays, there are loads of Electron and React Native apps that don't even present anything in the global menu bar; if the developers don't think to add them in themselves, basic functions like copy and paste don't work without secondary clicking!

> UX apps of Win98 era were much more consistent

Counterpoint: 99.5% of everything ever created with Visual Basic.

99.5% of everything ever created with VB is probably line-of-business apps. Which is to say, most users would only be exposed to 1 or 2 such app, usually at work.

They were also self-documenting and training. Do an action and while you're doing it, right there next to the description of the action, is how to do it quickly.

If you realized that, were doing the same thing frequently, and used the keyboard action after the first couple times you learned the memory of how to do it the quick way.

The one thing I miss from windows is that alt access to the menu. While search menu is great when I don't know what I am looking for, using alt menu and then a chord to access features was great and less painful than some of the macOS shortcuts that require three modifier keys at the same time.

Yes! yes! 1000x yes!

Have spent the vast majority of my time on OSX for the past several years, but still reminisce about the wonderful keyboard shortcuts from Windows.

I'd argue MacOS classic was the real winner here, especially keyboard shortcuts. For example cmnd+q always quits an app, where as in Windows you had ctrl+q, alt+f4, ctrl+w, and sometimes you just had to do the menu navigation (alt f, then e I think? and sometimes it was alt f, x), and yet other times there was no keyboard shortcut at all.

It’s funny to mention ctrl+q , because it is one consistency in MacOS that I find unbearable to the point of having set it to spotlight instead

Right next to ctrl+q (something I end up hitting once per session of an app, by definition) is ctrl+a (select all, something I hit tens of times a session), ctrl+w (hit in the browser a good amount), ctrl+1, ctrl+2 (also good browser shortcuts)

I actually don’t need to close the entire program that often! Please don’t make it so easy to accidentally hit at such a high frequency. Bonus points: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY keyboards a lot. That’s just me but it makes me have a lot of extra pain

Alt-F4 is very nice in that regard.

Select all in MacOS should be CMD+A, not CTRL+A. Try swapping your muscle memory :)

Alt+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current top-level window.

Ctrl+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current child window/tab. For apps with tabs, this was often duplicated as Ctrl+W.

There's no standard shortcut for exit. I believe that this is deliberate, to avoid people hitting it accidentally. However, the accelerator keys to do it via the File menu are always Alt+F ("File") -> X ("eXit").

These are all platform UX guidelines, or at least they were back in the day. Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS.

> Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS.

This is much less likely, given that they are set up by default for every new application.

I find SizeUp to be a lifesaver. Good example of a finished app. It does what it’s supposed to and is incredibly stable and reliable.

One UX issue with the cascading menus in Start menu was when you had to navigate several levels deep to open a program. Since the menus expanded and collapsed on mouse hover every once in a while accidentally moving the mouse in the wrong direction meant all my menu navigation progress was lost and I had to start over.

Shoutout to Shortcat for providing something like "knowledge-free keyboard shortcuts everywhere" on macOS. You hit a search key-chord (I use SHIFT-CMD-SPACE) and it pops up a search modal making all UI elements keyboard selectable. Usually the thing you want is 1 or 2 characters followed by Return.

It honestly reminds me of the experience of navigating Windows menus with Alt- and progressive keyboard shortcut learning, but flexible enough to handle things like Electron applications that don't even have a Menu bar or settable shortcuts.

Does anyone else use this or something similar?

https://shortcatapp.com/

Jetbrains' IDEA has the "Search everywhere" feature that...well...searches everywhere - menus, commands, project files, etc. I'd love to have that for every app in the OS.

Actually, that would be really, really awesome once you get used to Jetbrains' way of working. It's so unusual to be able to search for all the configuration, functionality, code and files in the same place.

Emacs is much like that, as everything the user can do is an interactive command, which is typically a named function. So tools like Helm, Ivy/Counsel, as well as the built-in completion for M-x, let the user find and execute commands by name. And, e.g. `helm-M-x` display any bound keys next to the command name.

Thank you for teaching me about Shortcat!

Re: usability of the Start Menu...

When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.

One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff.

I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I'd propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools.

I'd also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu.

Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.

I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.

> I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.

Many already do such things (most Desktop Environments provide a shell with some kind of software category menu).

Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft. Also applies to c:\Program Files and the registry.

I can't remember the rationale, but it does make it hard to find things.

One possible rationale: companies tend to specialize in one specific software domain, so you would end up with your graphic design software under Adobe folder, your Quake games grouped under idSoftware, and your databases grouped under Oracle.

The rationale was that on Windows 3.1, the company would put all of their stuff, not just the program executable, in the Program Group.

So not only would you have the program, but you'd also have the readme and the uninstaller and anything else that goes along with the program.

When Windows 95 came out, Microsoft wanted to hide all of that. The new guideline was to just put the program in the root level of the Programs menu, leave the uninstaller up to the new Add/Remove Programs control panel, and if you want the readme or whatever, go hunt for it yourself. But unfortunately most developers ignored it. They continued building Windows 3.1-style Program Groups the same way they always did.

And, yes, the Programs menu used the same backend as Program Manager. What appeared in one appeared in the other.

> Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft.

That was part of the Windows 3.1 guidelines. On Windows 95, Microsoft's guidelines specified that your applications were to appear as single icons under the Programs menu. Unfortunately, most almost all developers ignored that and continued doing things the Win3.1 way.

KDE already does this.

Screenshot from my system: https://i.imgur.com/csWWl9Y.png

And this is on Arch, which means that almost all software is unmodified from upstream.

That's exactly the sort of top level I want! I once suggested that GNOME games be broken down into categories but I quickly encountered a bunch of resistance. Granted, I probably wasn't addressing the right people anyway.

On the other hand, it requires the user to read minds and figure out how the developer might have classified the application. If I'm looking for After Effects, should I look under Graphics or Multimedia? Or maybe Utilities?

I agree that using Company Name as the top level folder might be the worst option. If I'm looking for some random utility app I downloaded and installed, why should I have to first remember what the name of the company was who made it?

First the categories need be a bit more distinct. Also, a program might be allowed in more than one category. In a commercial case I could see stupid companies stuffing their app in as many menus as possible.

XFCE (arch also) also does this, and I find that it a great experience that whenever a program is installed I can find it immediately in the category that makes sense.

> Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.

The concern is namespace conflicts. Users may be surprised to find a program has 'changed' when in fact another user installed a similarly named program.

Gnome 2 did this (and Mate still does), but I actually find it more confusing.

It's sometimes not obvious which category a program belongs to, so you have to meticulously search all categories that could apply. And you'd only to that if you don't exactly remember the program name in the first place, otherwise you would have had quicker ways to launch it.

Here the old windows way offers more 'breadcrumbs' to find something.

I thought that Win7 had a good solution to that, with typing immediately doing a search within the start menu. Then, Win8 made it also search for files, destroying any utility of the search. If you want people to have muscle memory (e.g. WinKey + moz + enter to start Mozilla Firefox), then having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.

> having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.

There's no reason search has to do this, though. Spotlight (the macOS version of this) is able to find results pretty much instantly, and it doesn't show any results until it's searched everything, so the top result never changes. I really don't understand why Windows hasn't been able to do the same thing (and if anything, the win10 search is worse).

> it doesn't show any results until it's searched everything, so the top result never changes

I don't see how that follows. If it also searches files, the top result can change if any indexed file changes, which would still break the app launching scenario.

Or is it always showing apps on top?

Is this case, they are referring to consistent display of results within a single search, not the consistency of several search results using the same search terms. Progressive searches that display results as they are found have a nasty habit of changing which result is currently underneath your mouse, right when you are about to click it.

Yup. Mobile Twitter is horrible in this regard. Search for something, it comes up first or second, wonderful; tap i- DAMMIT WHY DID YOU REPLACE IT WITH AN UNRELATED HASHTAG!?!

Result: search, wait 10 seconds for the damn UI to stabilize, tap the result and NOPE, THERE COMES ANOTHER LATE RESPONSE MESSING IT UP AGAIN.

I wish Firefox would do this too. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve pressed return just as Firefox changes the ordering of the items in the search bar suggestions. Very fustrating as I’ve since learnt to wait for Firefox to complete its suggestion process before hitting return.

Win7's built in menu search was great. Win8 technically had similar functionality but it was awful for all the reasons you mention (lag, poor search capability) plus it took over your whole screen in a horrible, visually jarring flash making it very unpleasant to use. Win10's is halfway between the two, but close enough to Win7's that I actually use it now instead of just using Launchy and pretending the Windows menu doesn't exist, like I do on Win8.

Edit: While we're talking about laggy keyboard interfaces, AAARGH the Win10 logon screen is awful. You have to hit a key, then wait for the screen to load and be shown on the screen, before you start typing your PIN, or it'll eat the first character of your PIN going from "press any key to log on" to "enter your pin". What the hell is so hard about understanding that keyboard interfaces shouldn't be laggy even if graphics don't quite keep up? Electric typewriters from 1990 got this right!

> One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff.

It was even worse than that. The app name usually was a subfolder too. It went like: 'Start -> Programs -> Adobe -> Photoshop -> Launch Photoshop' (Plus 'Open Readme' and 'Uninstall' and whatnot)

Part of it may also be down to features. Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need. Sadly there seems to be a sense that the next version of Windows or Mac OS needs to add new features, visible features.

If you shave a modern OS down to just the features that you'd need to do your work, the economics of carefully designing a desktop and the icons becomes more "reasonable" again.

I still think that a clone of the classic Mac desktop, or Windows 3.11 would be great on Linux.

If you must use Windows get Windows LTSC

A version of windows 10 that is completely free of bloatware (no Microsoft store, no preinstalled apps like candy crush, no tiles on start menu, no Cortana, only windows search, no edge, only Internet explorer). It only gets security updates instead of feature updates, and has support for 10 years. Best version of windows 10 IMO. FYI it was originally called LTSB (Long term servicing branch) and was renamed to LTSC (Long term servicing channel).

I put it on my new machine and it the 1st version of Windows I've been ok with since 7. Buying it is basically impossible for a normal person, but its readily available on tpb. (also kms activator)

I recently tried out LTSC again in a vm to see how W10 has progressed. Apps take a long time to open. I thought it wasn't registering the clicks or something, until 30 seconds later it opened it 3 times.

Start menu takes > 0.5 seconds to even begin animating. Disabling animations actually makes the lag subjectively worse.

I installed W7 a few hours later to compare, and I was amazed at the difference in responsiveness. I'm talking like 10-20x faster.

I bought 5 year old netbook recently and it didn't have the resources to open W10's start menu. (Well, it could, but it took three minutes.) Did a fresh install of W7, and like magic, you can actually use the computer again.

I don't use any version of Windows anymore, but I'd like to be able to. I'm sad support for W7 will be ending soon.

With classic theme gone, and everything so slow, the best Windows desktop experience for me in this day and age is XFCE.

Maybe it just didn't work well with the VM. Windows 10 is pretty lean and apps definitely don't take a long time to open.

Running LTSC in a VM right now with Linux / KDE on the host. It is very snappy indeed. A few ideas:

- you aren't running off an SSD and Windows Defender is choking your disk I/O out from under you

- you haven't allocated enough memory to the VM

- you've just installed the VM and a Windows Update is going on behind your back and dragging things down

Opening the Task Manager and seeing what is choking the life out of your machine would be very helpful.

I agree with the parent poster that LTSC is generally pretty great if you've got to run Windows. For everything else, there is KDE :-)

edit: formatting

> Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need.

It's a purposeful mess in that regard. They know the control panel is unmanageable for the average user, so they've been building out the Settings app over the last few versions. The settings app is much more like the Settings in iOS and Android and purposefully laid out.

It makes perfect sense to have both those applications exists while the transition in progress.

They've been building out the Settings app for over 6 years.

Yep, it's getting better and better. For example, we can now change default sound devices - and apply monitor colour profiles - using the new settings.

Lots of work remains, but they're getting there step by step. E.g, there's no link to modify the colour profiles yet, but at least being able to quickly check and change from previously defined ones is a good little addition.

I hate how you can only have 1 instance of the settings app open, unlike the old control panel, really leaves people who wanna see multiple parts of the settings app no choice but to open the old control panel

This makes me very sad. Remember when you had to learn to program just to be able to load a game from a disc in the 80s-90s? People can't even be bothered to learn now a days. Is this part of the "instant gratification" societal aspect? Personally I found that everytime that they try to hide settings it just makes it harder for me to find things. For instance before the separation of the Control Panel, they made this Categories view. This is the worst of everything. The categories that they put the settings under rarely made sense and you can't just press a hotkey to jump to the known settings panel. I really really hate the category view! haha

The mess started with Windows 8. Up until Windows 7 the UI was stil usable, and the Start Menu was great.

I would genuinely be keen to have another go at linux on the desktop if it had a win3.1 or win95 shell.

Back to usable basics.

I wonder if this project is already out there... (Rather than try to start another side project)

I use this XFCE theme on my Raspberry Pi: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

It takes a bit of work to set up but once you do, it genuinely feels like you're using Windows 95 but with modern Linux apps.

This is true but users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once. I love high-density UI but I think the web and modern design has trended the way it has because focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed.

Now the prevailing trend is this Fischer-Price children's-toys minimalism, with bright shiny colors and cute mascots. It's insulting

> users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once ... focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed

Do you have any links to such studies/focus groups/articles on this? I'd be genuinely curious to read about them.

My experience there is more anecdotal, though over the life of my career one thing I am often measured on is the visual complexity of the UIs that I have made

My last job we brought in focus groups at times and that was exactly their feedback, for an embedded UI for the machine that we sold. It should be noted that that machine required about a week of operator training to use, which included interacting with our UI

I'm not sure screen density is a flaw in the Windows UX/UI style.

A lot of Windows programs have really cluttered, disorganized configuration menus and confusing workflows; PuTTY and ConEmu are two particularly egregious offenders. Seems more like a "developer lacking good design sense" issue, rather than something inherent to the Windows environment.

Interesting--I've never in my career actually seen a user study or focus group that concluded that users don't like dense UIs or lots of options. Not saying they don't exist--sounds like you experienced a group that found this. I've just never seen it myself.

What I see a lot is UI professionals and artists simply declaring that interfaces must be minimal and abstract and that visual complexity is bad. Whether this is just current fashionable dogma, or if there is actually research to support this, I have no idea, but none of the product decision makers I've worked with have ever asked for evidence.

People don't verbalise enthusiasm for lack of busy UI, but they tend to prefer simpler UIs especially if they are not expert users of a more complex UI. It just looks cleaner and less stressful. The choice is expressed through usage rather than studies.

It was something of a unique audience, as these folks were not computer literate and we were training them to be machine operators. On the professional software side of things the big dense UIs seem to be holding their own, so they must have some good :)

Ed Tufte makes the point in his lecture that the sports pages in the newspaper and the stock pages contain loads of many tiny detailed numerical statements. Newspapers are generally written for median intelligence people.

I wonder if we'll see a resurgence of "real work" ui for desktops and laptops now that most of the "everyone else"/"the mainstream" has shifted to mobile.

I sure hope so. This may be a contentious opinion, but I strongly think that the 'average non-technical user' that has driven so much of modern UI development (for better or for worse) is not representative of someone who should have input when it comes to tools used by professionals. Complex tasks usually benefit from deep, rich interfaces. Simpler ones may be easier to learn, but will always be restrictive once baseline competence has been reached.

Agreed. There's two things that seem to be a reoccurring theme in every redesign nowadays, lower contrast and more whitespace. One of the modern design trends I can't stand is buttons with icons and no labels, sometimes without mouse over text as well.

Buttons with no labels are certainly not a modern design trend. A lot of older (Windows, mostly) software had a complex interface consisting of a menubar, a toolbar (that sometimes had functionality not available elsewhere), and a space for "internal windows". The icons were usually 16x16 and it was really unclear what they were supposed to represent. At least mouseover text was reasonably common.

Most apps allowed you to customize toolbars, and displaying labels next to the icons was one of the options.

However, no conforming app should have had any functionality in the toolbar that was not available in the menu bar. This isn't to say that nobody ever did it, but the OS design guidelines were very clear on that point.

But at least mouseover tooltips were common. It’s downright rare to see tooltips nowadays, almost never on mobile apps especially.

I've long believed that Windows 98 is the pinnacle of desktop usability on many fronts, 2000 was the best NT in my view. The performance was spectacular, and it was rarely unclear how to accomplish something (unless it hadn't been thought of before the release of W98).

Added: I'd be interested in putting together a Wayland desktop environment around the strengths of Windows 98's interface designs (along with some modern discoveries about human interface, and at least whole number resolution scaling). I feel like there should be at least one well-maintained toolkit which doesn't attempt to support full CSS styling on widgets.

I use XFCE4 to imitate Win95/98.

Seconded.

On Unix, I also reached a similar point on SGI Indigo Magic Desktop.

When first tried Windows 10 while is still was in public beta I though "Oh they are still working on the design, things are still pretty crude and indistinguishable from each other". Then a little bit latter I realized it was the final design all along.

> - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.

New Start menu:

1. Click Windows key

2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run

3. Click <Enter>

That's 4 keystrokes, bound only by the time it takes the user to physically make the keypresses.

User doesn't need any knowledge of how programs are categorized, nor know a hierarchy of categories.

The process by which the system displays programs matching what the user is typing happens as fast as possible.

You can even speak to your damned computer and the start menu will probably react accordingly.

None of these actions require the user to even know they have a harddrive, or a system path, etc.

So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load.

Remind me: how does Windows 98 Start Menu compare to that?

discoverable

That's the problem. It was far easier to browse through what's available. You can't search for something you don't even know the name of, but you can certainly read through a list.

Even back then it was inconsistent.

Some things were in the start menu under a hierarchy of company name -> program name.

Others went just by the program name.

Some were (company name) (program name).

Some were just a start menu entry, not a folder.

But you could move them around as you pleased. I had Graphics, Audio, Video, Games, etc.

Indeed. The classic start menu was incredibly simple, it was just a menuized view of an actual folder hierarchy.

It is notable that you can create your own such menuized views by right-clicking on the taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar.

Oh, this brings memories, although it happens still. It was especially infuriating when a company name wasn't marketed as much as a program brand itself (which is fine by me) and you had to browse to endless meaninglessly named folders to find what you were looking for.

> You can't search for something you don't even know the name of

You can if those search results aren't limited to literal name matches, but also consider the intentions the user expresses with their search terms. Maybe associate a bunch of keywords with the result. Terms like "backup", "update" or "presentation" should lead to relevant applications/settings regardless of what they are actually called.

I very much like the search-to-open feature and it covers 98% of my uses, but every so often, the search doesn't seem to index everything or outright refuse to find things like calc. Or the start menu would take forever to open.

As someone else pointed out, the discoverability isn't as good, but I think this has more to do with the fact that the start menu items aren't just all neatly collected in one location on your disk and by the amount of space the new menu uses, like if I have to always scroll to find what I want, it already lost the race against a list that shows most if not all applications at once.

I agree that start menu search was great in Windows 7. However, it is totally broken in Windows 10. Results are unpredictable unless you finish typing out the complete and correct name of exactly what you're searching for. There are a bunch of things in the start menu that it just can't find at all. Worst of all, it's always trying to send me to Bing or the Windows Store. I just want to search the menu!

Or it updates after a few key presses, right before I hit enter and focuses on another result!

This happens entirely too often for me, and the other result that ends up being focused on is "<x> \n See web results".

I've never wanted to search for anything on the web from my start menu, and to make matters worse, it always performs the search using the IE/Edge browser and Bing as the search engine. To date, I've yet to see any way of customizing (or disabling) this behavior.

If I had a list of the "most annoying things my computer does", this would certainly be near the top.

It also sends your keystrokes outside, in order to get the "Search suggestions" as you type.

I have a firewall rule set up in Windows to disable outbound connections from Edge purely for this reason.

It’s bonkers how bad the Windows 10 start search is now. Even when I type in an app I use frequently, it tries to recommend a web search. I’ve given up and usually just use explorer to navigate program files and go to the app directly.

I long ago switched to Classic Start Menu (part of Classic Shell), and I love it. I have a hybrid of Win 98 and Win 7. Hit start, type the first few letters of the program, hit enter.

Launchy is really great as well.

> 2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run

Unless what you want to run is, for example, "Internet Explorer": "Inte" will auto-complete to nothing useful if you have a bunch of apps, "Interne" will auto-complete to Internet Explorer, but "Internet" will auto-complete to Edge. Not exactly convenient.

Besides: it's full of ads, and it takes bloody ages to find an application in a list where every item is touch-sized and which doesn't expand to fill your screen. The keyboard entry became necessary because the new structure is impossible to navigate visually (for bonus points, while this structure is supposed to be better for touch interfaces, that's precisely where it sucks even more, because "just type three letters of the program you want to run" isn't too convenient on touch-only devices).

There are environments which manage to get this surprisingly right, such as LXQT: you have a hierarchical menu which is easy to navigate, but if you're faster with keyboard-based search, you can do that as well.

Plus, you know, to us ol' Unix farts, not having to type stuff in order to launch a program is what progress is supposed to look like. If thirty years of UX research gave us the equivalent of bash and tab completion, we might as well go all the way and replace the start menu thingie with a terminal and call it a day.

Edit: also, I don't know what kind of super workstation hardware you're on, but I'd hardly call that thing "realtime-responsive" :-).

To be honest it worked much better in Vista/7, but still I find it more convenient to just press the meta key and type whatever I need or just use mouse because usually what I'm looking for is at Recently Added or Most Used section.

In the Linux world I think that Plasma nailed that feature.

I assume Win 10 start menu search adapts to what you click on, because start>i gives inkscape, in inkscape, int internet explorer

> Unless what you want to run is, for example, "Internet Explorer": "Inte" will auto-complete to nothing useful if you have a bunch of apps, "Interne" will auto-complete to Internet Explorer, but "Internet" will auto-complete to Edge. Not exactly convenient.

I realize this may not be very intuitive for most people, but in the case of Internet Explorer I would instincitively just type "ie" because I know the name of the executable.

I used WIN+R nameofexe since 1995 at least. So not so much progress in 20 year

Because half the time it finds and launches the install executable

"int" does autocomplete to "Internet Explorer" here.

> Besides: it's full of ads

You can turn all of these off, with a combination of registry/GP fixes. Granted, they should be off by default, especially on Professional/Enterprise, but at least you can do it. - https://superuser.com/a/1348759/100543

I'd say this backs up the original point, because searching is what you do now instead of using the start menu. The huge alphabetical list of programs plus different-sized icons that make up the "menu" part of the start menu now is not so great.

I get differing results for the same input depending on how sleepy I am and how loaded the machine is. It's utterly useless for me.

I never understood how it is even possible to have the search through the start menu hierarchy lag so much. What is going on there? Modern Wimdows keeps the menu contents cached in a file and keeping the tree of labels cached in memory wouldn't be a huge deal, either - probably around 10kB for just about any realistic system.

It's ridiculous how it fails to perform its one job, in such a spectacular way.

It takes several seconds for the results to load - I know performance may degrade in a VM, but come on! Searching through a list of strings is an interview question.

Not only that, all the key-presses of "Update" show the Java update program.. only when I add the final "S" it will show "Check for updates" system applet.

And with the amount of cpu/memory SearchIndexer.exe consumes, it's not even a bad joke.

>So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load.

Discoverability is, to me at least, a nightmare on most modern operating system, mobile included. I don't think it was much better on older operating system, but at least they had a manual and less stuff to worry about.

> Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here)

This is one reason why, on Linux, I prefer KDE/Qt applications above all others.

Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding, and the widgets just look huge, regardless of what GTK theme you're using. Qt, on the other hand, has a number of theme engines with small, tight widgets.

Personally, I'm a huge fan of QtCurve. You can customize it exactly how you want it, and it's a godsend. I just wish the GTK devs didn't torpedo the possibility of making a GTK3 version available.

For some examples, I opened up a KWrite window and took a couple screenshots of the main UI and the settings dialog: https://imgur.com/a/bx1dk8h

Heh. I think something like the GTK3 application-managed header bar is actually the best compromise if touch-first interaction is going to become important. I mean, even Windows 10 now has huge titlebars in order to support the touch case, and that's surely no better than what GNOME/GTK does.

>Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding

Get the Tenebris theme.

There were some things that Windows 98 did better than the UIs of today, but overall I just don't agree that it was "excellent". I definitely wouldn't want to go back to it, and here are a few reasons why:

- Even purely from a UI perspective, I much prefer modern Chrome's flat and minimal UI over Internet Explorer 4, and I think most other people do too. At the time, Microsoft claimed that IE4 was an integral part of Windows 98, so I'm going to consider it as part of the Windows UI rather than just a standalone app :)

- The taskbar doesn't scale very well, and once you get more than a dozen or so windows, each entry with the same icon becomes indistinguishable. This was particularly bad because browsers at the time didn't have tabs. As I type this, I have 14 tabs open in various browser windows, and this just wouldn't have fit in a Windows 98 style taskbar. Note that I consider the non-tabbed single document interface ("SDI") to be an integral part of the Windows UI here. Both SDI and MDI (multi-document interface) were part of Microsoft's UI guides, and MDI was even worse than SDI.

- The Start menu also doesn't scale very well, and could get very deep, which confused users. It lacked a search function like Windows 10, Mac (via Spotlight) and most Linux DEs today have.

- No support for virtual desktops, which Windows 10, Mac and Linux DEs today all have.

- Network Neighborhood was slow af, and was confusing for users to configure. Apple's AirDrop has a much better UI for sharing files on a network.

- Active Desktop.

- At the time, Microsoft was experimenting with integrating the web with Windows, and one of the things they did was put hyperlinks all over the place. They even experimented with changing it so that desktop icons and icons in Windows Explorer were links, and this caused a lot of confusion due to the inconsistency between a single-click vs double-click.

Some of the problems here are that we have much more computing power now, and (at least I) tend to keep more things open at a time. There were also numerous Internet UIs that Microsoft was experimenting with at the time (NN, AD, MSN, etc.) and many of them didn't work out.

They also worked with what they had. Limited by 640x480, 16 or 256 colors, they weren’t wasting cpu time and memory on alpha blending a menu so it fades in...

At least when they started doing animated menus and such you could still turn those features off.

You could still get that with the Windows Classic theme up until Windows 8 when they took it out. I'm not sure what I'll do when Windows 7 support ends next year all the new windows interfaces have been horrendous.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows.

- Start menu was crap without search. Search, and being able to just start typing, is extremely important for day-to-day usability.

- The toolbars of many applications used to contain far too many buttons that almost nobody ever clicked on.

- I consider the taskbar in Windows 7+ to be the best way to handle multitasking and switching between applications (including the previews on hover, the wheel click for new window or closing an existing one - just like browser tabs work, etc.). No other OS/environment even comes close in this regard.

Not to mention, the operating system was just a product that you bought. Instead of a “free” “upgrade” that get foisted on you to monetize your personal data.

at the risk of a useless comment, +1.

windows 98 may have been the height of desktop UI.

the windows file dialog is still, puzzlingly, the very best out there. no idea why other platforms are so resistant to copying it.

The widgets are great for a resolution of 1024x768 or so but I think larger ones are better for today’s displays eh 27” 2560x1400

2x scale still looks very good.

That's what UI scaling is for.

And speed.

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