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Companies like Microsoft do their research. They interview the gen-Z'ers and get consistent feedback about the UIs HackerNews likes: "They're old. They're boring. They're dated. I don't like them. My grandma would use this."

Microsoft feels that it has no choice but to follow fashion trends and I am not sure that they're wrong to do so. Eventually minimalist UIs will go out of fashion and utilitarian evidence-based UIs may come back. But for now, the fashion is what it is and if companies want new users, they must follow the trend.

Regarding the hodge-podge of different UI designs, I think that that is just a function of UI/UX designers not being honest with themselves and others about whether they're doing engineering, psychology or fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change but engineering and psychology do not. This creates inconsistencies.

> Companies like Microsoft do their research.

Having worked at many companies over the years I feel like you are giving Microsoft way more credit than it probably deserves.

Politics plays a huge role in decision making, and in my experience, when it comes to UI/UX, politics accounts for 80% or more of choices.

I find it really hard to convince myself that Windows' scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign on top of each other is the result of careful planning and research.

I'm sure they do the research, and look at feedback. I just don't think it has any bearing on decision making.

This is true. I was a senior developer at Apple for a decade, and if you think they follow some rigorous UI-vetting process (or even user testing in many cases), you’re wrong. There are probably exceptions, but it’s not a company-wide norm.

I also think the fashion theory is wrong. In fact, it’s backward. Younger users didn’t demand these regressions; they’re simply more used to lazy, shitty design and the absence of the visual cues and standards that made GUIs so intuitive in the first place. So, for example, they are more likely to tap or click on a plain text label to see if it’s a control than those of us who expect controls to be demarcated as such. But once those regressions become the norm, the better designs are indeed recognizable as “older.”

Thus we all suffer a decline in design quality. Windows is now an unmitigated UI shítshow.

Fortunately we’re finally seeing some backlash against “flat” (AKA no) design.

Some flatish themes can be good. Mac System 7, or Zukitre. Because the buttons have contrast and they are marked as such.

Yes. Cheesy skeuomorphism caused a massive overcorrection. It’s time to get back to some subtle bevels and highlights and stop dicking with it.

Yeah. It feels more like they have a long to-do list of settings menus to update and they just can never quite get through it.

"Politics" doesn't explain the change. Politics in corporations was just as bad in the 90s as it is today, if not worse.

Separately, I didn't say anything about "careful planning", I only said "research". And that the research is telling them to make the UIs look flat and non-skeuomorphic.

> scatterbrain UX with layers of half done redesign

No one here claimed that they succeeded ;-)

> They're boring. They're dated.

Boring sound like a good UI quality to me. I don't want UI to be entertaining and full of surprises, I want a job to be done.

But that will not get you a promotion or industry award if you are the designer.

The only flat theme I liked was Zukitre under Linux with the Newaita icons. Contrasted gray with clear buttons and nice icons. The rest sucked a lot. Either too bright, or dark, or contrastless.

II am one of the gen-Z'ers you are talking about.

Each time OS vendors update their UI, they add more white space and make the UI flatter. The old always complain but I just found the new design more comfortable and intuitive to use.

It is a one way trip. I can't get back to old, traditional IDE after trying the more modern VS Code.

VSCode doesn't have a lot of whitespace though, it's still a function-over-form, high information density, getting things done application.

It has much more white space compared to IntelliJ IDEA or Visual Studio.

I am a Millennial and I don't give a crap about fashion and trends. I want something that I like and is good to use. I found some old UI's ugly and clunky. I find the trend of material design just that: a trend. Just like Baroque, Rococo and Renaissance were trends. Which eventually faded, like all trends. Just like Material Design will fade. Some young people are rebels just for the sake of rebelling, and therefore it has to change regardless of whether the change is good or not. Cool, though sad. Those are the ones that most likely will become conservatives later on, as they're just following emotions. Some older people are conservative because "the good ole times when everything was better." I fit in neither, which is kind of lonely but it is what it is.

I love the W11 design, best looking one so far. Usability is not bad. W7's was better in some regards, worse in others. I hated W10 design. Usability was poor. W7 design was nice. Usability was good. Windows XP design was ugly. Usability was nice. Windows 98 was ugly. Usability was ok for the time.

The others in between are not worth mentioning.

You are wrong. My first graphical OS was Windows 98 at home after DOS at school. Windows 95 was built with UX/UI at mind, which lots of research. Current are themes are pure crap on usability. No contrast for buttons or menues. Too bright or too dark themes. No slight widget frames for separation.

The only semi usable flat theme under *nix it's Zukitre GTK2/3 theme with, maybe, the Newaita icons or similar. Everything else lacks lots of contrast.

You can use window managers in Unix.

Themes are used for borders. Every program has its own UI. Even on MS Windows.

Except for Motif/Athena, everything under my GNU/Linux setup uses the "blackwater-dim" GTK2/3/QT5 and the Chicago 95 theme thanks to qt5ct, among the Metal2 IceWM theme closeish to early 00's Java look. Best of worlds. A highly usable window border, keybindings, solid widget themings and virtual desktops.

> You are wrong.

Not acknowledging that other people have other taste that doesn't necessarily match with a person's personal preference is wrong in my opinion.

It's not a matter of taste. Windows 95 was specially built on a large study on usability: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

Unix had brilliant points, too: Virtual desktops and moving/resizing with alt or super_l and clicking the mouse with a left/right mouse click.

Thus, you can use a Unix based WM/DE (IceWM, Mate, XFCE) with the Windows 95 theming (Chicago95) AND the Unix keybindings, having the best of the both worlds since Icewm was created from long ago.

Can't you just acknowledge that the GP just have a significantly different experience from yours? It's disappointing that you seem to just ignore everything that the GP said, with the explicit acknowledgement that it was just their personal opinion, and just rammed another comment without understanding it?

I will just ignore your thick-headed comment from this point, it's clear that you're not arguing in good faith.

Current icons will go out of fashion, then all we have left are single letters that comprise major "applications"... "T" for twitter, "F" for Facebook, "I" for Instagram. You get the idea.

Looks at work Windows laptop icons...stylized O for Outlook...Y for Yammer...T for Teams...E for Excel...etc., etc.

Apparently, Microsoft is way ahead of you.

Apparently.. :mindblown:

The trouble is that the desktop metaphor depends on your programs being analogous to physical tools. A text editor is a notepad, a directory is a manila folder, a contacts app is a Rolodex. What iconic tool represents Twitter, or "app store," or "password manager," or "detect the song that's playing right now"? The metaphor breaks down and your icons become mere abstract shapes. If no other meaning is relevant, an eye-catchingly stylized version of the first letter of the service name at least hints at what this is.

> Old versions of Windows seemed to be built in a intuitive way so even someone with no computer experience would have a chance at finding what they were looking for.

I think the goal is very much the same today, but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS. Computers are now for serious business and maybe high-end video games, the rest is done on phones and tablets. The world has gone mobile first so for beginners to pick up Windows, Windows needs to be "mobile-compatible". Icons are flat and abstract, buttons are big without borders, and half your screen being filled with UI is not bad as long as you full screen that important content when it matters.

I don't think the clarity of older operating systems needs to go away per se, but people's expectations have dropped significantly with small touch screen devices and designers love showing off how "clean" their design looks.

Mobile designs are horrible about being intuitive and discoverable, to the point that many apps have tutorials about where you can swipe or double-tap and what it does because there's no reasonable way to discern this from their UI. If that's what we base our desktop UIs on it's no wonder they become less usable.

Yeah, mobile is an mess of obscure gestures and icons.

Without the ability to hover over an icon with a cursor there's often no way to tell what it will do, and apps usually don't include any help pages.

I completely agree that UX on mobile is terrible, half the controls can only be learned by random chance or brute force. However, kids grow up with mobile devices from a very young age these days, young enough for the terrible UX not to matter as much.

Copying the mobile UI is definitely a bad direction, but it's a very understandable one from a business sense and it's the only explanation I can really think of when it comes to Windows 11's iconography and design.

I really dislike this trend. I switched my KDE theme to windows classic with the memphis icons and it's just a joy to use, even for a while. I like being able to tweak things, and the latest version of windows is even harder to do that.

> but the people first using a computer have probably already experienced Android or iOS.

Rape is also an experience. A negative one.

And Android or iOS are not computers (just like a TV or a washing machine are not computers). They are specialized entertainment devices designed to extract data from the users.

> Computers are now for serious business

Always have been.

Exactly, we are using the IBM-compatible PC, not some Amiga-compatible computer.

As others said -- "Control Panel" is the older UI being phased out, "Settings" is the new, unified one. And on Windows 11 it really does include 99% of what Settings had. There's only a few screens here and there for very specific, niche things that are still linked-to via Settings. (e.g.: Color Management -- you can select a color profile in Settings but you need the older "advanced" UI for manually importing ICCs and such. Colorimeters and monitor drivers auto-import ICCs.)

And "Start" has been gone for over 15 years. It transformed into the "Windows logo button" with Vista in 2006. The menu's naming was kept (and still is) but "Start" as text hasn't been a thing for a long time.

I normally use the "Change what closing the lid does" setting on laptops but it is not in Settings on Windows 11 nor is there a link to it. You have to know what search term to use to find it.

Yeah, that one is still stuck in power plan settings for some reason. But they’ve been moving to one “Balanced” plan for a while now so I guess that entire panel is going away.

I had to use Outlook recently after a decade or so to help someone declutter their mailbox.

I was shocked how unintuitive and sometimes insane that software has turned to. It's basically useless. After spending hours trying to sort the emails, we decided to just back them up and delete everything. My friend moved to Gmail.

I wonder what happened? Old Outlook while having some shortcomings was a manageable piece of software, whereas the new one is completely unusable. Other Microsoft software suffer the same problems like Teams. I feel sorry for any workplace that is using any Microsoft software. There are exceptions like VSCode, but given how things work at Microsoft, I wouldn't be surprised if VSCode turned into crap nobody wants to use anymore.

> I wonder what happened ?

They call it the Ribbon. A collections of icons (or as someone said, hyeroglyphs) arranged in who knows what order, which you need to guess what they do. Some have text, some not.

There are issues with the modern windows user interface but I’m not sure it’s these. For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts, so the label didn’t really make sense.

The control panel is depreciated and remains for compatibility reasons and is deliberately hidden in favour of the settings button, which uses the now familiar gear icon.

> For one “start” was never actually how most people started using the computer - it is through desktop shortcuts

This is just wrong haha. Here's a raymond chen post:

> But one thing kept getting kicked up by usability tests: People booted up the computer and just sat there, unsure what to do next.

> That’s when we decided to label the System button “Start”.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030722-00/?p=43...

Edit: I hope this comment doesn't come off as rude or anything too :). I just remember reading about this in Raymond's book and the fact that the start menu originally didn't say start stuck out to me.

Ah, but that's because those people were presumably used to Windows 3.1, where when the computer started up, a window opened displaying an icon grid of programs you could open. From the perspective of one of these people, Windows 95 is like if Windows 3.1 failed to finish booting up, so Program Manager never started, and you were stuck just staring at the wallpaper.

Well, prior to Windows 95, Windows didn't really have a desktop. 3.1's desktop was just an icon-grid taskbar. (Now I'm wondering if the "single instance" behavior of moving to front when you relaunch an app was done to accommodate that UI pattern)

> UI/UX decisions made in the latest versions of Windows

"Google and Apple does it so it must be good"

"Tablets and phones are the future."

"Users don't want to be bothered"

"We know better"