Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)
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Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring.
Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS.
Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
Alternatively, you could mouse over and click file -> save as or press Alt -> f -> a.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.
You literally cannot even complete a fresh windows 11 install without a live internet connection now, if you're an ordinary non technical end user. It demands to be connected to some form of wired network or wireless with internet access to report home to microsoft and make a cloud based account.
They clearly decided that getting people to sign up for a forever-recurring monthly paid cloud service plan in perpetuity was the best way to go for revenue. Or at least bait them into it by methods like "oh, here's your free 5GB onedrive account, you can totally back up your whole system and use onedrive for everything. What's that, you're out of storage space on your free account? Sign up now for this $12/month account for (some_large_number_of_GB)!"
I like to think that some PM at Microsoft got promoted and brags about how one of those is 'their' button.
Is Office(CurrentYear) easier to use than 1997?
I think I copied everything to my local disk as well, but it’s 20 years of my life, so I’m disinclined from finally trashing all those various services.
Nah, won't even happen when I'm dead or about dead, or by the time I'm dead.
I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.
[EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
(* They're more correctly called opto-mechanical since the movement sensing is done by way of a slotted disc interrupting light beams.)
I'm half-joking. I know what you mean, but I think a larger picture is that touch-interfaces have their own problems/solutions that the traditional Desktop doesn't have, and vice versa. I think that the desire to have One-Interface-To-Rule-Them-All leaves a lot of people (and possibilities) behind.
It would be a lot of work, but I think Microsoft needs two entirely separate Desktop Environments. One for touch-based devices, one for Desktop. I'm not holding my breath, we've been debating this since Windows 8. And I'm fully aware that as a middle-aged Windows Application developer that my opinion matters less with every year that passes... but I can't help but feel that maybe we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
While some people might see Win95 as a good GUI because that is what they first learned, that doesn't mean that applies to everyone. And if nothing else it also works the other way around - "kids these days" may not mind navigating around flat touch-based interfaces because they've spent the time to learn them, not because of any inherent superiority of said interfaces.
This is why IMO using how easy kids can use/learn something (in computers at least), be it UIs, languages or whatever isn't very helpful - kids have a ton of time and if they like something they can spend ages on it regardless of any inherent properties of that something. I mean, consider the downright atrocious UX the overwhelming majority of games had in home computers from the 80s and PCs until early 90s - and yet kids at the time spent hours deciphering and playing them. That didn't mean the games actually had good UIs, it meant kids had enough time and motivation to work around these UIs so they can enjoy the games.
I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread.
Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.
IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.
I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.
So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both?
> Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59.
> And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be.
I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing."
To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.
Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them.
And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.
I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).
the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).
In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success.
Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM
If I remember correctly, this part wasn't there in Windows 95, so presumably they decided that users mostly don't need it anymore.
Every. Single. Time.
You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things.
Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa.
There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.
Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable.
Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.
There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.
Having normal toolbars instead of dealing with the takes-twice-as-many-clicks Ribbon is another benefit.
I think there's a tension between Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users that the Windows Team has decided to just ignore. Or they have decided that Desktop users are not important. I spent extra for a widescreen monitor that would give me more vertical pixels. What does Windows think I want to do with these pixels? Use them to display a big, honkin' new Taskbar, apparently. Why did they take away the option to make it thinner? Why is "Every user must have a Big Fat Taskbar" the hill they want to die on? And the modern-ish design language feels like it was designed to waste space and hide information. I have a huge screen, I don't want a 3+ click minimum to get to any setting.
Third-party bloatware, permanent rounded corners for some reason, the take-it-or-I-dare-you-to-switch-to-Linux attitude does not give me warm fuzzy fealings. I would switch to linux, but I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.
For now, I'm still able to cobble together the tools that make Windows a mostly-pleasant Desktop experience. I use Directory Opus, Open Shell (with ExplorerPatcher for Win11), Everything Search, and some registry edits to do things like bring the normal Context Menu back.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120314071640/http://kruzeniski..., seemingly missed by HN at the time in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3301723 (6 points, 0 comments).
If win11 were running on a surface duo or similar device it might make sense but on the desktop they should be embarrassed by the amount of software and tweaks people use just to make their software usable.
I'm in the same boat. Do you get to design your WPF UIs, or are they dictated to you by a UX designer? I hate the UIs I have to develop. I would never use them, but some PM insists they are good design, citing metrics from a broken feedback system that's been gamed to give PMs promotions over honest feedback. The designers don't use the software they are designing, but insist it is good design. Heck they are designing Windows software, using a Mac. Most users are held hostage. I'm convinced if there were actual competition these products would all fail.
I will say that the constant feedback is how that they love how "modern" our application looks compared to our main competitor. So I try to never ignore the power of that perception, even if it is just a bias.
The crazy thing is that Windows touch-screen users are a tiny minority of all Windows users, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Yet a lot of the design compromises since Windows 8 making things worse for non-touch users are made for the single reason of catering to touch screens.
What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nominally the same man-machine interface, are somewhat differentiated.
Why is MS so hellbent on making Windows a jack of all trades?
IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.
No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).
Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.
The design compromises have become really hard to justify even when you're coming from the point of view of the minority among us who use hybrid devices. It's difficult to tell who Windows 11 is for. They want to imitate the macOS dock but even macOS has less limitations, you can drag and drop a document onto the dock, you can drag a folder and have a peek in the inside of the folder when you click it, you can't do that with the 11 taskbar, which only accepts software shortcuts. The windows 11 taskbar is an abomination and the worst piece of UI I have ever used in my life.
It was possible to add documents, folders etc to "quick launch" which was introduced to windows 9x along with Internet Explorer's active desktop. It's just amazing how the modern windows UI has become inferior to decades old tools.
They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?
They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?
Treat everyone like an idiot and they'll become idiots.
Idiots are more likely to be persuaded in the "right" direction and milked for profit.
Some of those idiots then get jobs designing UI, and the cycle repeats.
...or at least that's my theory of what's happening.
They know better. They really like to rearange windows in the win 10 taskbar. My thoughts always get to their mothers. Having to use this (insert profanity here) 8 hours a day is too much.
Now there’s a term I haven’t heard in aeons…
Now, users come already with certain habits and expectations developed by years of of computer use.
This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different.
Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
This is a really great point. Like many others on this thread I miss "old" UI design, and like many posters can explain why. There's been a large transition to hiding UI, not marking interactable UI, and not spacially locating related UI elements.
Recently I watched one of my nieces use her phone. She was trying to do something, frustrated and telling me, but had not yet asked me to help. (I offer to help, but not to do something for them - to guide but let them achieve their goal.) I realised she was essentially tapping the screen looking for something that responded to taps. She didn't know what would react. Now, she knows lists can be scrolled, buttons etc can be clicked... but does she? Because there are no buttons, often, today and the button she needed, which I could see onscreen, was just text, no border indicating clickability.
I've heard anecdotally that the big UI designers in companies like Apple don't mind this because 'everyone already knows how to use their phones' and Macs / Windows. This ignores the young -- but we often ignore the young and expect them to learn -- and it ignores the elderly, those with bad eyesight, those who have not before now had the financial opportunity to own something, and so forth. There are lots, and always will be lots, of new people.
And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure. Not just because there are always those who don't know, but because designing such that it can be used by anyone is more optimal. And finally, that designing such that it can be be used by _anyone_ means _everyone_ can use it. Phrased another way, another golden quote I cannot attribute is, 'accessibility is for everyone.' Which is a way of saying, designing for the non-average user who may have difficulties makes usage much easier for the average user too.
Why? Cars aren't a failure because they need to be learnt, neither is reading, 10-finger typing, math, ...
We teach these things because they make other tasks more efficient. Similarly, interfaces are converging to a somewhat complex, but actually quite consistent, set of conventions that allows you to accomplish an infinite set of tasks.
You might argue that we could achieve the same thing with less complex conventions, but I disagree. According to the article, subjects struggled with nested folders, yet now, hierarchies are a hugely important concept.
Randomly tapping elements on the screen and seeing what happens is a perfectly acceptable learning strategy for a child.
From there, you might learn that an accent color can represent links; That a row of buttons, where one is emphasised, might be a tab-bar; That holding on an element will open a secondary menu; That little arrows represent folded content; that a list on the left might change content on the right; That certain icons always lead to similar functionality;
Side note: OP's neice was wildly tapping the screen, because she likely learned that nowadays nearly everything is interactive (Go on YouTube and find me one element that can't be tapped).
Sure, but that doesn't mean that a UI that requires the user to randomly tap everywhere to see which spots will do something is as well designed as one which indicates what parts do what.
This sort of minimalism in design is completely frustrating. Being familiar with common UI paradigms only works if the UI designers actually use them.
Isn't this a good thing, though? Creating software that most current users out there can be easily onboarded with and be productive and familiar with quickly, without too much work put into it.
I recently did an article on using Linux as my daily driver for a week and admittedly picking a really boring desktop environment (XFCE) was a pleasant experience: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-...
Sure, things were occasionally broken for technical reasons, but at least the UX itself wasn't what was causing problems or friction. It's very much like using something like LibreOffice (with the default dropdown interface, or the optional ribbon one) after other office packages - it feels close enough to what you're used to not to be completely jarring, even if there might be other issues with it.
> Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
In my eyes, not challenging the status quo and making incremental improvements is a good idea for the majority of developers out there (even in web development, where you have your navbars and your sidebars and so on), let the trendsetters take the big risks and take what is proven to work in the long run from them, without being impacted negatively by their failures.
I do, however, support the idea of usability studies and looking for what might be better than what we currently have, but redesigns for the sake of being "modern" or "trendy" just seems like designers going for the fun low hanging fruit, like large companies just changing around all of their product icons, instead of working on, say, accessibility, text contrast and so on.
Really interesting seeing some of the design process that resulted in it.
This is pretty much the modern experience with web SPAs, except the hardware can hardly be blamed anymore.
"8 megs is recommended but I've got only 5"
The blog post is (2018) and the original article it republishes is (1996) according to Google.
You can also find it on Archive.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20220504061157/https://dl.acm.or...
See, for instance, here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#full
The “close window” (“×”) button is identical, and Windows 95 re-purposed NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button into a “maximize” button. But you can still see why NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button looks that way; it resembles a NeXTSTEP application icon, seen at the bottom on the above screenshot.
Windows 95 did not, sadly, copy the very useful behavior of the “close window” button in NeXTSTEP: It changed shape if the contents of a window was not saved, as seen here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#textedit...
In all other applications when you want to shut it down, it's the last option on the list. If you move the start menu to the top, then shutdown does indeed become the last on the list and the most common option, "Programs" becomes the closest by Fitts Law standards.
Even in the Program Manager in Windows 3.1, the Run and Shutdown options were the same place but the menu was at the top. From the beginning (of public releases) in Windows 95 you could in fact move the start bar to the top.
Having it on bottom was legally much cleaner, especially on the heels of 6-year saga of the classic Apple vs. Microsoft "look and feel" lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
Anyway, this is 100% speculative - there is a few builds with it on the top, such as Windows 95 build 90c https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_90c but it starts on the bottom and quickly moves back there: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Category:Windows_95_builds
But really, menu bar on the top, colorful rainbowish icon on the left, clock on the right, it's very System 7.5 (https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_7.5)
Reminds me of McDonaldland vs Sid & Marty Krofft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Marty_Krofft_Televisio....), and I quote: "We do not believe that the ordinary reasonable person, let alone a child, viewing these works will even notice that Pufnstuf is wearing a cummerbund while Mayor McCheese is wearing a diplomat’s sash."
Fitt's Law, GOMS analysis and the human processor model were all the rage in the mid-90s.
The ordering is pretty unusual but when you push the start menu to the top, all the rules are followed again.
Again, pure speculation. I wasn't in the room and I've never been able to directly ask someone who was (although I'd go out of my way for the opportunity).
As far as how it took them so long, I'd imagine moving things around on the start menu would require the signoff of an annoyingly large number of people. This is before the modern era of Unilateral UI Designer Autocrat who's given questionably broad authority over everything.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/danieloran/2022/11/28/qa-about-the-...
I am sure there are a lot of people interested in the history of computing and user interfaces that would really appreciate this interview and seeing the original prototypes and sketches.
Here it is:
Edit: reading further, this is a great example: "Separate UI for Beginners [...] [various problems mentioned] [...] For these reasons and others, we abandoned the idea". These reasons translate directly, one-to-one, to Android's simple homescreen variant that my grandma kept finding somehow, clicking on, and then not being able to use various things on her phone anymore. Nor getting more comfortable with the proper UI. Nor was it consistent with other apps. Android added this feature when, a decade earlier, it was already spotted (long before release, I should note) that such a variant wouldn't help people at all. This doesn't appear to have been thought about or tested in the real world, and I think Android is the most-used OS on the planet. (Not sure if all vendor's shells have this feature as well, but I'm fairly sure it was stock android or at least commonly implemented a few versions ago.)
To address your second question, it depends on the test. For example, during a recent test where I work (fairly large tech company), we used user logs to identify a set of "power users", since that's who we were interested in learning more about.
Or perhaps all the "easy pickings" have been picked and there's not much left.
See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbitrary metrics
Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.
The world we could have had...
Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.
On Windows 11, the System Classic skin is a very light gray and uses Segoe UI. 95/98 uses a darker gray and Microsoft Sans Serif. 2000 uses a slightly lighter gray and Tahoma. ME uses the 2000 gray and Tahoma.
On Windows XP, the 95/98 theme was "Windows Classic", and the 2000 theme was "Windows Standard".
Or if you want a visual comparison of the original UIs, https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/running#win95
Even many Mac users copy aspects of it (put your Applications folder in your dock and you have a start menu/programs).
You could put anything you wanted in that folder, and it would show up in the Apple Menu. It was a good idea to put aliases to your most commonly-used apps in it. I remember doing that all the way up through Mac OS 9.
Or the joke of a start menu from Windows 8 that presumably Ballmer liked a lot. You even had to make some hidden gesture (swish and flick, professor flitwick would say) to get to the settings only to find the 'shut down' option.
Windows 9x was a bit gray but otherwise mostly made sense.
Windows 10 seems to have gone back to the state of things at 7, except now the settings are at 200% zoom/whitespace and all over the place and I've heard everyone from beginner to guru wonder where the heck they hid xyz.
Windows 11 you've already covered.
Precisely this sort of thing is why I wondered in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33776750) whether this type of testing happens anymore at all, or whether it is constrained in some way.
On Windows 11, it's very rare to have to use the old Control Panel. It still exists for some uncommon settings, but nearly everything has been moved to the new settings. And everything is actually intelligently grouped. I only wish you could have multiple Settings windows open at once.
I cannot think of anything good to say about it in any other context though.
https://twitter.com/thebookisclosed/status/15929816173412474...
> Windows 11 is going to get a "Never Combine" taskbar item setting after all. It no longer features window titles like in Windows 10 & older releases, but retains the icon per window mechanic which some might still find useful. New in build 25246, hidden behind feature 29785186
> This feature is forcibly disabled and even if you do manage to enable it (regular ViVe commands won't do) its code is partially broken. You can notice WinDbg running as a few small patches were needed. No UI for enabling this exists in Settings yet.
I think the next leap in UI and visual design from Microsoft was...Windows Phone 8 (2012). It was a refreshing and different approach to mobile design. The visual language 'Metro' worked well on mobile touch screens. But Microsoft took the bad decision to transplant 'Metro' (flat design) to the desktop. The result is a clumsy, jumble of inconsistent screens. It simply doesn't work.
After installing Word 97, I have found it such a pleasure to use that I've started doing a lot of my writing in it.
From inside of a VM, it is still more responsive and accessible than most other things I have to use today.
It also had a very fluid and gentle gradiant from functionality intended for everyday users to more advanced stuff, without making you feel overwhelmed and without hiding things too much away from you.. Just count how many clicks it takes to install the IPX protocol in Windows 95 vs Windows 10! (Also, good luck with that on 10!)
It's also amazing how well it ran on the hardware at the time, 100 mhz and 16 mb ram was Just Fine. The entire OS could probably fit inside the space taken up by the windows 10 start menu I'm sure.
I wish M$ would start trying to make a good user experience again, instead of trying to sell candy crush..
I think there is something really interesting about how even back in 1992 people were talking about the need to be more agile.