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Comment by rafabulsing | Hacker News Reader

This is something that I've wondered about before. I've seen many people with that opinion: UIs in the past, although dated looking now, were very intuitive, in that every interactive thing looked interactive.

Contrast that with amorphous, flat, "clean" designs we have today.

So what could we do to have something that looks nice and modern, but is also intuitive, with clear affordances?

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Windows 95 was developed over several years with a lot of research and user studies. The primary objective of all this work was so that a person without prior exposure to computers could figure out how to use it. The software was designed to help the user accomplish the tasks they have set out to do before sitting down at the computer.

With most modern mainstream interfaces, both the audience and the objectives have changed. The overwhelming majority of the audience is now computer-literate and can be counted on to figure out how to use the basic features regardless of their quality. And the design objectives for many interfaces have changed to manipulating the users to do what the developer wants them to do, with the user's tasks relegated to a side quest.

Another factor is that Windows 95 was developed for "install it and leave it" operation, with the next upgrade coming in a year or two. A lot of attention to detail was unavoidable because you could not push an update a week after release to patch a bug. At the same time, Microsoft was offering real live person phone support for its products, so every UI flaw cost them a lot in support costs.

Also, one of the design requirements was to fully support only-keyboard operation, and a lot of QA effort went into ensuring this was true. This meant that every UI element had to have a keyboard cue. This duplication of accessibility resulted in a UI which was much more thoroughly evaluated for its efficiency.

Finally, I think there was a different culture around design. I think a higher portion of people in the UI field were there for personal and passion reasons, and would have been embarrassed to have anything to do with the type of blundering buffoon of an interface that is common in today's computing.

Excellent observations and analysis. Thank you. Indeed, there is so much going on under the tip of the iceberg.

I've been in development for 24 years and now I have issues with some very strange UIs. Where do I click to post?

Old UIs are consistent. Buttons are buttons, labels are labels, and so on.

New UIs are inconsistent. In the facebook interface, the post button is not a button, it's a label. It may have changed since I last used it. It also occurs in native programs.

In older UIs, button size makes sense. Today every app recreates the buttons, with absurd sizes.

Contrast. Designers love low contrast in the new UIs. Here in HN it is sometimes very difficult to read the text.

As a developer, I participated in several meetings about new UIs. "Beauty" is the keyword. The beauty seems to be in the rounded corners and the use of labels instead of buttons. Yes, I created a bunch of shitty UIs.

But most importantly, dark patterns don't exist in old UIs. Dark patterns are the worst thing about the new UIs.

Even with old UIs there were definitely mis-use of UI elements. Clickable labels that opened things, buttons made of images. Apps that were basically an imagemap that you clicked on. Think early media apps like Realplayer.

Although I don't know if you'd really classify these as "old UIs" - they were definitely old, and had a UI. You probably mean "use native platform widgets were possible and any new widgets look as native as possible".

But then some apps bridged this gap nicely. Winamp was very "non native" but the default skin was consistent, clean, and fast.

> Even with old UIs there were definitely mis-use of UI elements

Yes, but they were exceptions. Interface Hall of Shame has some examples http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/

> Winamp was very "non native" but the default skin was consistent, clean, and fast.

Visual aside, Winamp follows certain standards. Buttons are buttons, for example.

In the 90's, the concern was teaching new users how to compute. Personal computers for the home were still relatively new, and many people were using them for the very first time. Everyone was concerned with usability.

In the 20's, the concern is onboarding users that already have devices and pay money to use software. We don't think as much about familiarity, teaching, etc.

That's it, perfect.

Perhaps the most important thing is to keep the user on the platform, avoiding his departure as much as possible. Thus, a "unique" interface helps with this.

That would make sense if those unique UIs didn't themselves change fairly drastically every few years. I loved the older iOS devices because of the physical home button - I could give it to my grandma and say, "if you ever get lost, press this and you'll be back to home screen" - and it worked wonderfully... until they removed the physical button. On the latest iPad, you have to swipe from below the edge of the screen instead, and do it fast enough (if you do it slow you get the task switcher instead of home). Needless to say, this requires relearning.

At one of my jobs I worked on change for the sake of change... there was no real meaning to the change, just the boss wanted change. I don't have a good theory about it, but it's now very common. Apple, facebook, to it all the time.

Is it to create a "fresh product" feeling? I don't know.

> in that every interactive thing looked interactive

I agree in general though i'm not sure Win95 was that consistent. Buttons did look 3D but menus - also interactive - did not. Similarly with the context menu icon at the top left, it was interactive but didn't look like it. Meanwhile Win98 had toolbar buttons become flat.

There was an attempt with Win3.0 (i think) to define a form-follows-function approach where "if something can be interacted with it should be 3D" but even that didn't went far (checkboxes were not 3D nor were edit boxes). By late Win3.1 the ctl3d (i think) DLL was introduced to make everything look 3D regardless of function.

In comparison to today, sure things were better, but it isn't like there was any point in time where things were consistent in terms of control/widget look following its function.

Not every control was 3D, but for example in the menus you had mouseover highlighting that would suggest that you can click the item. And if for some control it wasn’t mouseover highlighting, then it was a tooltip or a changing mouse pointer.

That was in Windows 98, Windows 95 did not have any mouse hover highlighting. And from a form-follows-function perspective it is still inferior to having a distinct visual style for interactive elements without needing any interaction from the user like mouse hovering.

I’m sure there are many ways to do a restyling, similar to the Apple Aqua UI [0] for example, that could create a fresh look, while maintaining the clear affordances.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_(user_interface)

The issue, I suspect, is that the young UI graphic designers working at Microsoft today mostly didn’t grow up using PCs and therefore don’t really know what their missing.

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