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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

Common opinion agrees that windows 95 was the culmination of good UI. We've been down hill since then.

Windows 2000 is, I think, windows 95 refined, and really the peak (although some may prefer XP in classic mode).

If you tried hard, you could see bits and pieces of 3.1 interface in 95, but it was because you were running a fpga tool with an ancient file dialog, or you went out of your way to run progman, or an old installer launched progman for some reason (I think that sometimes happened, but could be misremembering 25 years ago). As opposed to newer windows where they change things, but not everything.

I think 95 was the last time Microsoft did user research to figure out how to make UI that is appealing and useful. At least, it was the last time they published anything about it. Newer stuff may be more appealing, but seems to make things require more clicks or wait to load more often, meaning it takes users longer to do tasks, and is less useful.

Things like the Office ribbon were a product of Microsoft user research, I just have no idea how they reached the conclusions they did with it (and I've watched a presentation by one of the lead designers on their reasoning - which all sounds valid, but doesn't explain how they specifically reached "the ribbon" and "personalized menus moving all over the place" as a solution).

I have a suspicion that the rise of the "user experience" engineer as opposed to UI designers played a big role - they got a bunch of people, did a bunch of research, and managed to narrow their focus to "so the first time a user ever opens Word, having somehow never used anything like it previously..." and ignored "our entire company is powered by enterprise sales of this product".

The ribbon get a lot of flack but personally I love the ribbon. I fell in love with it the first time I used it, so much better than navigating through classic menus. The implementation of it is excellent in Office. Other applications have tried implementing the same thing but they don't get it as right as Office does. Many seem to think the ribbon is how you control the program, but that's not really the point of the ribbon: the ribbon is dependent on the context, it supplies you with the tools that are available for whatever part of the work piece you have in front of you.

> the ribbon is dependent on the context

Is it? That would explain why I find it confusing and moving buttons around randomly.

Yes, that is one of the tenets of the ribbon. For example in Word, it makes no sense to show you options to style a table if your cursor is not inside a table.

Here's my theory, having never worked there but having seen how sausages get made in a hierarchical company. A "VIP" designer in Microsoft invented the ribbon out of some creative inspiration or chemically induced fever dream. In order to justify developing it, user research had to be conducted. Since the designer was a very high ranking person, the research obviously could only have one conclusion: the ribbon is good and should be implemented. And so data was found that showed the ribbon was good, and data that showed otherwise was discarded, and like that, we got the ribbon!

Whatever the reasoning behind the ribbon, I still associate the era the ribbon was introduced with 16:9 displays becoming common, starting with laptops. In that case, users would have had less vertical screen real-estate for developers to work with. If you remember the old Office, the menus were nested fairly deeply and it became a bit of a maze to use some of the features.

I had been using computers for so long at that point that I still don't feel 100% comfortable with the ribbon. It's fine, I can do what I need to do to work the programs. It's just a bit fiddly in a way the standard menus weren't. I used to be able to invoke commands with keystrokes and arrow keys. Now there's are bunch of icons on different scales, which sometimes hide if the window isn't maximized.

Where it kicks me is the loss of real estate for toolbar buttons.

Pre-ribbon (and currently in LibreOffice which is what I now use), I could keep File control, Fonts and Styles, Reviewing and Drawing all on the one screen.

Post-ribbon...this is literally impossible.

The worst is going back to mac versions of office after you have finally gotten used to everything being in the ribbon, half the stuff is in the ribbon, the other half is buried in menus, its incredibly frustrating.

> although some may prefer XP in classic mode

XP was IMO the inflection point, where Windows started to get worse faster than it got better. And close to my heart, Windows XP was the first version of Windows that was too big to fit on my trusty Compaq Presario 1210 and its whopping 1.4GB hard drive.

If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on refining that piece of near-perfection, I'd probably still be a Windows user today, and happily so. My dissatisfaction with Windows - starting with XP/2003, but especially every version after - was the big reason why I looked into alternatives like Linux.

> If Microsoft had "stopped" at Windows 2000 (like it has ostensibly "stopped" at Windows 10), and had focused on refining that piece of near-perfection

I for one, wished for the same thing.

Alas, once Apple came out with its shiny Aqua UI (which I must say was beautify in a totally different way), Microsoft was too insecure not to try and match that. They failed miserably in Windows XP, which felt rushed, forced, and contrived. But it certainly looked more colorful.

> Alas, once Apple came out with its shiny Aqua UI

Which is another thing that I can't stand: "Apple did something, so now we have to do it, too". Apple changed some UI element? Guess what everyone's gonna copy. Apple ditched the headphone jack? Guess what everyone's gonna copy.

You'd think that more companies would figure out that product differentiation is what makes them, you know, actually relevant amidst competition.

I can't stand it either. But I think I'm beginning to understand it.

It seems that's the way it works for competition in the consumer market. Consumers respond to the coolness factor in a major way. Microsoft probably felt that they had to try to keep up.

As near perfect as Windows 2000 was, compared to Aqua it was also perfectly ...boring.

Come to think of it, XP wasn't even a bad start given the less than two years it had in development. The real tragedy is that Microsoft couldn't do any better for the next two decades. Windows 7 was worse, 8 even worse, 10? hopeless.

Maybe it's time Microsoft throw in the towel, admit that they have no taste[0], and go back to the Windows 2000 look. They lucked into it somehow, and it still holds up better than anything else they have tried.

One can always hope.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-our-favourite-quotes/

The control panel was simple and clean in classic Windows, in Windows XP it's a maze with big icons and hypertext links, hopefully the classic view was still there.

Yep. Switching back to that classic view is the first thing I do on any Windows machine I touch. I've given it plenty of honest tries and in all of 5 minutes I'm fed up with it. So much easier to find things when they're, you know, actually visible and not hidden behind multiple different screens.

Discoverability in general seems to be a long-forgotten virtue of UI/UX design. Everything insists on hiding everything now. Phones do it, websites do it, macOS is increasingly doing it, Windows is increasingly doing it, Linux desktop environments are increasingly doing it (though thankfully there are a lot of holdouts)...

The "cluttered" UI is long overdue for a comeback.

I dual-booted 2000 and XP for a time because 2000 was simply superior for meaningful work, while XP was good for gaming. And it looked like a toy, too.

That was just the default theme. You could make it look exactly like Windows 2000 by switching the classic theme.

I'm aware, but many of the settings interfaces and system UIs were nerfed.

I also felt Windows 2000 was the peak. It was still relatively simple, no "eye candy" like you had with XP, Vista, and onward.

I have an old Pentium III in the basement, running Windows 2000 server, which used to be my main desktop for a while. I haven't turned it on since 2005-ish.

IMHO Windows UI peaked with Windows 2000.[0] The main difference being that it eliminated redundant lines and reduced contrast where it wasn't needed. This improved the visual signal-to-noise ratio. I recall no significant regressions.

[0] Functionally identical to Windows XP with the luna skin disabled, as well as Windows Server 2003.

Boring but consistent design and near perfect implementation of controls.

My vote goes to either 2000 or NT4. Believe it or not I used NT4 as late as 2011 to load programs on an even older CNC lathe.

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