There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

There are at least 10 different Microsoft design conventions in Windows 11

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149 pointsluke2m133 comments

Talking to modern UI / Designer folks for these things - so much mushy weird aspirational language and constructs.

What happened to this will be easier to see, to remember, takes fewer clicks, is quicker.

I mean, you spend a billion bucks on a new design and get things like this (from MS Fluent):

Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...

I just want to get work done. Save me from my spatial dimensions (and whitespace overload).

> Fluent experiences listen and adapt... They unite people and ideas, whether they’re on opposite sides of the globe or standing right next to each other... Fluent speaks in light and shadow, in spatial dimensions...

BARF. I can hear the thrumming of Enya's "Storms in Africa" behind this text...

Hey, that's a great song though.

Considered on its own, it's quite lovely. I was going for the overuse of it to punch up meaningless faux-inspirational ad/prezo copy with generic positive vibes.

I'm no designer but I've seen amazing ones work. Could it be that this is just marketing talk unrelated to actual design philosophy underneath because it is not targeting people related to that?

But the modern interfaces are relative junk from my view with some exceptions.

Just basic things like putting focus on an input field of a pop-up dialog. I get that isn't sexy but it IS efficient. They should focus more on the later and less on the sexy gradient / look stuff.

This may seem crazy but that was one of the major accomplishments of the google.com search page. Before that when you navigated to a search engine, you still had to click the search box. The cursor was not located in the box for you.

The trick is, these newer UWP apps, they all take fewer clicks, because they barely have any features!

Startup time is stable though: windows calculator has the same startup time as excel. Don't get me started on microsoft photos...

Modern UI quickly breaks down when you need to have complex software - software that needs a menubar, for example.

Exactly, this is my complaint. The calculator app is SLOWER with this modern UI, and I gain little in terms of efficiency.

You're just looking at the marketing speak from the new design language.

When thinking about design systems, there are few different levels and you speak about different ones depending on who you are talking to. For me it breaks down something like this, going from high-level to low-level:

Design Philosophy - Marketing (what you posted)

Design Principles - Designers / UX (accessible, minimal, emotion)

Design Language - Designers / UX (red is used to denote danger)

Design Library - Designers / UX / Engineers (ButtonPrimary color = blue, ButtonDanger color = red)

Design Implementation - Engineers (<ButtonDanger>Cancel</ButtonDanger>)

I hate the inconsistencies, but this is a bit of an extreme breakdown.

The ones marked as 95, NT, and XP are all fit with each other. Vista and 7 also go together fine, and with the UI theming still don't look inconsistent with the previous set.

The one marked as 8 looks right at home with 11 (which was really just a matter of giving it blurred transparency and rounded corners).

Splitting 10 RTM and the Store is weird. They very much go together.

That leaves 10 19H1 which is the biggest oddball to me and hopefully gets fixed to be consistent with 11.

But anyway, isn't it better that they haven't fucked with some of the older (95-7) UIs that your normal user is never going to see? (I'm counting add/remove programs in that set since there is a non-.cpl replacement that is modernized) Power users tend to hate it when things get changed for no reason other than aesthetics, especially since they often lose functionality.

It also leaves out the Windows 3.1

https://i.redd.it/5xo6c8xmst571.png

Ok, that's the absolute worst. I hate running into those 3.1 file pickers because they're so annoying to navigate.

Horrible? Sure. But difficult to navigate? I am not so sure. Maybe because I used Win 3.x and 9x? Could be.

Yes, difficult to navigate. The list can only display a few items at a time because it's so small. And really I don't want to be clicking my way to a folder anyway, I want to be able to paste the path in or type it with autocomplete.

I grew up with 3.1 and 9x. I don't want that back.

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought you mean to use the different objects in it. Not the specifics of browsing the files/folders. Yes, I agree then.

If I recall correctly, the 3.1 file picker isn't resizable. And it's very small. The small size wasn't such a problem when the filesystem enforced 8.3 file name lengths, but these days it's reasonable to expect names for individual files or folders to be much longer than that.

We have a bug in our backlog right now because we tack on an extra bit when we export files. Imagine we open foobar.raw and export foobar.txt and foobar.txt.info. But when the application tried to write out foobar.txt.info it hits the 260 character limit in NTFS. Meaning that the original file name was over 255 characters.

> And it's very small

It was designed to work on a VGA screen with 480x640 pixels after all.

And this is from Windows NT 3.5 IIRC. Windows 3.1 didn’t have long file names (like the Apple II had in 1979 or so).

still better than the gtk3 one

I was looking for one of these, but I could only find Win31 common dialogs in third-party (non-Microsoft) applications. Well done.

I can’t take credit, saw it here: https://reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/o1x183/the_famous_wi...

Comment on the Reddit thread from where this screenshot was taken -

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/o1x183/the_famou...

The ODBC Driver interface for configuration is tied to the old dialog.

The interface for the drivers was designed around GetOpenFileName() as it was at the time.

One of the features of GetOpenFileName/GetSaveFileName is that the structure passed in can include two special options- a function pointer to a hook routine, as well as a custom dialog template which windows will insert.

The functions were improved in Windows 95 with the "Explorer style". Even old programs get this style at the very least, because windows will imply the flag.

unless a template or hook routine is specified. See if a hook routine or template is specified and the OFN_EXPLORER flag is not, then the hook routine or template was designed for the old-style dialog. Windows uses the old-style dialog in this instance so that the program can run and doesn't crash.

The ODBC Driver configuration uses a dialog template to add the "read Only" and "Exclusive" checkboxes. That is why it shows the old style dialog.

People might say, "They should update it"

Update what?

If GetOpenFileName()'s ability to fallback to the old-style dialog is removed, than you won't see this dialog. Instead, it will crash. Cool. great experience.

the driver interface? OK great. so now there is a new version of the ODBC Driver interface. Now all the ODBC Drivers need to be updated. Some of the drivers were written by companies that are either out of business or rather different. I have this sneaking suspicion that Paradox software isn't going to be writing a new ODBC Driver for the MS-DOS Database.

Just drop everything? OK Cool.... so now companies get forcibly upgraded to Windows 11 and literally cannot do business because they rely on them in some manner. "They should upgrade". I won't get into that except to say it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, but companies in that position are far more likely to find ways to not upgrade the software that caused the problem so, you know, they can keep doing business. And not upgrading the OS is certainly cheaper than countless thousands of man-hours in upgrading their Business software.

And a big thing people don't understand about backwards compatibility is it's not just about old programs working. It's about new ones working to.

If Microsoft removed all "backwards compatibility", than practically nothing would actually work. Software would be constantly crashing, sending error reports, etc. Now, call me crazy, but somehow that doesn't seem like it's a great experience. And if upgrading to Windows X+1 suddenly caused programs to crash left & right, nobody is going to blame the programs.

I'm not even sure why they migrated settings to settings - control panel remains much more direct and explicit.

Because it's not your computer to control anymore?

It reminds me of when My Computer was renamed to This PC, and My Documents became Documents --- a subtle way to say it's not yours.

The latest anti user trend is of course that of referring to computers as "devices".

Yeah... I think you might be reading just a little too much into the new names.

Perhaps, but I've sat in design meetings for a very similar concept: the original product was something similar to "My Pass" and there was well over an hour of a dozen people discussing the psychological effects changing it to something closer to "[Brand] Pass" - the biggest one being that exact transition of ownership. The overwhelming majority agreed that removing the sense of individual ownership implied by "My" would both encourage sharing (in this case it was reasonable to do this as an "upgrade") and to encourage brand loyalty. I suggested "My [Brand] Pass" but was roundly shot down as "that just complicated things". Surveys were performed (NB: I do not know what these surveys contained or how they were handled) and eventually it was decided to call it something like "Family Pass".

Point being that name changes can come from such over thinking.

The name was probably changed because there were so many school- and work-issued Windows PCs that calling it "my computer" made no sense.

People who are downvoting you don't realise that sometimes corporates even spend millions of dollars to determine such small things, like even choosing the right word or colour to determine how to best influence consumers.

> that your normal user is never going to see

You underestimate the amount of ducking around a normal user has to do to keep windows happy over the years.

I have to do the same with my mom and her mac every week or two. The latest was all of the flash deprecation warnings and she uses flash routinely for puzzle games although she's never heard of this "flash" thing. I spend about as much time getting her mac fixed as I used to her windows computer and she's been using computers since the 80s. Remember, we're talking about "normal users," not us on HN. Most normal users don't know 90% of their computer. They know how to turn it on and do what they did yesterday, and if that doesn't work any longer they are mostly lost. Kind of like cars. Most know how to drive them and gas them up, but if there is ever any other sort of issue that isn't obvious like a flat tire they are lost. That's most "normal" users. There's a reason why "did you simply try turning it off and on again" is a meme, because that's most people.

> There's a reason why "did you simply try turning it off and on again" is a meme, because that's most people.

Well, that and the fact that it actually does the trick 90% of the time, which is fairly stupid to begin.

Troubleshooting Windows is largely an exercise in futility to begin with; turning it off and on again is usually the only thing that even IT people can reasonably do (that, and google the error to find out about turning on/off this specific thing)

> Well, that and the fact that it actually does the trick 90% of the time, which is fairly stupid to begin.

I don't think it is, it's like aging on an accelerated scale. Turning on and off is like death and rebirth, you don't have all the stuff you acumulate with age. No injuries, no tumors, it's a clean start.

If you want to start that competition, ok. It’s not nearly the same. For one, the Mac will actually turn off when you want to turn it off. System updates are far in between and usually just work. On windows you get driver updates every week (which still don’t automatically install for the most part), and you might have audio / graphics issues start popping up out of the blue. Or your favorite software stops working. Or it just refuses to wake up from sleep. Or one of the 17 things running in the tray (the mouse driver maybe, or fan manager, or the manufacturers “optimization” software) starts eating your CPU. Your fans start going wild every 30 seconds for no particular reason. The start menu stops responding. Some app locks the whole system up and you can’t even open the task manager because it steals focus. One day your audio volume is off and you can’t figure out why. Windows decides that the default output is something else and ignores your attempts at reverting that. Your mouse locks up randomly. The Windows key decides it doesn’t work anymore. Alt-tab stops working. Everything slows down to a crawl one day while watching YouTube, and again you can’t open the task manager…

The solution (if there is one) usually involves a fair bit of googling, uninstalling/reinstalling/updating things, maybe messing with the registry or settings.

You may think I’m exaggerating, but this is actually the list of issues I’ve had myself in a span of two years. I use the PC for browsing and gaming, nothing else. It has been very frustrating, and I’ve been working with computers for 20 years. I used to think Linux was a pain but am rethinking that.

Flash has been deprecated on the Mac for ages, and Adobe stopped supporting it completely last year.

In the image, they've provided colored boxes around the different types, that seem to match your breakdown pretty well. (so, 95, NT, and XP are teal in the image). I guess for the post title, the more dramatic count was used.

> The ones marked as 95, NT, and XP are all fit with each other.

They aren't really though. Aesthetically they are reasonably close but employ different conventions (e.g. the list/tree in win32 and the list in NT4 display the same kind of information but different ways, and with different icons).

Consistency is a pretty fundamental thing in interface design, and whether or not something "fits" aesthetically is only a small part of all this, which I think was OP's point.

Yes, they are different paradigms.

The Microsoft's insistence on maintaining native backwards compatibility with software some of which is as old as me is so perplexing.

I saw what the API of the classic Mac OS looked like[1] the other day, and it does resemble WinAPI very much. It's procedural, many functions take descriptors, many other functions take structs you allocate and fill in, there's a DIY event loop, and so on. It even has a windows.h (lol). Apple got rid of this in 2000. It then provided a VM-style "classic environment" backwards compatibility layer in OS X for ~5 years, and Carbon library for source-level compatibility for even longer.

Apple did manage to pull this off. Why can't Microsoft do the same? Why can't they put a seamlessly integrated 95/XP/whatever VM into their system that would launch when you run a win32 application, and finally give themselves the freedom to rewrite everything from scratch, with more sensible APIs and in a more memory-safe language?

[1] https://github.com/cy384/ssheven/blob/master/ssheven.c

    Microsoft's insistence on maintaining native backwards compatibility with software some of which is as old as me is so perplexing.

This is why Microsoft has such a huge presence in corporate - unlike you or me, most corporates do not immediately update to latest, hi tech flashy tool of the month. If something works really well, they'll keep using it, sometimes for decades. And demand that Microsoft don't break it on their OS. Microsoft will happily support them as they earn a lot from corporate licenses and support.

Apple doesn't have the kind of importance that Microsoft does in corporate. Nor does Apple have to support the kind of hardware and software that Microsoft does, and so Apple's monoculture helps them makes changes to their platform faster than Microsoft can.

> If something works really well, they'll keep using it, sometimes for decades.

But why does it apparently not apply to the operating systems themselves? And how would running win32 apps in a seamless VM (a-la Apple's classic environment) break that?

Yes the 2 different flavours of Control Panel for example are jarring. If MS seems to think that the new UI style is not fit for purpose or worth the effort for more rarely used or technical settings, why should I?

Also 2 different flavors of the open/save file dialog, the one from Windows 95 and the newer one from vista/7.

From looking at the evolution of Windows, it feels like they're only capable of writing new code, but not deleting or rewriting anything existing unless absolutely necessary to support new code. Those shiny UWP apps? Yeah, they still have that win32 message loop deep inside them.

It does apply to the OS too - that is why Microsoft (and others) offer LTS (long-term-support) for their OS and pubilicise an end-of-life date for every version they release. (And sometimes some businesses continue using it even after Microsoft stops LTS - it's only a recent trend that everyone is now forced to upgrade OSes over fears of security / lack of security updates). This is also why Microsoft Windows can get away with forced updates for home users but the business versions offer more fine-grained control over Windows update.

As for running Win32 apps on different setups, it makes the system more complicated. When more vendors are involved, it also makes fixing things difficult - In case something breaks, Microsoft can say it is Apple's fault, and Apple will say we don't support Win32 apps, contact your developer. (Not to mention that Apple is not as corporate friendly as many others, like Microsoft, or IBM, as they are largely a business-to-consumer company and not a business-to-business company).

No, I didn't mean to say to run win32 apps on OS X. I was comparing my idea to the thing[1] Apple actually made in the early 00s to ease the transition from classic Mac OS to OS X.

My idea is that Microsoft would build a special version of Windows that supports all kinds of legacy apps, and put it into a VM. And probably not update it much if ever. That would allow them to deprecate, and then remove, older APIs in the main system, which would in turn allow rewriting the internals to be less vulnerable. They totally have the resources needed to do this. And there's no technical innovation needed to do this, either.

As far as the end user is concerned, old apps still run. Except now they run in a sandboxed environment.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_macOS_components#Class...

> I think 11 will be a true return to a Microsoft experience supremacy not seen in a decade.

I’m sorry. I had to laugh.

Windows has been so complicated and inconsistent, with built-in control panels, vendor mini-applications, inconsistent within Windows itself, where you see the parts that haven’t been touched since NT 3.5, alongside each and every version of Windows ever sold, plus the built in vendor specific control panels that makes it impossible to figure out what is the currently active Wi-Fi configuration (a recurrent problem I have when helping house guests to connect. Macs just work. Linux just works, Androids and iPhones easily connect. Windows laptops? Ha! Just use the range extender that’s in the guest bedroom. For some reason I will not dedicate the time to figure out for every Windows version and PC manufacturer why, that little thing seems to like Windows machines.

I'll agree that Macs have it pretty good, but to say 'Linux just works' with WiFi is a bold statement. Some Linux distributions work well, but when you have to fall back to the command prompt to do something as simple as connect to an enterprise WiFi network for a device as common as a raspberry pi [0] because there is no GUI, well. I'll grant that at least the steps are moderately consistent. Anecdotally, even on my Ubuntu laptop, at least once a year I lose WiFi and have to delve into some online forums to learn what just broke it.

I use both Linux (Ubuntu/Raspian) and Windows extensively and overall most things just work better on Windows, poor design philosophies aside.

[0] https://iceburn.medium.com/raspberry-pi-connected-to-wifi-of...

I installed Ubuntu Server 20.04 on a spare laptop. Long story short, it did not have any way to connect to my WiFi network unless I either first went through the guided installation with an Ethernet cord attached, or went through some excruciating troubleshooting steps involving setting up hardware via obtuse CLI commands and arguments. I tried the latter just to see if I could without looking things up on my phone/separate computer, and even with a bit of cheating I still gave up and tried again with the cord plugged in.

I’m happy that these reports are relatively rare. Most of the time, it just works.

The one that always gets me is how oddly forgotten the MMC stuff is:

The Disk Management UI's bottom pane, for whatever reason, has never worked with scroll wheels. It still gleefully ignores scroll wheels.

The Hyper-V Manager .. a new thing .. has a broken UI as well. It's "Actions" pane size is based off the screen-width, but the default size of the window is based off the screen height, so on ultra-wide screen monitors, a pane that should take up about a 1/3 of the window, ends up covering about 2/3 of the window.

I also love how even the Action menu is a hold over from some older UX ideas. There are two ways to bring up the help dialog now in all of the MMC apps, either with the Help menu, or via the Action menu.

But! At least they got enough attention to use Edge instead of the default browser if you try to open the "TechCenter Website" (a website that hasn't had that name in 8 years or so)

Well... your problem is solved... disk management has no UI anymore...

I'm really disappointed in the center-justification of the task bar and start menu. I'm assuming that means the start menu icon will forever be creeping left as I open more apps, along with the start menu itself. Not a fan of this at all. There's an option to left-justify, I understand - and I like options - but would prefer left-justified to remain the default for users.

I assume they're building in the option to left-justify in case this move turns out to be another Windows 8 cock-up of a UI experience. I remember MS executives being "excited" about Windows 8 as well, it means little to nothing to me that Satya is excited about Win11.

A mere hypothesis, but I wonder if that task bar centering wasn't pushed because of the increase in popularity of ultrawide screens as well as tablets (Microsoft has been pushing for Windows use on tablets for quite some time now). Because when you imagine a centered taskbar on an ultrawide screen or a tablet, it makes absolute sense and is preferable to having it on the left side of the screen. The centered taskbar doesn't work at all on smaller screens though.

Huge advantage of the start button on the bottom left: I can just “throw” my mouse pointer as far down and left as I can and click, and I’ll always hit the start button.

This is actual supported by Fitts' law, one of the very few laws in UX design [0]:

"Placing layout elements on the four edges of the screen allows for infinitely large targets in one dimension and therefore present ideal scenarios. As the user's pointer will always stop at the edge, they can move the mouse with the greatest possible speed and still hit the target. The target area is effectively infinitely long along the movement axis. Therefore, this guideline is called “Rule of the infinite edges”. The use of this rule can be seen for example in MacOS, which places the menu bar always on the top left edge of the screen instead of the current program's windowframe."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law#Implications_for...

Apparently you can put it back in the bottom left corner via an option.

Speaking of horrid design, Reddit is blocking me from viewing that page unless I visit it in their app

The article now points to old.reddit.com, which should not do that.

I remember when Win 7 came out - even then it was so easy to click through the veneer of the Win 7 style. I think it was the 'display' dialogue, which looked almost identical to the Win98 version, complete with the CRT-style monitor. Likewise, Windows 10 looks good with superficial use. Seems like each iteration adds an extra shell.

This is great for people who already know it, but terrible for people who don’t and try to understand why there are 4 different panels for the same thing that all look different.

Eh, UI consistency is overrated. I'm old enough to remember the 90s and early 00s when people said the webapps would never really be widely used outside of toy applications because of UI/UX inconsistencies.

This entire field of so-called *design" is WILDLY overrated. The biggest problem is that there is way too much mere fashion masquerading as "scientifically proven methodologies of human interaction with machines." There's so much ridiculousness in this space because "designers" treat their own preferences (or worse, those of their company) as nearly immutable laws. Just let me pick poofy or flat buttons and get over yourselves.

I'm inclined to agree. I'm always wary of design refresh/update in operating systems and commonly used applications like Firefox, because more often than not, it means worse user experience and no perceptible benefit.

Your whole comment also rings true when "design" and "designers" are replaced with "software" and "programmers".

On this new update of Firefox, tabs are disconnected from the page. Are they even tabs anymore?!? They're just disconnected rectangles with round corners!

I'm half joking but honestly I don't know why they bother with this. And for whatever reason, it gets under my skin and feels weird.

How about let me have text on my buttons so I know what the hell they are for. And I can communicate to my parents what the hell they should be clicking on. And stop hiding every single button.

I am specifically referring to Google.

And instead, they are widely used and hated!

Businesses are great at iterating to find out just how much customers are willing to put up with in quality reductions before they actually leave, and also great at putting up barriers to shift that tipping point further in the company's favour. It turns out people will put up with a lot. Even stuff they hate.

We have the technology and ability to create things that are far higher quality, but it's usually a losing proposition from a profit-seeking perspective.

It's just the same old "worse is better" story.

(This is just a tangential thought, not some kind of disagreement or rebuttal.)

It’s pretty sad, but unfortunately the exact reason why it seems like everything we use is terrible. Executives at companies don’t care for the aforementioned reason, but they discount the deep scorching branding damage this incurs that no amount of marketing will fix.

Users who have the choice will switch eventually, whenever they get the chance, they will never come back and they will hate you and share their discomfort. This will lead to scales being tipped against you wherever possible.

Now, you can still build a hard to avoid product and make a ton of money from it (Microsoft), so it‘s still not a losing strategy.

So here I am just begging companies to stop building terrible products because they make people miserable.

You can also build a high quality loved product and the effect above will reverse, but probably not at the same price (Apple, Jetbrains).

I don't find the the experiences of native desktop apps particularly compelling. I think much of the thinking behind this mentality grew from an era where computers were scary and intimidating and you had huge swaths of the population that didn't even want to use them. So everyone bent over backwards trying to appeal to reluctant adopters. That world doesn't exist anymore.

Seems like some progress has been made because the oldest style here is as recent as Win95.

For a long time, the "Install Font" dialog was unchanged from Windows 3.0, with a tiny little folder tree view meant for 8.3 character file names and a drive picker button...

Some googling reveals they cleaned these up around 2015: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/09/windo...

Don't forget applications that still use a forked version of the Windows 3.1 common dialog.

To be fair, the last consistent Windows UI was probably Windows 3.1. In hindsight, it looks is incredibly cohesive and functional. Swap out the font (MS Sans Serif, especially bold, looks pretty bad), make the graphical components vector-based, and it would still look great today.

Windows 3.1 had something like 5 built-in widgets. CTL3D.DLL (dating myself here!) IIRC added a bunch more. IMHO somewhere between CTL3D and XP was when design topped out.

I still love elements of 7 and 10, but honestly would have been totally fine if 2K or XP were the final themes. Imagine if after all this time, the only way to date a Windows installation was by subtle design variations of the window title bar. Such bliss! Although of course, I am glad for many of the changes made during the mobile/touch revolution.

I wonder if the tide will ever turn on UX ideologists. Chased out of the industry like the witches and warlocks they are :)

Admins can you please change the url to the old Reddit UI. The new UI is locked on mobile Safari.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

I got my start programming with a tool that originated on mainframes, saw a brief popularity in text-based minicomputers (Vaxen and Unixen), was ported to X11 Unix, then to PCs beginning with MS Windows 3, and through multiple generations as that became the overwhelmingly dominant user platform.

There were further changes and inheretences from within each of those environments as well.

It was possible when using the application to recognise where and how various components and features originated and what platform(s) they were developed on or for. Even some 50 years after the first release, this can be determined.

As I came to use Unix and Linux more heavily, I noticed the same trend in various applications, both command-line (GNU and BSD userland, MVS JCL relics such as "dd", and others) and graphical. Various X11 and graphical toolkits became instantly recognisable, and though the appearances (and often feature locations and implementations) were often wildly inconsistent (Xt Intrinsics / Athena scrollbars, anyone?), once the contexts were known, the visual indicators made clear "oh, this is an Athena app, this is a Motif app, this is a gtk app, this is a KDE app", or singletons (Netscape / Mozilla / Phoenix / Fireox, StarOffice / OpenOffice / NeoOffice / LibreOffice, Applixware (remember that?), etc. came to be known quantities. Various JS toolkits and Electron apps are probably the current version of this.

I've (mostly in jest, though possibly more seriously with time) had the tag "technological archaeologist" in various online bios. That traces directly to my experience with tools developed over a number of different platforms or tools. Or simply the influences of time and trends or fashions.

Microsoft Windows at about 45 years of age now has its own design legacy and archaeological strata.

Moral: the UX "sector" needs to shrink by about 98%, and what remains should be contractors or agencies

I've long suspected that there is a glut of not-terribly-good UX people who continually create pointless redesigns to justify their ongoing employment. I can't remember the last time (maybe never?) that I saw a redesign and thought, "Oh, yes, that's so much better, I'm excited for this!"

Maybe UX is a fashion-sector? As they also regulary reinvent themself to stay alive.

This is a good way to think of it. We've had clothes for ages but they get boring. We seek different things that look unique because we want to be excited. Our brains didn't like staring at text all day so we started wrapping the text with fun colors and shapes and it spiraled from there.

Although my favorite is Win32, Modern/Fluent is the only one that really strikes me as "bad."

That’s the funniest part: the oldest style is still the best.

Because back then usability was in focus: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

There is also a Twitter thread that notes what got lost over time - especially separation and contrast. https://twitter.com/tuomassalo/status/978717292023500805

I'm glad Windows still has a high contrast mode for the people who really need it to see things, but I so wish that designers everywhere would think much more about keeping good contrast. They're all working on high-end monitors in ideal conditions, all nicely color calibrated. But that's not normal. TN panels are still very popular. On those, elements displayed on screen very easily lose contrast when looking at them at an angle. I have a sub-optimal positioning right now on a TN panel where the center is lined up with my eyes and looks good, but if I look to the top of the panel, everything is darker than it should be.

You're thinking of a TN panel. VA panels can be nearly as good as IPS in terms of viewing angles.

You're right. I always get TN and VA mixed up. I'll edit that.

TN panels are still very popular. On those, elements displayed on screen very easily lose contrast when looking at them at an angle.

Back when ads were actually a different background color on Google, I suspect they A/B tested background colors right up to the point that they disappeared on cheap TN laptops. I experienced this first hand when helping a friend with their laptop 5-10 years ago, and they clicked on an ad by mistake. Turned out that the ad background turned white at normal laptop viewing angles.

You'd probably like GTK/QT. Both of them are effectively delineations of that same functional design language, with holistically different approaches to the subject. I personally love both, but they're a fascinating case study if nothing else.

Yes, I certainly do -- especially Qt.

I'm always wondering whether my preference for this more "traditional" design paradigm just comes from using Win32 in my formative years or some objective difference of quality.

Anyone who shares the sentiment might want to check out the Chicago95 theme[1].

[1] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95

I think they were quite efficient designs. I grew up using a lot of paradigms, from 3.1, 95, RiscOS, Workbench and dabble of Mac 9/10 later on. I gave gnome 3 a good go, but while I really enjoyed the visual appeal of it, I found I wasn't as productive - trying to switch Windows was hard as the windows didn't stay in the same place like they did with a taskbar. Unity was more productive for me. But I'm happiest on MATE.

I wonder if the software update dialog box will still feature the useless flying dots instead of providing useful information like: what update is actually doing (or more like trying to do but failing), how much progress it has made in trying to do it (or, more like where has the damn thing hung again) and (god forbid) a solid guess as to how many fricking hours are left.

~2T$ and these jokers can't figure out how to reasonably update their kludgy mess.

(sorry for the rant, but this update crap killed a half a day of my non-profit volunteer time and is still unresolved)

I mean, it’s fun to dunk on Microsoft OS design, but aren’t we looking at screenshots from a leaked early build? Seems reasonable that it looks a bit hacked together at this point. Maybe it will launch this way. But maybe it won’t.

I mean people thought the same thing about Windows 10 and to this day it's a mix of 7 different designs or so.

It’s reasonable to assume it won’t, when you see how legacy UI was kept mostly unchanged at least since Windows XP.

I have a feeling the only people who care about this are people who don't use Windows.

I do use windows. And it does annoye me how inconsistent it is. And I also use Linux, which is inconsistent by design. Yet windows is even worse than this IMHO.

I like how the tabbed dialog to set the system path env vars is the same for 20 years, then if I open up the calculator and it's got a fancy new look and feel, that's good too.

We shall admit that to follow UI trends in one application is relatively easy.

For example one application in last 15 years: https://sciter.com/from-skeuomorph-to-flat-ui-evolution-of-o...

But to do the same on OS level - hundreds of different apps and applets ... That's Sisyphean task to be honest.

We should be lucky that old stuff is still working and API that appeared in Win 3 is still with us.

Actually that is not just Windows problem. On Linux, for example, all these utilities were historically console UI applications that are more "UI conservative" but even there - whole zoo of different approaches...

Well, the reason for the Linux utilities is because Linux doesn't actually ship with a GUI; anything you see on screen is drawn by a userspace program that all other programs interact with (said program is called a "desktop environment" or DE).

Building text-based tools is much easier than building GUIs on Linux because you have to target a specific GUI architecture like X11 / Wayland, and then you also have to think about fitting in with whatever window manager the user uses; GNOME / KDE / whatever.

On Mac or Windows, you build a GUI using the vendor's tools and you're golden. No need to worry about how the user is getting windows to show up on their screen because every user is using the same software to do so. For similar reasons, a lot of software just says screw it and targets Ubuntu only so they don't have to support your weird configuration on any other distro.

Kinda wish microsoft would make Windows 10 the last backwards compatible windows and start from scratch. Virtualize Win10 for backwards compatibility and start from a blank slate with modern design principles.

This is how it’s been forever. Windows 10 is the same - the fact that there are two control panels is mind boggling.

Loads of third party apps have shell extensions that use control panel and there's 20 years of settings to migrate over. It's getting there.

UI is a train wreck, but on the bright side, it has all that sophisticated telemetry to improve the UX.

As an older developer I find it funny how design trends cycle around. I think in my life I've seen UI design go the full circle at least twice. The square corner, solid colour era is ending and it looks like we're pulling back into round corner and gradient land. Next stop, Skeuomorph station, all aboard.

Upside, some of the legacy systems I wrote 20 years ago are going to look modern again!

Glass half full: that's some serious commitment to backwards compatibility.

I suspect there's a belief in some mythic market of "computer-averse" people, who if we just round off enough rough corners-- both metaphorically and literally-- they'll be willing to jump from, say, an iDevice or Chromebook, or no computer at all, to a full Windows PC.

What saddens me is that this steers the whole design process. You create a thin candy coating over the system to appeal to this audience, but at the same time, that clogs up established workflows and creates an inconsistent mess for more experienced users who have to work with both new and old UX flows.

Maybe we need to simply own the inconsistency. Build the shiny new experiences as a seperate flow, and allow users to migrate towards more traditional, powerful tools with the old UI conventions. Something like the manufacturer-provided shell you'd see on a late Windows 3.1 PC, where eventually you outgrow it and switch to using Program Manager.

They’ve mastered the art of inconsistency. At least they’re doing something to the previously hideous winforms widgets.

Bonus points had actually updated them to the new design language (god fucking damn it).

I kind of wonder - maybe it's a sign of what a company like MS is, and its strengths. i.e. they are focusing on being a good platform/services company, and end user UI/UX is really more of an afterthought for them. If somehow they end up with a good Apple-like UI/UX, would that be a bad sign the company is losing its focus or getting its culture muddled?

In my years of using different operating systems, KDE Plasma has had the most consistent UI across the board.

Consistently ugly?

Breeze cleaned things up a bit, but almost all the apps have an „I made the UI in 5 minutes before I fall asleep“ vibe (namely because the spacings are all weird).

To be fair: That is very consistent.

You haven't used KDE Plasma as primary desktop for long time, have you?

It has been about a year.

The open source way of splitting out the actual utility into some command line thing, and then making a thin UI wrapper, seems to really improve consistency. Which, I guess, is unsurprising -- the open source community needed to make a UI on top of a chaotic ecosystem, so they actually had to deal with the problem up front. Windows skated by accidental consistency for quite a while.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...

@dang can we update the link, on mobile you can’t even view the thread (Reddit pop up)

I second this. I don’t have the reddit app and will not install it to view this link. Might as well remove it from HN altogether.

Is Reddit usable without the app on a phone? I can’t seem to get to that page, two prompts to continue without an app that I don’t have or want and I’m redirected to the homepage…

10 is a bit of a stretch. I only see 2-3 distinct styles.

That feeling, when you are still patching up lesser used components for current design system and manager barges in with new redesign.

Wow, reddit really hates website users.

So... any god damn news on what MS are doing with 11 beyond dicking around with the UI again?

I understand it can be fun to point stuff out like this, laugh at it, etc.

Personally, I think this is actually good. Consistent and Productive Design, especially on the level of patterns across an entire operating system of both first and third party applications, is an insanely difficult problem. This means one absolutely needs to bring in the consideration of resource allocation. Its not possible to do everything exactly the same; in fact, a related but incorrect argument may be that its not possible to do everything exactly the same on Day 1, but because "Good Design" is a moving target, its actually really difficult to reach that goal in any capacity whatsoever.

Inconsistent design, like this, tells me that it isn't a resource allocation priority for Microsoft. Thus, those resources are most likely diverted to more functional aspects; getting it working, faster, more consistent behavior, broader and deeper feature sets, etc.

This is the right trade-off for Windows. One can point to MacOS or iOS and see a much more consistent design language across first-party apps, as well as pretty strong adoption of this design language across third-party apps, but the cost of this near-perfection is abstracted away. Its easy to see inconsistencies in design; its much harder to speak in aggregates about obscure software issues, missing features, delayed releases, etc. Strongly consistent design, in the face of these issues (many of which are unproveable externally) may actually be the right trade-off for MacOS and iOS; Apple is a far more design/PR/marketing driven company, and this guise of "everything is engineered and under control" may actually be materially important for their brand.

Windows is different. Moreover; it should be different. The fundamental idea that an entire operating system needs a cohesive, strongly consistent design language is one that Microsoft has tried to push several times, but one which hasn't even seen internal adoption, let alone external. One can blame this on the design languages being bad, or their tooling being bad, or anything, but at the end of the day its still the most popular non-server OS in the world (or is Android bigger now? Well, its the same argument there too). Conforming to any central design pattern isn't a priority for Windows users. There's no physical law of the universe that OS-wide design languages are a naturally good thing; in fact, I would argue that design languages shared between many domains of applications may fundamentally fail to account for the wide variety of interaction patterns within every domain, and thus as a software platform increases its complexity of services offered, domain-agnostic design languages naturally begin to fall apart. They may actually be Generally Bad, though I only feel comfortable asserting with any certainty that they're probably not Generally Good or Bad, and there's room for different platforms to try different things.

Sure, different people want different things is true and accurate. But it also true and accurate that the vast majority of people want to do the thing they want to do, and for the interface to get out the way.

Design consistency helps with that, or rather, design inconsistency hinders it. I sense stockholm syndrome. Windows would not lose anything by making their design language consistent.

Very contrived over-counting.

Is it just me, or can this Reddit post not even be viewed with iOS Safari? I understand that Reddit wants me to download their app, but to prevent me from even seeing the post is a step too far.

It’s pathetic. You can request the desktop version though which works fine in landscape mode

What stopped me was having to click "View rest of discussion" to read a full comment thread. When I clicked it, it didn't show me the discussion, but instead took me to a window with another submission from r/Windows11 in focus. I had to scroll back up to actually find the discussion. Good grief!

Edit: I meant "Continue this thread," not "View rest of discussion."

Try to view too many comments and it'll force you to log in, too. At which point I just close the tab, remembering that I've never read anything in a reddit thread that was worth the time it takes to log in.

There's also the NSFW thing too. If you try to view post in specific subreddits it will try to force you to the app. These aren't even smut subreddits. I think /r/greentext (4chat story screenshots) does this. I really need to finally leave.

No, that’s “normal” and has been there for a while.

This post forces you to use the app to see any of it period, or returns you to /r/popular. First time I’ve ever seen it as well.

https://imgur.com/a/IFI9ik9

Most days I can't view Facebook or Instagram content because I don't have an account, I only get a login page.

I guess this is a trend. I wonder if it's affecting influencers' business.

Instagram walked back the forced-login-to-view-page change 2-3 weeks ago, and within the last couple days put it back on.

Guess I don't get to see Instagram pages anymore. Sad thing is many small businesses use Instagram for their "website", there's a few around me that I haven't checked out because I can't see their "website" on Instagram.

> I wonder if it's affecting influencers' business.

HN is a self-selecting bunch. The vast, vast majority of people that care about influencers are logged in all the time anyway.

Can't view it in Duck Duck Go browser on Android either. Reddit forces me to either download the app or go to /r/popular.

old.reddit.com for the win

(just change www. to old. or i. for mobile layout)

https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/o2a0kp/there_are...