Windows 95 UI Design
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It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels were smoothed. Tasteful gradients and transparency replaced harsh outlines. Explanatory text was tucked away. Manuals became brochures, then a lonely slip of paper with a URL. Maybe a QR code.
Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. There are no extraneous details. Indeed, there are no details. I caress my phone's surface gently, hoping to see a sliver of its rapturous visage peel back, hinting that I have found the first step in the puzzle box of its interaction model.
Alas, no dice. Maybe I can hunt down a how-to video... to show me how to hunt down a video...
I grew up in CGI land, basically high end CGI programs were what the latest web app is. Reactive redrawing of free form geometries. I wanted this to be mainstream so bad. I got old and it became slightly true. Not keeping aside the drift of website content and pop overs.. something hit me. My brain doesn't want real time and free floating. I want abstraction, solid, and patient. It even contradicts my love for lisp repls (another form of low latency feedback). I look at 90s desktop GUIs with a bit more love and appreciation. They were limited just enough, the limitation forced abstraction and organization. And most of the time it was just right (you could remove spooky side effects, and add a bit of genericity it wouldn't hurt).
I know a few twenty-somethings who are still falling for shiny stuff. I don't think that's going away, but I do think the overall culture will come to realize that it's junk food computing.
Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a living.
Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious.
I just wish Apple et al. didn't force these choices on us, that we could disable silliness like force touch and hidden toolbars. But alas one cannot.
The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore.
My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.
Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.
See: right click.
I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.
So every Mac menu conceivably had (has?) 7 sets of contents, 6 of which are essentially secret. Idiotic.
edit: with my post I in no way wanted to indicate that Apple's UI is the pinnacle of design - just that they IMO made the right choice at first by avoiding context menus, or at least keep them optional.
If you really need it, you will discover it. Otherwise, you can still go to the trash and really delete the file from there. It's safer than having the really delete item by default, and it's there if you need it.
Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.
I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...
Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.
¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...
Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.
That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.
At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.
Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.
The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.
A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.
I think it's quite a myth that Jobs knew good design. Jobs had a fetish for minimalism. For simple, single use, UIs that's often a good choice. I think that's what made iPods and the first generations of iPhones so well designed. But as smartphones have transitioned into being primary use devices with greater abilities, hidden UIs and extreme minimalism because a worse choice.
On mobile, and particularly on screens the size of the original iPhone, hiding the scrollbar is a necessary tradeoff for screen real-estate. It also doesn't necessarily hurt usability if you know the exact screen size you're designing for, and can ensure elements are never fully cut off on your initial view.
How would you propose doing that on a 3.5" screen without a mouse or stylus?
> Nor can you use it as an instant reference to determine how long the document is.
You scroll the screen a tiny bit and the scrollbar pops up. Again, keep the size of the screen in mind—making the scrollbar persistent would be a poor use of space.
I know it’s still there - that’s why I said “instant”. It’s a very minor concern, I’ll grant you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouse_button#Number_of_buttons
I know why Apple got rid of force touch - BOM cost. Not that I condone the concept of Force Touch, but some wizbang designer pitched to the management that hey "We could solve this using just the UI with long press, and save $$$ in LCD costs to put a force sensitive layer". That's exactly how this happened.
Edit: Just checked on iPhone 11 Pro - yup, just long touch an icon to popup a contextual menu which used to require pressing with force.
I'm glad Apple was able to swallow their pride and drop their "breakthrough innovative pressure sensitive screen" - reducing BOM costs was the icing on the cake, although it seems like they have just replaced that space with more battery so I wouldn't be surprised if the BOM difference was negligible in the end.
I suspect it was also a disaster for older people. The delicate touch just seems to go away at some point. My mom for example can't do a half-press-to-focus on a camera. She just doesn't feel the extra step. I've seen older people doing force-touch gesture by accident and get confused why it happens.
I think you’re correct that cost was a factor, but more likely that the marginally utility of force touch over long-press wasn’t worth the trade-off. (Both gestures have to be learned, but force touch is faster once learned. But probably not enough people used it to justify the extra layer of technology.)
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/05/29/3d-touch-2019-i...
Apparently, the Austin 7 popularized what are now standard controls for cars in 1922 (although it wasn't the very first example), and the IC auto was patented in 1886, which means it was about 36 years before people mostly settled on one interface.
By comparison, microcomputers have been around longer, but if you consider the GUI personal computer as a separate class, the Apple Lisa came out in 1983, which was...36 years ago! But it doesn't seem like we are converging to one standard.
Without exception, laptops are two panels connected by a hinge, with the top containing a screen and the bottom a keyboard and trackpad. The “desktop” metaphor is universal — draggable, tilable windows adorn a hierarchical filesystem.
Basically all modern phones are rectangles dedicated entirely to their screens, with which you interact using your fingers. Turn them on and you get a grid of app icons, each of which takes up the full screen when launched.
Sure, there’s a lot more variation on top of these foundations — but then, computers are way more complex than cars.
Then there is the which side of the road do you drive thing ...
BMW has R in the top left, while Fiat has it where BMW put 6th.
Right hand - throttle and front brake
Left hand - clutch
Right foot - rear brake
Left foot - gear shifter
You have to use the clutch and gear shifter together, and you have to have at least one foot down when you stop. This layout makes a lot of sense.
Back in the day you had things like suicide shifters: you shift gears with your left hand and the clutch is at the left foot meaning that you have to take your hand off the handlebars to shift gears (hence “suicide shifter”), and as you come to a stop you have no foot to put down since you should be using bother the clutch and the rear brake. And that’s just one of many examples of weird layouts. Basically imagine driving a manual car where the gears are shifter with your left foot, the brake is hand operated and the clutch is a part of the steering wheel.
However, I think the last major difference in the basic controls of a car was automatic vs. traditional manual, and that seems to be resolving.
I can imagine things that nobody seems to be doing - like what if you have a CVT, but manual control of the gear ratio through a lever with no detents?
... I didn’t know there’s a button bar there until just now, and I tend to think that I know what I’m doing. I’ve always scrolled all the way back to the top of the page to get to that bar. I genuinely wonder what else I’ve missed now.
until you get a blue screen of death...
Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.
(Sarcasm: someone can make a thousand word blog post about it and it can be voted to the top.)
That said I am firmly in the "we lost something between 95 and here" camp for now.
And to while it does explain why pads are different it doesn't explain why we needed to mess up the desktop in the process.
That's probably what we learned from the iPhone.
The degree of complexity that can be adequately conveyed graphically on a single screen though is fairly constant.
She has +25 years of experience in using computing devices now, and computers are hundreds of times more powerful, of course things are easier for her
My grandma worked on typewriters, and then word processors in the 70s/80s. She had no problem doing her job.
She’d been using a Windows laptop since the mid/late 2000’s, and it’s always been a huge struggle for her. She’d frequently enable/disable features without noticing, etc.
Her tablet has been, as they say, like a glass of iced water in hell. She is far from a power user, but there is not a single thing she did on her laptop that she cannot do on her tablet.
TBF tablets do a fraction of what regular computers do.
I find it hard to believe that she finds hard to do the things she does on her tablet on her the laptop.
Like, for example, working with excel file (spreadheets in general) on a tablet is excruciatingly hard, while I've seen literal computer illiterates fly on their keyboards
That's the only explanation I can find for the whitespace ridden desktop and phone interfaces that plague us today.
Considering the trend maybe that isn't too unexpected, and I'm also worried that when I get old I'll feel left out and abandoned by this growing tend towards oversimplification
The original Macintosh (and Windows before 95) were built for people who were more or less familiar with computers already BUT who didn't know so much about the mouse, etc. (And even if the Mac might have been "easier to use" people wouldn't just jump into an expensive machine without knowing what they would be getting). Hence they would "handhold" more. Even the 1st iPhone was more user friendly (design wise) than the newer ones.
Now kids know how to swipe "intuitively" and design will seem less obvious (for people unaccustomed with it) with time.
Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.
Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated.
I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and found the clickable areas at least visually pleasant, if a bit hidden. Windows 10 is undiscoverable AND ugly.
To me Windows XP’s look & feel was among the best. Except for the fat Window title bar.
Windows 95 was extremely polished and well done.
Windows XP was a response to PCs becoming mainstream and figuring what the everyman wanted was more flair and fashion.
Windows 7 was a response to desktop Linux (Compiz et al.) capturing people's imaginations.
Windows 8 was a response to iOS while trying to avoid Apple's skeuomorphism patents (fortunately).
Windows 10 was realizing that none of that really mattered, they already have all the users anyway, so they just need long-term UI stability now.
Thankfully Microsoft showed restraint. Windows Vista got a GPU accelerated 3D workspace but the only real showcase for it was the very gimmicky and useless win+tab feature.
For me the savior of Linux is the niche tiling window managers.
That's not exactly what the ellipsis is intended to communicate.
Have you ever wondered why File/Open... has the ellipsis, but in a properly designed app, Help/About does not have it? Even though Help/About opens a dialog too?
The distinction is that the ellipsis indicates that a command will take some action after further user input. The user input may be anything like text entry, selecting from a list, or just a Yes/No or OK/Cancel confirmation. But the key point is that the command will do something after that user input (unless the user cancels).
An About box should not take any action or cause any change to the state of your document or system. It's just information displayed that the user can dismiss with the OK button or close icon. So it doesn't get the ellipsis.
http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf
Search for "ellipsis" or go to pages 91-95 of the PDF (labeled as pages 67-71), in particular:
> The ellipsis character doesn’t simply mean that a dialog box or window will appear. For example in the Finder File menu, the Get Info command doesn’t have an ellipsis character and shouldn’t. When you select a Finder object and choose Get Info, a window appears displaying information about the object. The window appearing simply completes the command. The command doesn’t require additional input from the user before it executes.
Also in the Windows 95 Interface Guidelines (PDF):
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M...
Again search for "ellipsis" or go to page 109 of the PDF (labeled along with several other pages as page 143):
> If you provide access to copyright and version information for your application, include an About application name command on this menu. When the user chooses this command, display a window containing the application's name, version number, copyright information, and any other informational properties related to the application. Display this information in a dialog box or alternatively as a copyright page of the property sheet of the application's main executable (.EXE) file. Do not use an ellipsis at the end of this command because the resulting window does not require the user to provide any further parameters.
"Don’t use an ellipsis character if the command displays an alert box to warn the user of a potentially dangerous action, especially if the command displays an alert box only sometimes. In this case you are simply giving the user an opportunity to cancel a potentially dangerous action (such as causing a loss of data), not asking for more information."
Empty Trash… [shift][cmd][del]
Empty Trash [opt][shift][cmd][del]So the ellipsis is only when the user must actually enter or select some information, not if it's just a simple confirmation.
The Windows 95 guidelines seem a bit less clear about this, but I think they follow the same idea.
Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif
I remember when CTL3D.dll was all the rage.
Good times.
To think we used to worry about VB programs needing a separate runtime to distribute them and Delphi programs, while stand-alone, took up almost 200KB for a minimal app!
Kids nowadays have it so easy with their Electrons and QTs...
[I worked on parts of the Win95 UI although George Pitt I think did most of the work on the Taskbar itself]
b) The Windows 95 UI looks nothing like NextStep (or SGI IRIX and the other X Windows UIs of the time) to my eyes. In particular, they made a distinct move away from the drab grey look of all Unix UIs, which was a really welcome splash of color. I still find that grey look reminding me of my days in the Unix lab at college, and I find it hard to relate to the enthusiasm of Apple fans for the boring grey look of macOs, which is clearly a '70s Unix look!
Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating.
I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and HTML/JS. First, it used around 4.1Gb of memory. The interface was not responsive and then it crushed.
I'm using a 16Gb/i7 2018 MacBook Pro and there is lags for most of the buttons in the Finder application.
This was important enough back then that some of the UI was implemented in kernel mode on NT-class operating systems, specifically in order to preserve that responsiveness. AIUI, Win9x did not have a complete user-mode/supervisor-mode distinction, but the UI code was written on a very low level and tightly coupled with the OS itself, for similar reasons.
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...
For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument:
https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors
Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network.
(That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)
The ultimate state of perfect security for a system is a dead rock. Everything that's interesting and useful can only happen in the state of some lack of security.
The whole point is that application developers don't even have to care about it if they do things right, by using the OS's UI controls they will automatically be drawn with whatever colour the user has set.
You could tell the ones who didn't know what they were doing by the invisible text littering their UIs under some color schemes. This continued into the Web era. There were tons of defective sites that overrode your system background color with a hard-coded white background, but didn't bother setting the text color to black.
The result was invisible text on any system with a "dark" (non-inverse) color scheme. DUHHHH
There are probably still millions of such sites today, but now UIs are so gimped that they hide the defect.
But the file dialogs have black text. You can hardly read anything
https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...
The constant push with SAAS and cloud-based data and all the rest, just makes me think we're heading back towards a terminal/mainframe environment and soon we'll be "consuming" the Internet in the same way we consume interactive Cable TV.
They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken.
One of my main passions in theming is making your entire system look cohesively styled. Hell, I’d rather have standard Windows look but every program using the system UI so at least it all looks the same. I despise Spotify, Discord, and all Electron apps for this reason. They look so amateurish.
On the bright side, with native Linux you can customize everything. It's so fun to customize your window manager, status bar, etc. and have everything look and work exactly how you want.
Unfortunately, this does not give the ability to do system-wide restyling of the kind _trampeltier mentioned. Despite professions to the contrary, almost nothing whatsoever on the web is in any way semantic. Each website is its own assortment of CSS hacks hooked up to a tree of randomly nested, randomly named divs. You can't just write one style that says "please stop with the whitespace around media boxes", you have to unbreak each site individually, because a "media box" isn't really a website-independent thing, and neither is a button.
FWIW, I still recommend installing Stylus instead of Stylish - the difference is that at some point, Stylish changed owner and acquired analytics; Stylus is a fork that's free of privacy-invading antifeatures.
It is just what I needed.
Under Windows I created and used a "dark" theme in 1991, nearly identical to what the canned Mac OS "dark" one is today. Used it well into the 2000s.
Microsoft REMOVED that capability in what, Vista? And now that everyone has finally realized how stupid inverse color schemes are, the color-scheme editor is totally gone from Windows. It was in there for a decade and a half or more.
They also removed the "blue background, white text" option from Word, just a couple years ago.
Windows is an execrable mess now.
Apple, which forced an inverse color scheme on its users for 30+ years, has at least granted them some relief. But it's still pathetic to hobble a OS's UI with hard-coded color schemes.
also white text on blue- ouch.
It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.
The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.
So were toolbars in Microsoft Office were similarly dynamic.
They also were primarily shortcuts as everything could be reached using the menus anyway.
Ribbon contains everything that is available in the menus, and is collapsible. Ribbon also supports keyboard accelerators
They also aren't predictable.
Do you have examples of other apps with dynamic toolbars that work better?
The big difference is fewer clicks to do what you most often do (with ribbons). The cost is using more space and possibly cluttering the UI. You can also argue easier discoverability, but I'd guess that's up for debate (seems to for my old parents, but that's a quite small sample size).
It’s been around for 11 or 12 years and as recently as 2-3 years ago I was still helping friends out with it. The only reason I was ever able to figure out how to find what they were looking for is that I had what was essentially the trivia knowledge of what the Ribbon was meant to be good at rattling around in my head from reading about it years ago and what was left of my experience with the internal hierarchy of the apps from the late 90s. More often than not, it was some thing I knew used to be a menu item.
Menus and toolbars are a bit easier to figure out without prior knowledge, but where’s the fun in sticking with what is known to work well when you can reinvent the wheel and declare it to be a better wheel because it is newer and therefore must be better. Because it is newer.
If you're a repeat user, icons start becoming easier to find than text, and the inconsistent grid starts having a geographic element that helps with muscle memory. For a new user, I reckon menus are easier, especially if combined with status bar help text (remember that?).
Yes - you've just made me aware of how and why scanning a ribbon always felt somehow more physically exerting to me, the 'manual work' of dragging my eyeballs around and about, instead of in a straight line.
Plus with buttons of different sizes, you have to 'zoom' your attention in and out to catch them all; while the harder I try to find something, the more I naturally tend to lean forward and crane into the small details, and miss the wood for the trees.
Not on the Mac though. But Macs also don’t have alt shortcuts in menus.
1. Switch to Home pane. 2. Click the tiny icon at the bottom right corner of the styles section. It will open the "Styles" palette. The icon is unlabeled, of course. 3. At the bottom of the "Styles" palette there are three icons. One of them opens "Style Inspector" palette. It's hard to tell which one until you hover it to read the tooltip as they're pretty similar. 4. At the bottom of the "Style Inspector" we have two more icons. Again, hover over them to see which one opens the "Reveal Formatting" palette. 5. There you are. I don't know if there's a shorter route.
A good menu would be much more discoverable.
(Shift+F1 opens the 'reveal formatting' pane. I think it's tucked away on purpose, as a 'wrong' way to do things in modern Word)
These things often exist now or have an analog (e.g. long press is right-click in mobile UI), but not everywhere and not always done the same way. Mobile has some inconsistency; the Web has a good bit.
The modern has plenty of its own UI/UX things--URLs and the Back button for the win, dev tools/view source are awesome, and certain cool things can come from services not living entirely on your device. Something like hiding clutter at the cost of discoverability is a win for many people.
Still think it's interesting to compare and think about what can be usefully brought forward from the past.
Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu?
Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility.
Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.
because HTML was never designed to be a application interface, and I don't see a menu-bar nor dropdown as necessary for a document display.
What's needed for the web is a common and standarized (i.e., browser provided) library for application UI that's distinct from the existing HTML markup. They should not mix, and if you have a document (rather than a web-app), you use HTML, but if you intend to write an application UI, you would use that library.
I forsee something like WASM compiled QT or some such to be the beginnings of such an api.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Archive/Mozilla/XUL...
I think WASM will bring "Flash" back, just in a different form, and now everyone will be happy because it is standard.
WASM can be sandboxed properly, unlike flash.
The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.
- expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately
- remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz
VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!)
VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.
Agree about the experience being unmatched. Compare it to Android Studio which is supposed to be the modern flagship from the competition, even 15 year old versions of Visual Studio provides much smoother RAD experience. No matter how good code editing in IntelliJ is, everything around it with gradle slowness and app relaunches just makes you look back and wonder what happened to technological progress.
I know a bunch of people who started doing web stuff with the rise of Flash.
- Very few use the desktop as their primary computer interface now compared to back then.
- We keep abstracting. The web browser has almost entirely abstracted away the OS. You run Windows 7, or OS X? Who cares, just log into this web page and do your thing there.
* The web solved the software distribution problem. There were some pretty good tools for building GUI apps in the 90s but the tools for getting software to the customer sucked. Complex installers, no autoupdates, "DLL hell" incompatibilities.
* There never really were any great tools for building cross-platform GUIs. You built for Windows on x86, that was it. Widgets were shipped as binary COM components. Now you need to be on multiple OSes, multiple hardware architectures, and multiple form factors. VB wasn't going to give you that.
* Formatting text sucked. Actually, formatting in general sucked - the RAD GUI builders built awesome fixed-size dialogs, but now screens vary from watch-sized to wall-sized. Embedded HTML components really made layout easier... and once you start putting things in HTML, it tends to take over.
* All those pretty 3d effects in Win 95 UIs? Those were a bitch to get right. Hours of trial and error drawing extra lines of black and white and grey pixels. It looked good but it was a lot of effort that would have been better spent building real features.
Except that never actually works, for anything but the lowest common denominator trash apps. Unfortunately people are convinced that this is something that should be pursued; the only real result is lowering the bar across the board and eroding compliance with long-established platform UX guidelines.
Even before all this happened I remember articles about software companies yearning/pleading for subscription revenue, but customers were not interested. The web allowed them to turn the tables on expectations.
A few advancements, such as excellent UI consistency were left behind though.
Also deliver binary executables has a huge attack surface of virus. Web is considered "safer"
I have the feeling this is the main reason, yes.
C#/VB with WinForms was the successor to VB6 and doesn’t sacrifice much in terms of development speed but added a lot of modern conveniences (high dpi etc..) that would have cost too much to add to VB6.
Perhaps better examples of things that were difficult to shoehorn into VB6 apps but first class in WinForms: multithreading, x64, Unicode.
The problem is: it sells.
Customer wants a website, designer makes a peace of art, customer thinks it looks amazing, contracts are signed.
The the trouble starts when it is getting build.
Real texts are much longer than designed, the available pictures don't fit as good as the hand picked stock pictures, and the interaction.. well it all looked great on paper.
I believe it's dumb to get contracts this way because the project always delays because the client doesn't get what works.
It's better to sell customers a moodboard and then design interaction as the project moves along.
Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018)
https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
One thing that has been a staple since win95 days is the ability to resize windows, sidebars, columns; almost everything, really. Rarely is this found on the web today, or so poorly implemented that it’s thrashing the UI thread when one or more resize callbacks are triggered. Even without that, layout + painting alone would probably lose the race against 95 UI tech.
Another “legacy” UI that stood out to me is blender. It looks decades old (until it was revamped recently), is probably a hodgepodge of C/C++ but stays smooth as everything can be resized even on dated hardware.
I can’t help but think that the UI engineers of old were a much more professional bunch, and that the field has mostly regressed since then.
This is not always good for UX, but new and different GUI's are an inevitable progression from homogeneous ecosystems like; Windows 95, Bootstrap, Material...
People just want to be different from the standard
The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul.
The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a modern OS. Nothing is obvious. Multitasking and copy/paste on iPad is befuddling to even the smartest and most technical people I know.
UI design that was perfected 30+ years ago has been completely shelved and lost by designers who are designing for other designers and their portfolios, rather than for users.
Interestingly, that was right around the time Apple's original interaction designer left the company.
And a simple virtual desktop implementation I used constantly.
How about fun, common sense widgets?
Scalable, vector desktop icons...
And a CD player featuring, "Save Track As..."
:D
I first used System 7 after having used DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 and a bit of SunOS. With that background, I found System 7 and the silly hardware limitations to be anything but intuitive.
To this day I find it annoying to have to go all the way to to top of the monitor to get to a menu. Arguably that was less of a pain on the tiny screen of a Mac SE, but becomes real where than one app is open in a way that the windowed app feature is used in a meaningful way.
An example of silly hardware limitations includes substituting an eject button on the floppy drive for dragging it to the trash. The same action used to delete files or folders is used to regain possession of my precious files.
The single button on a mouse to make it simple sounds nice, but then there are modifiers using command - giving the same functionality a windows user would expect from a right click.
1000x this. I remember using a Mac for the first time at school (1997-ish). I needed to put a file on a floppy, which was similar enough to Windows 95 up to ejecting the floppy. I ran my finger over the drive area and asked someone (a teacher, maybe), who said 'drag the floppy to the trash'. 'I want to eject it, not delete it!' I did it anyway (if it got deleted, just copy it again), and was surprised that it worked. I made another mental note that PCs were superior with their physical eject buttons, as I realized that a Mac could eat a floppy (like a stereo eating a cassette tape) if the drive (or OS or mouse) failed.
As others have said, targeting multiple resolutions and dpis, and supporting reactive/resizable canvases, has driven most of those guidelines to the curb. A different era.
All of this is pretty natural - so long as you design native desktop software using native controls.
I don’t want heavy borders to show that something can be resized (just show me a different cursor when I hover), or column titles styled like buttons, or an always-visible scrollbar (I rarely need to know a “vague” measurement of files in a folder). To me, this just makes an interface more confusing.
Although I’ve been spoiled by Mac over the last few years, so maybe this argument is more about Windows.
Can't believe I never noticed this.
And that’s before even considering how incredibly wasteful it is with space. I hate myself and wonder where my life went wrong every time I have to open a Settings window on a device that doesn’t have full HD or higher, because it usually results in copious amounts of scrolling for information that could be easily displayed in 1/4th of the space. Hell, and you can forget about using it non-maximized, because then the “advanced” links on the right side disappear to wherever, because fuck showing you what you need at a glance.
And they keep changing how you reach the actually sane, usable and functional Control Panel windows (like the sound devices settings) and alternate between making it easier and ridiculously obtuse. It makes me want to bash my head against things really, really hard.
At the same time, for all of its fashions and foibles, the one-app-a-time, direct-manipulating touchscreen UI has made computers more accessible to all sorts of people to whom 'the desktop metaphor' was and remains confusing and unintuitive.
Will even make phone calls when they get hold of a phone. The right phone calls.
It is an advance.
Guarantee they'd be cruising the fuck out of Win98, as well.
Environment is everything.
Still, it is an advance. More work overall remains to reach more optimal for more people more of the time.
That problem is applying the right UX to more people more of the time. That costs more than just doing one size fits all, and we should be paying those costs more, in my view.
I did that with Android. Have to be honest. I can fly on a reasonable Android phone. Apple, not so much. Didn't want to make two investments.
Content create, communications, programming, social media, all aren't a burden today. Function set is limited, but it's not as big of a deal as it was prior to really working the UX, just like many of us did with the other paradigms. And I often just do not need a deeper set of features / flows too.
Not saying it's better. It's not in my view. But, I am also saying, users can do better with it than they may think.
Part of the problem is the "winner takes all" dynamic of the computing sector. I'd be fine with simplified interface for children and elderly existing side by side with a properly deep interface for adults in full capacity. But currently, the market can only sustain one of these - and it chooses the one that can support more users, despite the total loss of utility this causes.
Porting an example I use in topics about accessibility: consider Braille. Everyone can learn to read Braille, but blind people can't learn to read regular, printed characters. But we don't try to replace print with Braille, because it would be ridiculously debilitating to the vast majority of the planet's population. We instead opt to run two interfaces side by side - we print both regular and Braille books.
I wrote to tell you that Control Panel itself still exists. You can get to it from using the hidden search in Start Menu. Open Start and begin typing Control Panel and it will show up eventually. Or you can right-click on Start button and select it. Or even type “control panel” in command prompt or powershell, without quotes. Apparently it shows up in File Explorer under Desktop as well, which makes the least sense of all to my intuition. Hope that helps.
Apparently, searching for sound now lists the old panel too, so at least there's that.
Since Win8, I've found that right-clicking the Start button gives you an actual menu of useful things instead of the ad-riddled abomination that they've decided to put in its place.
Sort of related: MS has done something that stopped my DVD function from working. My drive plays CDs, but it won't recognize DVDs. I uninstalled the latest update, but that hasn't fixed it. I've searched and found this problem has existed and been reported for years now, as though it's a continual effort to prevent DVDs from working on all Windows machines over time. There are a multitude of 'fixes' that have worked for some and not for others, because there are many different ways to create the same problem. It strikes me as Microsoft's attempt to steer people away from "legacy" hardware (my new laptop wasn't even offered an option for a DVD drive) and toward the cloud. Well, I paid a lot of money for my DVDs and I don't have the money lying around to purchase the entertainment that I already purchased just because Microsoft has seen fit to break a product that I paid for. I've already wasted hours of time trying to fix it and I'm resentful of these people who have no respect for their customers.
The design was very nice, but a bit over complicated. Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. The open dialog is a good example. Drop down elements, lists, directory list, label for selected directory. Later iterations fixed this and nowadays apps try to avoid selecting files altogether if possible. Overall, design has improved a lot since then, maybe except for the touch additions.
There is still a lot of unrealized potential in that area.
Do you want to be implicated in a child porn ring, and have the evidence sitting right on your computer?
Less cheekily, I recall joy of not needing to look to the bottom for more commands and tabs.
First encounter with that paradigm was iTunes. It took me a week to realize that half the functionality was in the nether reaches of the screen. I felt I was the butt of some joke.
P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can also see, even if I do not appreciate the road taken specifically, why this wasn't sustainable with high resolution displays.
They looked "heavy" on pixelated, low-res flat screens (lacking the natural Gaussian blur that a CRT gives you) but it's not like there was an alternative back then. OTOH nowadays, with resolutions, DPIs etc. varying so much, pixel perfect design is not the sensible choice that it was back then.
Flat design is just a bad choice, though. You can have softened bevels/3d effects in a modern design such as Adwaita in GNOME/Linux, and that looks quite good - perhaps the best feasible iteration on a Windows 95-like design, all things considered.
> Flat design is just a bad choice, though. You can have softened bevels/3d effects in a modern design (…)
I agree. However, I can see why we ended where we are now. Also, it's cheap (as compared to having to maintain various resources and various color definitions for various resolutions) …