These UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.
It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps.
Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things, apparently they are still trying, because it is a mess.
But now, we have another problem. Desktop UIs and Mobile UIs are very different. And this, in itself, is a bad thing. Mobile and desktop computers do a lot of the same thing, you shouldn't have to learn how to do it twice. So they tried to unify, and in the process, lost decades of UI refinement.
The next issue is portability. We have web apps, Desktop UIs, Mobile UIs, different OSes, etc... Developers don't want to make a different UI for every system, and users want consistency. The least common denominator is the web browser, so designers use that, but the web is made for documents, it is terrible for apps, but clever devs make do.
So as you see, we now have a lot of hard problems to solve at the same time, and the desktop UI became part of it.
Exactly this.
The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, and for what it did, it was (imho) a great way to use a phone.
Then the rest of microsoft took what that group was doing and made it one-size-fits-all UI for everything windows.
Originally it was for Zune, which inspired Windows Phone 7, and then it was horrifically mangled for Windows 8.
WP7 Metro had a ton of affordances to make the phone easy to use, things like scrollable pages of content should always show a peek of content that is below the current view, so users know there is more content down below.
Common sense stuff that has been forgotten. :(
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/continuum
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_10_Mobile
and it had its merits (from a phone-centric view) but the (crappy) UI remained even when there was not any more need for it (and a Windows 2000/Windows 7 like one would be much more suitable to laptos/desktops or anyway for no-touch devices).
Monochrome vector icons make things like dark mode easier to implement. Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.
I had to chuckle. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 days, there used be a separate monochrome set of icons for all Windows (and Microsoft) programs.
Unfortunately, we’ll probably be at Windows 20 before the last of the Windows 8-style monochrome icons finally finds its way out of Windows, because that’s how things go at Microsoft. (It’s harder than it used to be, but I’m pretty sure you can still find a few Windows 95-era icons hanging around, and there are definitely still some 2000 icons in there).
Also, many of the DOS applications with icons in moricons.dll probably still run in 32-bit Windows 10. NTVDM and DOS application support don't exist in 64-bit Windows, but they're still alive and well in 32-bit Windows (albeit an optional install, because MS would really rather people not still be using DOS applications in 2021).
You can scan an interface of this fashion and be almost certain about what is a button, what is a scroll bar, what is a text input, etcetera.
While with Windows 8+ the flat UI lets a huge space for ambiguity and causes a bigger cognitive load to the user, who is forced to tell things between flat rectangles and lines.
I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again, but I think the cat is out of the bag.
And yes, on text you'd want a minimal UI. You don't see books with flashy things everywhere competing for your attention, maybe excepting kids' books.
My guess is that, as someone already pointed about design doing a full circle again in a few years, it already has happened in the web several times - plain text and 'brutalist' design, then the native UI controls that had to be used within web interfaces, then skeumorphic design to compensate for the native UI controls, then you could style those UI controls as you wished, then flattening all the design again because most of web is text.
I remember back in the 90's, when Apple and Microsoft bragged about having big UI labs where they tried to take a scientific approach to UI design where they'd try out minor UI tweaks on users and observe what worked and what didn't.
Looking at the designs coming out of both companies now (but mostly Apple) it's extremely clear they they are designed just to look "fresh" and "pretty" with no real justification behind it.
> I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again
To be fair, in the 90's, there were plenty of crazily themed programs. Basically any media playing app seemed required to have some insane theme (WinAmp is fondly remembered but that was also a non-standard UI, which was so poorly-designed they needed a button to double the size of it so you could hit some buttons easier). Every PC sound card came with a suite of programs that tried to mimic the appearance of a home Hi-Fi system complete with 7-segment displays and fake cassette tape reels.
Bingo. This is exactly it for me, right here. Being able to tell what I can click on and expect it to do something, at a glance and without having to guess is the killer feature, IMO. How did we lose our way so badly that "can I click on this thing?" even became a reasonable question to ask of a modern UI?
There was a PDF on HN long ago about the Win95 research project. I found this, but it's not what I recall (I remember a loooong PDF): https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
I feel disgusted using Windows 10.
When a product manager asks me to make something look more "modern" these days that usually ends up being code for flattening the UI by eliminating signifiers/affordances like button borders, link indicators, scroll bars, etc. I thought skeuomorphism was garish, but at least it provided the occasional helpful metaphor.
I don't remember my experiences on an old Pentium-class processor being the same (except for that old work machine with a dual-proc. NT on a dualie was quite nice for the late 90s)
"Flat" design is dereliction of design.