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ilrwbwrkhv

Some of the greatest UX of all time. Shame how far we have fallen in the current flat world.

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A few people are trying to claim it back! My current favorite - https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar

I wonder what the differences between Classic, 2000, 95/98 themes are when put side by side.

Fonts and colors, matching the original OS.

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

This is amazing. Instant install. I wish there was a way to theme all of the UI to be like 95.

Nice! Does it work with OpenShell?

This is unbelievable. Thanks so much for sharing.

Windows 95 was an unprecedented advance in the human/computer GUI interface, which is still reverberating today.

Even many Mac users copy aspects of it (put your Applications folder in your dock and you have a start menu/programs).

In fairness, Mac users were already doing that in 1991 with System 7's Apple Menu Items folder.

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.

I know, like can the UI/UX people please please PLEASE pay more attention to this stuff!

UX goal is not enhance user experience anymore, it's improve profits by manipulation of the user experience.

You'll find that the vast majority of bad UX decisions aren't coming from designers themselves, but from management.

See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbitrary metrics

Designers are the gatekeepers though, maybe they should stand up to these folks more often.

I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement.

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.

I suspect a lot of that is because designers aren't often technology lifers, rather seemingly entering this field smelling profit and riding the wave as it were. I don't know what the solution is here other than firing them all and replacing them with engineers and passionate tech nerds who remember their history. Which won't ever happen, and the situation is hopeless.

The world we could have had...

Nonsense; plenty of people in UX, myself included, have tech backgrounds. Software engineers aren't immune from the "higher metrics == uSeRs lOvE iT" trap.

Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.

I wouldn't call those metrics arbitrary, they're just trying to measure something different. It's no longer measuring user productivity, it's measuring user engagement. It's no longer how quickly a user familiarizes and gets something done with the software, it's how often and how long the user uses the software.

I keep wondering, if flat is the new hot thing, why don't people just use libXaw to build their modern, cutting-edge UIs and not hobble my computer's performance in the process?

Because they cannot draw some rectangles like in the good old days. They have to "compose" a 3D surface of the screen. /s

libXaw is difficult to use and there aren't really suitable widgets for many purposes-- it only really has buttons and textboxes. It doesn't support sophisticated layouts either, it just stretches the controls rather than letting you define any sort of anchors/margins.

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