The rise and fall of the standard user interface
theregister.com
theregister.com
80s 90s and early 2000s it was the OS. All apps running under a specific OS would look similar to each other. Behave same way. File menus looked same. Preferences was in same location.
But somewhere in 2000s this reversed and OS was no longer driver of consistency.
App developers stopped following OS UI guidelines and decided that it's not important for OS to be cohesive. The goal was that app, no matter where it is running, should have consistent look and behavior.
And now we are in application centric world where application dictates UI and there is no OS level consistency.
Additionally Microsoft and Apple did not help the situation by themselves breaking the OS UI paradigms with media players, or in MS case MS Office.
It was more of a thing on Macs, which never had a point where the platform didn’t provide guidance for what programs should look like, and that only got stronger with the introduction of OS X where non-native programs stuck out like a sore thumb due to looking so supremely unpolished next to apps built with Cocoa or Carbon, which were richly nuanced.
To my memory, all of this flipped with the introduction of flat design, when it became more acceptable to build software that didn’t have much love put towards UI design. An electron (or similar, e.g. CEF) app built using Material Design 1.0 stuck out much less starkly when framed by the flattened Helveticized OS X Yosemite or Windows 8 than it did framed by OS X Mavericks or Windows 7.
At the time of Windows 95, things were still basically homogeneous.
You could tell when something was made with Borland and TUI. Professional applications tended to look alike.
This is true... but, to be fair, there were a handful of apps that went out of their way to look like Turbovision apps but weren't, and by the same token, it was possible to create (e.g.) Delphi apps that didn't look like it.
The first console text editor I really liked on Linux was SETedit.
https://setedit.sourceforge.net/#scrnsht
That, I think, uses a 3rd party independent clone of Turbovision.
Do hammers, bulldozers, and microscopes all use a "standard user interface"? No, they do not.
A user interface should be optimized for the tool in question, not optimized to look exactly like the interface for all other tools.
Not to mention the hubris involved with imagining that one has invented the One True User Interface at the very dawn of the technology.
While performing roughly the same task, modern hammers don't have anything like the "user interface" of a Paleolithic hammer stone. Fortunately there weren't any "Human Interface Guidelines" people around when the hammer stone was invented.
When you learn how to drive a car, you can expect the same standard across all cars. You don't relearn how to drive when you get into a new car. There's common UI and UX paradigms across all software and no one should have to learn your bespoke implementation. And I believe these sets should be part of the OS.
When you look at Spotify or Slack UI, there's nothing there that is better than their more native looking alternatives. I have utilities to populate a command panel with menu items, but it's essentially useless on these apps because everything is buried inside the app itself.
These days you do. We're at a transition these last 10 years or so as great as the one from crank-start to key-turn start cars, from regular steering to powered steering, and from manual to automatic transmission.
Even back a couple of decades ago I remember my 1980's Buick having shifting on the steering post toggles versus my 2000's Saturn having a standard shift stick.
I think the better parallel is aspect ratio, not resolution.
Across all cars. Not "across all controllable artifacts" or even "across all vehicles" (driving a bulldozer is way different from driving a car).
An optimal user interface for (e.g.) an accounting package is extremely unlikely to be the same as the interface for (e.g.) a video editor.
For that matter, imagine attempting to drive a car by picking the things you want to do off a menu with a mouse.
It would suck.
Big time.
"Ok, now open the Speed menu and scroll down to 'brake'. Now go to the 'slam' submenu item... whoops! Sorry, kitty!".
I think its perfectly reasonable to expect a program to look and feel similar to other programs on the same OS.
At least for things the OS is somewhat concerned with, like window decorations, menu bars and so on.
If i designed an OS id be frustrated with the inconsistencies in how different applications interact with the design of my OS.
Indeed - I remember this situation very clearly. Back when Office 2007 came out, there was no first-party way to create applications like that, and after a year or two, only few third-party libraries that were lacking in quality and polish.
This was the turning point. Clients asked us for it, we tried, but ultimately we decided to ditch the bad libraries and do our own thing - then the clients decided they might as well define their own UI design language if they're paying for UI component development.
This was justified with, "I am an HCI expert, trust me". Which is garbage: I'm the user of the tool; don't try to pretend you know better, like some colonial governor.
Also, it started getting slower. A process that only got worse and worse.
My assumption is that it was really all driven by internal politics within Microsoft, specifically some manager's need to Change Something.
Strongly agreed. Better for newbies, maybe, but disastrous for skilled users. It broke the suite for me: I can't stand it at all, and switched to LibreOffice full time.
Sadly, though, LO Writer doesn't have Outline Mode, the one indispensible bit of MS Office for me. So I keep Word 97 or Word 2000 around, just for outlining.
The whole ribbon interface debacle looks like a classic case of enshittification, where the users are no longer the customers anymore.
But Office 2011 is 32-bit and no longer runs. Now, I only keep Word around. I've been forced to update to 2016, the oldest 64-bit version that'll run on macOS 11 (AIUI).
The menu bar is an inextricable part of the macOS UI so it would be hard to remove, but it demonstrates perfectly that Office for Windows could have kept both UIs, because the macOS version did.
My normal mode of operation in Word for Windows uo to 2003 is just to turn off all the toolbars, and the horizontal scrollbar, and the ruler. It runs well with nothing but a menu bar and every feature is usable.
Now it's easier to use HTML stack to create UIs and harder to use OS native controls.
Microsoft is still working hard at Office 365. They are nowhere close.
Java had, at some time, achived this.
There are as many bad user interfaces out there as there is bad graphic design, although I often think that the majority of "egregious" examples of graphic design (signs, etc) are actually quite functional and informative, just arguably visually-offensive -- they do their job well enough, they're just tarted up like toaster pastries.
Bad UIs on the other hand are genuinely unusable and can make or break an otherwise-brilliant program or service.
1) Frequently used applications: doesn't matter if I have to ctrl-alt-right-double-tap a weird key or click on some invisible UI element. I'll learn what it takes and use it without complaint
2) Casual use of a new environment or app: endless complaining about the weirdness until I either cast it aside or use it everyday (see 1 above)
It is overlong, sadly, yes. It was written in some haste, despite considerable planning -- see my docs uploaded to the Internet Archive, for instance -- because one of my planned, agreed interviewees for Retro Tech Week dropped out at the last minute and left me without an article, and I had to rush this.
Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.
> my OS/2 phase was a lot of fun and I was sad when it ended.
Same. I have been playing around with eComStation and ArcaOS recently. They are amazingly fast on elderly Core 2 Duo era kit where any modern Linux distro is sluggish... but I can't get wifi working.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/01/19/retro_tech_week_arca_...
I agree about the lack of standard key bindings is a problem. It is definitely a problem with things like text editors. Even worse between modal editors, or a mix of modal and modeless - I generally use Helix and occasionally using vi (or nano, or anything else) is a pain.
There aren’t any DEs that for example mimic macOS (modern or classic) and the few that do something different (e.g. GNUSTEP, CDE, etc) don’t ship with distros. As far as I know there haven’t been any recent DEs that were designed from scratch based on research from new user trials and usability studies (which is unfortunate; most of data in this realm dates back 20 years or more and could probably benefit from addition of new data from a modern context).
I cannot tell how well the distros that do mimic MacOS do it, but from what you say it is not well enough (at least not Pantheon).
If we're talking the files+folders paradigm, then there's not much innovation remaining outside of cosmetic changes. Desktop computers are "done" much the same way automobile interfaces (steering wheel, foot peddles, etc) are "done". I think true Desktop innovations would require a paradigm shift or new hardware, like eye-tracking or a BCI.