21 ms·

Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

568 points by LaSombra 9y ago

amiga-workbench 9y ago
When actual thought and reasoning went into UI design. Nice to see the methodology.
- ogdoad 9y ago
  Have we actually reached the point where we idolize something that was equally mainstream to bash when it came out? Remember "Winblows" &c? Suddenly, faced with hyper-spy mega-corps, the dumb simplicity of the evil-yet-cute Windows 95 is desirable. Like the lesser of two evils, or the evil you know. Any day now, a post will come up extolling the illumined joys of mainframe COBOL programming.
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    I'm no luddite but several areas of computing have had serious regressions. I still have Windows 95 machines kicking around and I know how fickle they are, but you will never hear me saying a bad word about the UI.
  - krylon 9y ago
    > Remember "Winblows" &c? There were many, many things wrong with Windows 95 (and its successors). But the design of the Shell was solid. (Also, considering how hardware requirements have skyrocketed, it might seem remarkable to some that it could run on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM and a CPU that makes today's low-end mobile phones look like supercomputers and still feel snappy.) I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that.
    - cesarb 9y ago
      > I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that. If you think of shutdown as a "stop" command to the computer, you see the contradiction: to stop your computer, press start.
      - krylon 9y ago
        I get that, I just never thought it was very funny. Start might not have been the best name for that button, but the idea of having a single a menu to access all OS functionality and applications was good. Still is good, in fact, which why so many people got upset when they removed it in Windows 8.
  - boomlinde 9y ago
    There was even a parody song about how much Windows 95 sucked, but the criticism seemed more popularly aimed at its resource requirements than the UI design.
    - ogdoad 9y ago
      The requirements were practically negligible for its era, and the leap it represented. I have installed and used it at length on 386 with 8MB on a 210MB disk. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't pretty bad either. Perhaps (on appropriate hardware) it wasn't as solid as NT 4, but before XP (which is 2000 which is NT, even if simplifying it) there weren't many "polished enough" _and_ "affordable enough" windowing systems for the masses. Classic Mac OS was very polished but not very affordable, and it didn't even have pre-emptive multiprocessing. UNIX had either a high cost of entry if you're talking workstations (Suns and SGIs were polished but expensive) or man-hours to acclimatize (try running X11 in 1995, then compare to Windows 95). Eh. In any case, to bring it back. It was good enough. Nowadays, I often hope for a minimal Windows 10 that will be out of the way enough to approach Windows 95.
      - boomlinde 9y ago
        > The requirements were practically negligible for its era Your 8 MB was the "recommended" requirement for 95, with 4 MB being the minimum. That wasn't pretty. If you have used 95 with only four megabytes of RAM and a small, slow hard drive, you'll learn that the minimum requirements are quite lower than comfortable, probably in order to more closely match what was actually a typical home computer at the time, some 386/486 with 4 MB RAM and a small hard drive. Where I'm from, Windows 95 pretty much meant getting a new PC for the average consumer. So you go home with your newly bought copy of Windows 95 to your 386 with 4 MB that you bought 1-2 years ago, perform the minimum installation to your 100 MB hard drive and find out that it's super slow and constantly using virtual memory making the loud disk sound like a Geiger counter throughout the session. You compare it to Windows 3.11, DOS, whatever you had before and have a pretty solid basis for complaining about its resource usage. Or worse, you read about Windows 95 and decide to finally sell your increasingly irrelevant Amiga 1200/3000/whatever now that you can also have preemptive multitasking on a PC, buy a cheap PC matching the Win 95 requirements with the money and install. Only to learn that it's 100x slower than Workbench, BSODs nearly as often as the Amiga gurus out, uses megabytes of RAM instead of kilobytes. Or you have a Macintosh, couldn't care less about how exactly multitasking is achieved, and wow, PC seems like a nice option now that that too has a nice, user friendly GUI. And it works on cheap, affordable hardware! So you buy the cheapest, most affordable hardware that'll support Windows 95...
  - anthk 9y ago
    Linux/Unix user since the 2003. 1) Windows 95 is a good UI design, better than even CDE. Heck, Win3.1 and CDE shared a lot of stuff. 2) ICEWM was golden back in 2001. Guess what mimicked.
- oblio 9y ago
  I doubt that Microsoft has really departed from the UI design methodology they used. The dubious decisions are most likely pushed from either the marketing department or from above. But I think Windows itself, even the newer versions, is quite well designed. Apple probably also has a pretty solid design process.
garganzol 9y ago
I remember the first time I used Windows 95. It was a smooth flight to say the least. Looking at Windows 95 user interface today, it becomes evident how iconic that UI was. No fluff, a pure joy to use.
wiradikusuma 9y ago
"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this, I'm always surprised, because she gives valid points, and I end up cursing the developer :D So, whenever I design UI/UX for an app, I ask my mom to test. Rant: In my opinion, there should be an option in Mac/Windows to disable file drag and drop. Every time I check her computer, I always find dislocated files simply because she accidentally drag them.
- michaelmrose 9y ago
  How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?
  - chkuendig 9y ago
    Cut & Paste for when you really need to reorganize? But usually it would probably be enough to just list the most recent files somewhere and provide full text search for everything else.
    - xab9 9y ago
      Seeing how my elderly parents use the computer: you don't manage files. At all. Right click is evil, keyboard shortcuts are evil, drag and drop never occurs to them. Mom usually just reads her emails (and attachements open in the browser nowdays), so it's not a problem, but father saves files. If he finds something important then he saves it multiple times, so in the file list view there will be multiple similar items, that's how he knows it's important (visually it's very distinctive). When he has to copy a file somewhere else he usually fires up his CAD software, opens the file and then saves it elsewhere. I just gave up "educating" them (after countless attempts). It's pointless. I remove file duplicates half a year, copy stuff to an usb key when he asks me (I visit them once a month) and avoid the machines like the plague, unless they explicitly ask me to do something (I installed ubuntu for mom, which works wonderfully for her, one less problem to worry about).
scandox 9y ago
24 People. If you'd asked me to guess I would have said 240.
- kuschku 9y ago
  24 people created this. 12'000 people create Uber's app.
- sbov 9y ago
  From some searching, Windows 95 was about 15 million lines of code, and Windows 3.1 had about 3 million. Compared to Firefox: https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...
- stevenwoo 9y ago
  From my reading, twelve designers and twelve programmers without a lot of overlap, and a significant investment in iterative useability studies. Interestingly they dropped the design documentation as too much trouble to update versus letting the design live in the latest implementation.
jaclaz 9y ago
Actually the original article by Kent (NOT Kevin) Sullivan is still available here: http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/...
- Multicomp 9y ago
  Thanks for finding this. Saved. I still have a soft spot for vanilla HTML. When I can hit view source and read the whole article (minus images) without much difficulty, I'm glad.
  - pault 9y ago
    I know it's not exactly the same but the developer tools on all modern browsers will display the current state of the DOM in the "inspect" tab. It's true that SPAs will have a lot more clutter in the form of JavaScript hooks and hidden elements but it's all there in glorious <html/>. :)
krylon 9y ago
The fact that the basic elements of Windows 95's GUI have survived for so long shows, I think, how well designed it was. For its time it was a great design that was intuitive to understand, relatively lightweight and did not get in my way. About the only changes I think improved things notably were the search field in the Start menu and Aero Snap.
- kobrad 9y ago
  Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. This is the new boundary for all interfaces, and I know it's just being stupid - sometimes it really makes me angry. But snap works just fine, yeah
  - krylon 9y ago
    > Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. I only use Windows at work, and my work computer is sufficiently slow that I have not had a problem with that. Maybe it is the version, too, my work laptop runs Windows 7 - and will hopefully continue to do so until Microsoft stops supporting it; as far as Windows goes, Microsoft really nailed it with Windows 7. (I have to admit, though, I have only very little experience with Windows 10; I really disliked Windows 8/8.1 and the corresponding server versions because Microsoft butchered the UI.)
- mustacheemperor 9y ago
  The replacement of actual Search with this Cortana-based attempt at a "smart" search or Q&A interaction is absolutely agonizing to experience as a user and just a completely boggling decision to me in general. Why on earth did a search feature that will return something different from what you typed in, with the exact thing you typed in the secondary results, ever make it out of testing for public release? I have faith it'll improve over time, but right now Cortana in general feels like a step directly backwards in every category "she" touches. The Edge browser is actually pretty slick on the Surface, but instead of being able to right click selected text and search it, I have to "ask Cortana." I don't want to ask Cortana, I want to search that in Google.
Paianni 9y ago
I have a feeling that Windows 95's window minimisation was at heart a workaround for the fact that the architecture couldn't support workspaces and therefore they had to find a way to 'hack' Windows to hide windows at will.
- thanatropism 9y ago
  Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).
  - amiga-workbench 9y ago
    Amiga Workbench did the same thing, the minimize button was labeled as "iconify" instead.
  - jaclaz 9y ago
    A lesser known program for Windows 3.1/3.11 was at the time the Norton Desktop, see: http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html that provided, even on Windows 3.1/3.11 roughly the same UI of the Mac OS of the time, very similar, for some aspects, to the later Windows 9x one.
    - interfixus 9y ago
      For some aspects, yes. For the over-all experience, not similar at all. PC Tools for Windows was another lternative shell. Finicky and prone to crashes, but better UI design than the Norton Desktop. Windows 95 obsoleted them both.
    - thanatropism 9y ago
      I remember someone who had an all-in-one Compaq PC with a version of Win 3.1 that had a shell with tabs on the top, not too unlike the "ribbon" of modern MS Office.
      - jaclaz 9y ago
louthy 9y ago
> Our testing data told us that the main problem was windows not being visible at all times, so users couldn’t see what they had open or access tasks quickly. This realization led us fairly quickly to the task bar design Hmm, I wonder if that should be reworded to “and then we saw RISC OS and it had a task bar design that we really liked”. I can’t believe that they wouldn’t have known about it.
- keithpeter 9y ago
  Yup - I remember that Windows PCs at work became far easier to use after Windows 95 (actually 98 I think) reached them as I was using an Archimedes at home.
russellbeattie 9y ago
It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it propelled Microsoft into a new level of ubiquity. Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Windows 95 solidified Microsoft's dominance, but could just as easily eroded it had they dropped the ball. Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. Edit: Found this fantastic PDF "Chicago Reviewers Guide" which goes over all the new stuff in Win95. So much stuff I had forgotten - TrueType fonts, Plug and Play, registry settings, right-click properties, long file names... Basically everything that makes Windows what it is today. http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf
- garblegarble 9y ago
  >Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. OT but have you tried Witch[1] as a task switcher? It switches between windows, which made my life SO much easier [1] https://manytricks.com/witch https://manytricks.com/witch
  - jvzr 9y ago
    I find Contexts (https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/) a better application to do exactly that
    - 9y ago
donmb 9y ago
But why?
petagonoral 9y ago
Contrast on that article between text and background was poor. following sets it back to something sane: document.body.style.fontWeight = "normal";
unicornporn 9y ago
I think it's beautiful. And, compared to Windows 10, Windows 95 was at least somewhat consistent design wise. After 12 years of macOS I recently got a Windows 10 machine. There's plenty of Windows 10 bling on top of the OS, but you don't have to dig deep before you encounter the embarrassing remnants from very early versions of Windows. Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Microsoft intend to do something about. I don't have too high hopes though, considering it was released two and a half years ago.
- xedarius 9y ago
  That problem increases when you throw a 4k monitor into the mix.
  - hutattedonmyarm 9y ago
    Even worse: A 4K main monitor, and a secondary 1080p one
- majewsky 9y ago
  > Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Microsoft intend to do something about. Might depend on what particular parts of the OS you come across. I use Win10 on my work notebook [1] and besides the long startup times [2], I haven't noticed anything "unfinished". In fact, Windows very subjectively feels more polished than macOS which I used before (until December). Then again, I don't use much of it: I only run Firefox, Slack, Outlook, and VirtualBox where the actual work is going on in a Linux VM. [1] Probably not the "latest" version though. I get to use whatever our corporate update server hands out. [2] Compared to my private Linux machines. macOS also took several minutes from turning on the machine to everything having fully settled in.
  - herbst 9y ago
    Pretty sure he is referring to the configuration structure. You get this fancy 8.1 sidebar configuration screens that may solve 80% of a average users tasks, but once you start digging you'll find configuration Windows in the style of W7, and if you dig even harder you'll even find stuff that looks straight out of 98. I am a linux users myself, configuration inconsistency gives me nightmares.
vilius 9y ago
In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin. As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket. Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short. I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that they did tried to stay away from copying as much as possible?
- valine 9y ago
  That was part of Apple’s GUI lawsuit in 1994 against Microfoft. Apple lost all parts of the suit except for the exclusive rights to the trash icon. Microsoft was forced to replace it with the recycle bin.
- Zardoz84 9y ago
  Because Apple would issue again Microsoft about stealing stuff from Mac ?
- TheCoreh 9y ago
  > As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. On the contrary, I'd say recycling is a much more fitting name for what happens when a file is deleted: The existing disk space is reclaimed to be reused for something else.
- theandrewbailey 9y ago
  At least with the Recycle Bin, one can joke that Windows is more environmentally friendly than other OSes.
- ubermonkey 9y ago
  I have to think that the common anti-pattern of naive users storing files they mean to keep in the Recycle Bin wouldn't happen so often if it were still called Trash.
  - toast0 9y ago
NoGravitas 9y ago
Some comparisons to the contemporary version of OS/2 (2.1 was the current version when Win95 was announced, and 3.0 was released immediately before Win95): * Applications minimized to a special folder, which was located on the desktop. * No start button or task bar (they were added in OS/2 4.0). * Shredder on the desktop (did not offer restore files like Mac Trash or Windows Recycle Bin). * Hierarchical folders on the desktop that could contain either shortcuts or files. * Shortcuts couldn't get "broken" as long as you did all of your file management through the Workplace Shell. * Folders and file types could be subclassed in various ways to change their behavior and appearance. Simple changes didn't require programming. * You could mark a folder as a project, and all the programs and files associated with the folder would open/close/hide along with the folder. At the time, I felt that the Workplace Shell was immensely superior to the Windows 95 desktop. But it probably was quite a bit less friendly to new users.
QGmLe 9y ago
Copy the Mac OS but make it crappier.
- kk_cz 9y ago
  Except apart for maybe "recycle bin" it was nothing like Mac OS. Central element of Windows 95 UI was taskbar and start menu, which don't have counterparts in Mac OS. Central element of Mac OS UI was the shared menubar, which doesn't have counterpart in Win95.
dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago
So much thought, effort and research went into this - and was thrown away altogether in Windows 8.
AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
It's impressive how long the "Desktop" paradigm of Windows 95 has stuck around, particularly if you're in the Linux Desktop world. Most of the popular desktop environments--Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon come to mind--still follow that pattern. The last major one to go in a different direction was GNOME 3, and the backlash against it was so fierce that several other major DE's forked an earlier version in order to keep consistency.
- romaniv 9y ago
  Desktop paradigm isn't a Windows 95 thing. It's Xerox Alto thing.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  What was GNOME 3's metaphor? (I've been so GNOME-averse I appear to have entirely missed that.)
  - AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
    It's difficult to explain succinctly. I will say that it's unique, insofar as it's not trying to copy past paradigms or macOS. But it can be a bit confusing. Minimize/Maximize buttons, for instance, aren't even included by default. Honestly, this is probably the best I can provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB7pBRi9Bbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB7pBRi9Bbk
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      Interesting, though that strikes me as maddeningly annoying as hell to actually use.
jcadam 9y ago
Ah, remembering Win95 makes me yearn for a simple, clean GUI again. All of the major operating systems have been in a downward slide in terms of UI/UX since the early 2000s. As far as UI/UX is concerned: Windows peaked with Windows 2000. MacOS with OS9 (Why didn't they just throw the classic GUI on top of Darwin)? At least with *nix you have choices and can go with one of the several variants of Gnome 2 (Xfce, et al).
- kk_cz 9y ago
  Just curious: why Windows 2000 and not Windows 7? Win7 was still internally consistent (as opposed to the newer tablet / mobile / pc / washing machine UIs of later versions) and provided few additional UI enhancements over 2k.
  - jcadam 9y ago
    Win7 is nice too, but I admit I didn't use it much (as I was a Linux user almost exclusively when 7 was released). I got Windows 10 on a new laptop and gave it an honest try (along with the new Linux subsystem), but the little annoyances and inconsistencies piled up, and back to Linux I went. I spent a lot of time with Windows 2000 back in the day. Windows 2000 was the first OS I bought retail -- my new PC came with Windows ME and it was so terrible I ran out and actually paid for an OS ;)
  - Koshkin 9y ago
    > still internally consistent The most internally consistent design was that of NT 3.1 - it was a true classic in many respects. As far as general usefulness, performance, and versatility nothing can compare with Windows 10 (except Linux, of course).
    - kk_cz 9y ago
      I am not arguing about NT 3.1, but what inconsistencies were there in Win7 UI? Starting with Win8 you have basically a random choice if some setting is set in "classic style" or new fancy "settings" dialogs. You can have all the performance in the world if your users spend most of the time just looking for the right place to do something.
erickhill 9y ago
As the Win95 team formed in 1992, I’d argue the Amiga OS was an excellent alternative at the time, albeit one oft forgotten due to its subsequent market share. Extremely easy to use, extend and navigatee, at the time it’s only missing piece was a built in “file explorer” but there were also so many 3rd party options by then, too (Directory Opus being my personal favorite).
UweSchmidt 9y ago
I still miss the dual window "Explorer" from Win 3.1 every time I move or copy files. The old File Manager had this by default. Installing Midnight Commander etc. on client computers is not possible, so I have to open two Explorers and get them to a convenient size.
- mikerg87 9y ago
  I keep hoping for a windows explorer with tabs with each release and each time I am dissapointed.
- mardukiz 9y ago
  Aye, need to go win + e, win + left_arrow, win + e, win + right_arrow.
rocky1138 9y ago
This is a perfect use case for using microformats to make the document more semantic, especially since archival for future reference is the author's explicit goal. An easy win would be to use h-entry categories[0] for the tags in the document. If you're writing stuff on the web, please consider adding some microformats to make your stuff more accessible and archivable. [0] http://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry http://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry
itomato 9y ago
I've often thought Windows 95 borrowed ideas from Nextstep. Looking at this retrospective, I can see how it could be possible, especially if they started design in 1992. NeXT had been winning praise for their UI for years by that point, and Microsoft were consulting with Susan Kare (an Apple alum and NeXT employee). If you compare Nextstep 3.3 and Windows 95 or NT, you can see startling similarities in title bar size and format (to the pixel), window borders, 'rectangularity', tabbed elements and more. "Great artists steal" and all that..
- jdswain 9y ago
  Soon after the Windows 95 release I heard that one of the members of the Windows 95 team had a copy of NeXTstep on a computer they used, and that it was a source of ‘inspiration’. I can’t find any reference to this now, but the 3D look and grey shades definitely are similar. Windows 95 looks much more like NeXTstep than Windows 3.11.
- atrn 9y ago
  Ditto. I was a NeXTSTEP developer at the time and when Win95 came out I thought the influences were pretty obvious.
nsriv 9y ago
I really just wish Windows had a Miller Columns view in Explorer like OSX. All the apps on Windows that promise this are utter garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns
- hungerstrike 9y ago
  Sorry to wish against you but I hope Explorer never gets them, not even as an option, because I think they are a garbage idea for browsing files or anything else since they're too busy and constantly make you change your focus.
  - nsriv 9y ago
    They're bad for browsing, I agree. I do a lot of file management and reorganization across network drives, and it would benefit me by immediately exposing one or two directory levels above a file location for drag and drop simplicity. Multiple windows or tiling tabs in Windows explorer could accomplish this as well, of course.
    - Too 9y ago
      win+right, ctrl+N, win+left, alt+up+up
SNACKeR99 9y ago
Clearly there was some magic on that team. Exhibit A: hiring Eno to create the startup sound.
msie 9y ago
I really miss the Windows 95 ui. Tried to repro it on Windows 10 but no luck.
jaredcwhite 9y ago
Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and was happy to leave the Windows world behind, the fact remains that for a few years time in the mid 90s, Microsoft showed a strong ability to design GUIs that were easy to use, relatively consistent, and flexible enough to suit a large array of first and third-party application designs. It's a shame that, IMHO, Windows XP took things in a highly negative direction after that, and Microsoft never fully recovered. With the possible exception of Windows 7, every OS release since XP has been a mishmash of competing ideas and confusing discrepancies, and macOS has continually outpaced Windows in usability. I still hold out hope that there's a solid future for Windows when it comes to UX/UI design, if only because I want macOS to have real competition on that front.
- romaniv 9y ago
  > At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. After seeing some old demos of Xerox Star, I'd question that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
- ghostcluster 9y ago
  The Task Bar and Start Menu metaphors have held up well. At the time on the Mac, it was harder to see an overview of running Applications and windows at a glance.
  - jaredcwhite 9y ago
    True. I didn't have much experience with the Mac back in the Mac OS classic era, but that was one thing I found very annoying coming from the Windows side. While it took a while to get the Dock right in OS X, it was a big improvement over the previous Mac UI.
- guelo 9y ago
digi_owl 9y ago
That tabbed beginners UI gets me thinking of the netbook UIs that popped up for a short while before Intel and Microsoft buried the segment in red tape.
richard_todd 9y ago
It was great to read about the early iterations that didn't pan out, and it reminds me of how far the average person has come in terms of computer knowledge (even though I know several people that _still_ have trouble double-clicking). I would love to see a similar Windows 8 document, because I have no idea how they convinced themselves that non-tablet users would like it. Things like charms and even the freaking start button were hard to discover.
sangnoir 9y ago
> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or “context”) menus, even after training. This is a lesson the Android team re-discovered decades later, resulting in Android dropping the "Menu" button. Apple still hasn't gotten the memo yet (3D Touch). The biggest usability negatives with context-menus are poor discoverability and inconsistency in different contexts.
NeoBasilisk 9y ago
Ah yes, the introduction of the start menu. A widget that even 20 years later, when Microsoft dared to change it even a bit, people absolutely lost their minds.
yarrel 9y ago
To be fair to Windows 95 it was as much a copy of NeXT as it was of MacOS.
makecheck 9y ago
Windows 95 (and later) always seemed to just miss the mark: they added new things but were just so close to having something that would work much better. It was as if they saw useful features to add from other systems but only copied what they could see without really understanding the behaviors that needed to be copied too. Examples... The original Start menu was in a corner of the screen but without the crucial zero pixels of separation from the physical corner, turning what could have been a massive target into a tiny one. (Fixed in XP though.) Menus were sluggish as hell to open, and they lacked hysteresis to make diagonal traversal a lot easier. Also, there was no consideration for how to handle a task that might take awhile, such as locating the names and icons of dozens of items; the menu would not show anything, you’d just wait. Sadly they were experts at efficiently making menus go away so one accidental mouse movement and you start all over. The ordering of frame buttons, “minimize, maximize, close”, on Windows does not clearly separate the most-dangerous action from the least-dangerous action, nor are the actions ordered by similarity. Instead, a very common action on Windows (“Maximize”) is right next to the most dangerous and polar opposite action (“Blow This Away Forever”), with zero pixels of separation. On the Mac, the order is “close, minimize, maximize”: if you mis-hit Minimize on a Mac while moving toward Close, the window will still go away (more or less what you wanted) instead of becoming gigantic and still visible (polar opposite). Also, on a Mac there is significant pixel space between the distinct options so it is harder to mis-click. The ordering of dialog buttons, such as “OK, Cancel”, meant that it was not possible for memory to take over. In some dialogs “OK” was in the position that Cancel would be in, in others it wasn’t. Also, Windows tended to have very generic names (Yes, No, Cancel), probably because entire APIs for opening messages had only those options; this required reading every word of a long-winded message to understand the options, rather than just clicking something obvious like Save. Windows 95+ tend to add hierarchy in lots of places that don’t benefit at all from hierarchy. I hate having to remember some obscure vendor’s name so I can find “Unnecessary Company Name, Inc. >> Unnecessary Product Suite Name >> App Name” in a menu for example, when “App Name” in a flat list is the only sensible option. (Fortunately, Search was a reasonable way to avoid this. Until it became slow and couldn’t actually find things that clearly exist.)
collinmanderson 9y ago
Amazing to see all of this design work happening starting in 1992. I always thought of iterative design and development as becoming popular staring around 2001, and usability studies only becoming popular around that time too. > the design documented in the spec was suddenly out of date. The team faced a major decision: spend weeks changing the spec to reflect the new ideas and lose valuable time for iterating or stop updating the spec and let the prototypes and code serve as a “living” spec. > After some debate, the team decided to take the latter approach. While this change made it somewhat more difficult for outside groups to keep track of what we were doing, it allowed us to iterate at top speed. The change also had an unexpected effect: it brought the whole team closer together because much of the spec existed in conversations and on white boards in people’s offices. Many “hallway” conversations ensued and continued for the duration of the project.

568 points by LaSombra 9y ago

amiga-workbench 9y ago

When actual thought and reasoning went into UI design. Nice to see the methodology.

ogdoad 9y ago
Have we actually reached the point where we idolize something that was equally mainstream to bash when it came out? Remember "Winblows" &c? Suddenly, faced with hyper-spy mega-corps, the dumb simplicity of the evil-yet-cute Windows 95 is desirable. Like the lesser of two evils, or the evil you know. Any day now, a post will come up extolling the illumined joys of mainframe COBOL programming.
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  I'm no luddite but several areas of computing have had serious regressions. I still have Windows 95 machines kicking around and I know how fickle they are, but you will never hear me saying a bad word about the UI.
- krylon 9y ago
  > Remember "Winblows" &c? There were many, many things wrong with Windows 95 (and its successors). But the design of the Shell was solid. (Also, considering how hardware requirements have skyrocketed, it might seem remarkable to some that it could run on a computer with 8 MiB of RAM and a CPU that makes today's low-end mobile phones look like supercomputers and still feel snappy.) I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that.
  - cesarb 9y ago
    > I know people used to joke about using the "Start" button to shutdown the computer, but I never understood what is so funny about that. If you think of shutdown as a "stop" command to the computer, you see the contradiction: to stop your computer, press start.
    - krylon 9y ago
      I get that, I just never thought it was very funny. Start might not have been the best name for that button, but the idea of having a single a menu to access all OS functionality and applications was good. Still is good, in fact, which why so many people got upset when they removed it in Windows 8.
- boomlinde 9y ago
  There was even a parody song about how much Windows 95 sucked, but the criticism seemed more popularly aimed at its resource requirements than the UI design.
  - ogdoad 9y ago
    The requirements were practically negligible for its era, and the leap it represented. I have installed and used it at length on 386 with 8MB on a 210MB disk. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't pretty bad either. Perhaps (on appropriate hardware) it wasn't as solid as NT 4, but before XP (which is 2000 which is NT, even if simplifying it) there weren't many "polished enough" _and_ "affordable enough" windowing systems for the masses. Classic Mac OS was very polished but not very affordable, and it didn't even have pre-emptive multiprocessing. UNIX had either a high cost of entry if you're talking workstations (Suns and SGIs were polished but expensive) or man-hours to acclimatize (try running X11 in 1995, then compare to Windows 95). Eh. In any case, to bring it back. It was good enough. Nowadays, I often hope for a minimal Windows 10 that will be out of the way enough to approach Windows 95.
    - boomlinde 9y ago
      > The requirements were practically negligible for its era Your 8 MB was the "recommended" requirement for 95, with 4 MB being the minimum. That wasn't pretty. If you have used 95 with only four megabytes of RAM and a small, slow hard drive, you'll learn that the minimum requirements are quite lower than comfortable, probably in order to more closely match what was actually a typical home computer at the time, some 386/486 with 4 MB RAM and a small hard drive. Where I'm from, Windows 95 pretty much meant getting a new PC for the average consumer. So you go home with your newly bought copy of Windows 95 to your 386 with 4 MB that you bought 1-2 years ago, perform the minimum installation to your 100 MB hard drive and find out that it's super slow and constantly using virtual memory making the loud disk sound like a Geiger counter throughout the session. You compare it to Windows 3.11, DOS, whatever you had before and have a pretty solid basis for complaining about its resource usage. Or worse, you read about Windows 95 and decide to finally sell your increasingly irrelevant Amiga 1200/3000/whatever now that you can also have preemptive multitasking on a PC, buy a cheap PC matching the Win 95 requirements with the money and install. Only to learn that it's 100x slower than Workbench, BSODs nearly as often as the Amiga gurus out, uses megabytes of RAM instead of kilobytes. Or you have a Macintosh, couldn't care less about how exactly multitasking is achieved, and wow, PC seems like a nice option now that that too has a nice, user friendly GUI. And it works on cheap, affordable hardware! So you buy the cheapest, most affordable hardware that'll support Windows 95...
- anthk 9y ago
  Linux/Unix user since the 2003. 1) Windows 95 is a good UI design, better than even CDE. Heck, Win3.1 and CDE shared a lot of stuff. 2) ICEWM was golden back in 2001. Guess what mimicked.
oblio 9y ago
I doubt that Microsoft has really departed from the UI design methodology they used. The dubious decisions are most likely pushed from either the marketing department or from above. But I think Windows itself, even the newer versions, is quite well designed. Apple probably also has a pretty solid design process.

garganzol 9y ago

I remember the first time I used Windows 95. It was a smooth flight to say the least. Looking at Windows 95 user interface today, it becomes evident how iconic that UI was. No fluff, a pure joy to use.

wiradikusuma 9y ago

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this, I'm always surprised, because she gives valid points, and I end up cursing the developer :D So, whenever I design UI/UX for an app, I ask my mom to test. Rant: In my opinion, there should be an option in Mac/Windows to disable file drag and drop. Every time I check her computer, I always find dislocated files simply because she accidentally drag them.

michaelmrose 9y ago
How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?
- chkuendig 9y ago
  Cut & Paste for when you really need to reorganize? But usually it would probably be enough to just list the most recent files somewhere and provide full text search for everything else.
  - xab9 9y ago
    Seeing how my elderly parents use the computer: you don't manage files. At all. Right click is evil, keyboard shortcuts are evil, drag and drop never occurs to them. Mom usually just reads her emails (and attachements open in the browser nowdays), so it's not a problem, but father saves files. If he finds something important then he saves it multiple times, so in the file list view there will be multiple similar items, that's how he knows it's important (visually it's very distinctive). When he has to copy a file somewhere else he usually fires up his CAD software, opens the file and then saves it elsewhere. I just gave up "educating" them (after countless attempts). It's pointless. I remove file duplicates half a year, copy stuff to an usb key when he asks me (I visit them once a month) and avoid the machines like the plague, unless they explicitly ask me to do something (I installed ubuntu for mom, which works wonderfully for her, one less problem to worry about).

scandox 9y ago

24 People. If you'd asked me to guess I would have said 240.

kuschku 9y ago
24 people created this. 12'000 people create Uber's app.
sbov 9y ago
From some searching, Windows 95 was about 15 million lines of code, and Windows 3.1 had about 3 million. Compared to Firefox: https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_summary https://www.openhub.net/p/firefox/analyses/latest/languages_...
stevenwoo 9y ago
From my reading, twelve designers and twelve programmers without a lot of overlap, and a significant investment in iterative useability studies. Interestingly they dropped the design documentation as too much trouble to update versus letting the design live in the latest implementation.

jaclaz 9y ago

Actually the original article by Kent (NOT Kevin) Sullivan is still available here: http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm http://prior.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/...

Multicomp 9y ago
Thanks for finding this. Saved. I still have a soft spot for vanilla HTML. When I can hit view source and read the whole article (minus images) without much difficulty, I'm glad.
- pault 9y ago
  I know it's not exactly the same but the developer tools on all modern browsers will display the current state of the DOM in the "inspect" tab. It's true that SPAs will have a lot more clutter in the form of JavaScript hooks and hidden elements but it's all there in glorious <html/>. :)

krylon 9y ago

The fact that the basic elements of Windows 95's GUI have survived for so long shows, I think, how well designed it was. For its time it was a great design that was intuitive to understand, relatively lightweight and did not get in my way. About the only changes I think improved things notably were the search field in the Start menu and Aero Snap.

kobrad 9y ago
Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. This is the new boundary for all interfaces, and I know it's just being stupid - sometimes it really makes me angry. But snap works just fine, yeah
- krylon 9y ago
  > Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. I only use Windows at work, and my work computer is sufficiently slow that I have not had a problem with that. Maybe it is the version, too, my work laptop runs Windows 7 - and will hopefully continue to do so until Microsoft stops supporting it; as far as Windows goes, Microsoft really nailed it with Windows 7. (I have to admit, though, I have only very little experience with Windows 10; I really disliked Windows 8/8.1 and the corresponding server versions because Microsoft butchered the UI.)
mustacheemperor 9y ago
The replacement of actual Search with this Cortana-based attempt at a "smart" search or Q&A interaction is absolutely agonizing to experience as a user and just a completely boggling decision to me in general. Why on earth did a search feature that will return something different from what you typed in, with the exact thing you typed in the secondary results, ever make it out of testing for public release? I have faith it'll improve over time, but right now Cortana in general feels like a step directly backwards in every category "she" touches. The Edge browser is actually pretty slick on the Surface, but instead of being able to right click selected text and search it, I have to "ask Cortana." I don't want to ask Cortana, I want to search that in Google.

Paianni 9y ago

I have a feeling that Windows 95's window minimisation was at heart a workaround for the fact that the architecture couldn't support workspaces and therefore they had to find a way to 'hack' Windows to hide windows at will.

thanatropism 9y ago
Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).
- amiga-workbench 9y ago
  Amiga Workbench did the same thing, the minimize button was labeled as "iconify" instead.
- jaclaz 9y ago
  A lesser known program for Windows 3.1/3.11 was at the time the Norton Desktop, see: http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html http://toastytech.com/guis/ndw.html that provided, even on Windows 3.1/3.11 roughly the same UI of the Mac OS of the time, very similar, for some aspects, to the later Windows 9x one.
  - interfixus 9y ago
    For some aspects, yes. For the over-all experience, not similar at all. PC Tools for Windows was another lternative shell. Finicky and prone to crashes, but better UI design than the Norton Desktop. Windows 95 obsoleted them both.
  - thanatropism 9y ago
    I remember someone who had an all-in-one Compaq PC with a version of Win 3.1 that had a shell with tabs on the top, not too unlike the "ribbon" of modern MS Office.
    - jaclaz 9y ago

louthy 9y ago

> Our testing data told us that the main problem was windows not being visible at all times, so users couldn’t see what they had open or access tasks quickly. This realization led us fairly quickly to the task bar design Hmm, I wonder if that should be reworded to “and then we saw RISC OS and it had a task bar design that we really liked”. I can’t believe that they wouldn’t have known about it.

keithpeter 9y ago
Yup - I remember that Windows PCs at work became far easier to use after Windows 95 (actually 98 I think) reached them as I was using an Archimedes at home.

russellbeattie 9y ago

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it propelled Microsoft into a new level of ubiquity. Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Windows 95 solidified Microsoft's dominance, but could just as easily eroded it had they dropped the ball. Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. Edit: Found this fantastic PDF "Chicago Reviewers Guide" which goes over all the new stuff in Win95. So much stuff I had forgotten - TrueType fonts, Plug and Play, registry settings, right-click properties, long file names... Basically everything that makes Windows what it is today. http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf http://tech-insider.org/windows/research/acrobat/940601.pdf

garblegarble 9y ago
>Even though I've used a Mac daily for the past decade or so, I still miss the task bar, and window-oriented GUI of Windows. I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it. I wouldn't switch back because of the underlying crap that is the Windows OS and file system, but I still miss the interface. OT but have you tried Witch[1] as a task switcher? It switches between windows, which made my life SO much easier [1] https://manytricks.com/witch https://manytricks.com/witch
- jvzr 9y ago
  I find Contexts (https://contexts.co/ https://contexts.co/) a better application to do exactly that
  - 9y ago

donmb 9y ago

But why?

petagonoral 9y ago

Contrast on that article between text and background was poor. following sets it back to something sane: document.body.style.fontWeight = "normal";

unicornporn 9y ago

I think it's beautiful. And, compared to Windows 10, Windows 95 was at least somewhat consistent design wise. After 12 years of macOS I recently got a Windows 10 machine. There's plenty of Windows 10 bling on top of the OS, but you don't have to dig deep before you encounter the embarrassing remnants from very early versions of Windows. Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Microsoft intend to do something about. I don't have too high hopes though, considering it was released two and a half years ago.

xedarius 9y ago
That problem increases when you throw a 4k monitor into the mix.
- hutattedonmyarm 9y ago
  Even worse: A 4K main monitor, and a secondary 1080p one
majewsky 9y ago
> Running the latest version of 10 it still feels very unfinished which I hope Microsoft intend to do something about. Might depend on what particular parts of the OS you come across. I use Win10 on my work notebook [1] and besides the long startup times [2], I haven't noticed anything "unfinished". In fact, Windows very subjectively feels more polished than macOS which I used before (until December). Then again, I don't use much of it: I only run Firefox, Slack, Outlook, and VirtualBox where the actual work is going on in a Linux VM. [1] Probably not the "latest" version though. I get to use whatever our corporate update server hands out. [2] Compared to my private Linux machines. macOS also took several minutes from turning on the machine to everything having fully settled in.
- herbst 9y ago
  Pretty sure he is referring to the configuration structure. You get this fancy 8.1 sidebar configuration screens that may solve 80% of a average users tasks, but once you start digging you'll find configuration Windows in the style of W7, and if you dig even harder you'll even find stuff that looks straight out of 98. I am a linux users myself, configuration inconsistency gives me nightmares.

vilius 9y ago

In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin. As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket. Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short. I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that they did tried to stay away from copying as much as possible?

valine 9y ago
That was part of Apple’s GUI lawsuit in 1994 against Microfoft. Apple lost all parts of the suit except for the exclusive rights to the trash icon. Microsoft was forced to replace it with the recycle bin.
Zardoz84 9y ago
Because Apple would issue again Microsoft about stealing stuff from Mac ?
TheCoreh 9y ago
> As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. On the contrary, I'd say recycling is a much more fitting name for what happens when a file is deleted: The existing disk space is reclaimed to be reused for something else.
theandrewbailey 9y ago
At least with the Recycle Bin, one can joke that Windows is more environmentally friendly than other OSes.
ubermonkey 9y ago
I have to think that the common anti-pattern of naive users storing files they mean to keep in the Recycle Bin wouldn't happen so often if it were still called Trash.
- toast0 9y ago

NoGravitas 9y ago

Some comparisons to the contemporary version of OS/2 (2.1 was the current version when Win95 was announced, and 3.0 was released immediately before Win95): * Applications minimized to a special folder, which was located on the desktop. * No start button or task bar (they were added in OS/2 4.0). * Shredder on the desktop (did not offer restore files like Mac Trash or Windows Recycle Bin). * Hierarchical folders on the desktop that could contain either shortcuts or files. * Shortcuts couldn't get "broken" as long as you did all of your file management through the Workplace Shell. * Folders and file types could be subclassed in various ways to change their behavior and appearance. Simple changes didn't require programming. * You could mark a folder as a project, and all the programs and files associated with the folder would open/close/hide along with the folder. At the time, I felt that the Workplace Shell was immensely superior to the Windows 95 desktop. But it probably was quite a bit less friendly to new users.

QGmLe 9y ago

Copy the Mac OS but make it crappier.

kk_cz 9y ago
Except apart for maybe "recycle bin" it was nothing like Mac OS. Central element of Windows 95 UI was taskbar and start menu, which don't have counterparts in Mac OS. Central element of Mac OS UI was the shared menubar, which doesn't have counterpart in Win95.

dvfjsdhgfv 9y ago

So much thought, effort and research went into this - and was thrown away altogether in Windows 8.

AdmiralAsshat 9y ago

It's impressive how long the "Desktop" paradigm of Windows 95 has stuck around, particularly if you're in the Linux Desktop world. Most of the popular desktop environments--Xfce, Mate, and Cinnamon come to mind--still follow that pattern. The last major one to go in a different direction was GNOME 3, and the backlash against it was so fierce that several other major DE's forked an earlier version in order to keep consistency.

romaniv 9y ago
Desktop paradigm isn't a Windows 95 thing. It's Xerox Alto thing.
dredmorbius 9y ago
What was GNOME 3's metaphor? (I've been so GNOME-averse I appear to have entirely missed that.)
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  It's difficult to explain succinctly. I will say that it's unique, insofar as it's not trying to copy past paradigms or macOS. But it can be a bit confusing. Minimize/Maximize buttons, for instance, aren't even included by default. Honestly, this is probably the best I can provide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB7pBRi9Bbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BB7pBRi9Bbk
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    Interesting, though that strikes me as maddeningly annoying as hell to actually use.

jcadam 9y ago

Ah, remembering Win95 makes me yearn for a simple, clean GUI again. All of the major operating systems have been in a downward slide in terms of UI/UX since the early 2000s. As far as UI/UX is concerned: Windows peaked with Windows 2000. MacOS with OS9 (Why didn't they just throw the classic GUI on top of Darwin)? At least with *nix you have choices and can go with one of the several variants of Gnome 2 (Xfce, et al).

kk_cz 9y ago
Just curious: why Windows 2000 and not Windows 7? Win7 was still internally consistent (as opposed to the newer tablet / mobile / pc / washing machine UIs of later versions) and provided few additional UI enhancements over 2k.
- jcadam 9y ago
  Win7 is nice too, but I admit I didn't use it much (as I was a Linux user almost exclusively when 7 was released). I got Windows 10 on a new laptop and gave it an honest try (along with the new Linux subsystem), but the little annoyances and inconsistencies piled up, and back to Linux I went. I spent a lot of time with Windows 2000 back in the day. Windows 2000 was the first OS I bought retail -- my new PC came with Windows ME and it was so terrible I ran out and actually paid for an OS ;)
- Koshkin 9y ago
  > still internally consistent The most internally consistent design was that of NT 3.1 - it was a true classic in many respects. As far as general usefulness, performance, and versatility nothing can compare with Windows 10 (except Linux, of course).
  - kk_cz 9y ago
    I am not arguing about NT 3.1, but what inconsistencies were there in Win7 UI? Starting with Win8 you have basically a random choice if some setting is set in "classic style" or new fancy "settings" dialogs. You can have all the performance in the world if your users spend most of the time just looking for the right place to do something.

erickhill 9y ago

As the Win95 team formed in 1992, I’d argue the Amiga OS was an excellent alternative at the time, albeit one oft forgotten due to its subsequent market share. Extremely easy to use, extend and navigatee, at the time it’s only missing piece was a built in “file explorer” but there were also so many 3rd party options by then, too (Directory Opus being my personal favorite).

UweSchmidt 9y ago

I still miss the dual window "Explorer" from Win 3.1 every time I move or copy files. The old File Manager had this by default. Installing Midnight Commander etc. on client computers is not possible, so I have to open two Explorers and get them to a convenient size.

mikerg87 9y ago
I keep hoping for a windows explorer with tabs with each release and each time I am dissapointed.
mardukiz 9y ago
Aye, need to go win + e, win + left_arrow, win + e, win + right_arrow.

rocky1138 9y ago

This is a perfect use case for using microformats to make the document more semantic, especially since archival for future reference is the author's explicit goal. An easy win would be to use h-entry categories[0] for the tags in the document. If you're writing stuff on the web, please consider adding some microformats to make your stuff more accessible and archivable. [0] http://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry http://microformats.org/wiki/h-entry

itomato 9y ago

I've often thought Windows 95 borrowed ideas from Nextstep. Looking at this retrospective, I can see how it could be possible, especially if they started design in 1992. NeXT had been winning praise for their UI for years by that point, and Microsoft were consulting with Susan Kare (an Apple alum and NeXT employee). If you compare Nextstep 3.3 and Windows 95 or NT, you can see startling similarities in title bar size and format (to the pixel), window borders, 'rectangularity', tabbed elements and more. "Great artists steal" and all that..

jdswain 9y ago
Soon after the Windows 95 release I heard that one of the members of the Windows 95 team had a copy of NeXTstep on a computer they used, and that it was a source of ‘inspiration’. I can’t find any reference to this now, but the 3D look and grey shades definitely are similar. Windows 95 looks much more like NeXTstep than Windows 3.11.
atrn 9y ago
Ditto. I was a NeXTSTEP developer at the time and when Win95 came out I thought the influences were pretty obvious.

nsriv 9y ago

I really just wish Windows had a Miller Columns view in Explorer like OSX. All the apps on Windows that promise this are utter garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

hungerstrike 9y ago
Sorry to wish against you but I hope Explorer never gets them, not even as an option, because I think they are a garbage idea for browsing files or anything else since they're too busy and constantly make you change your focus.
- nsriv 9y ago
  They're bad for browsing, I agree. I do a lot of file management and reorganization across network drives, and it would benefit me by immediately exposing one or two directory levels above a file location for drag and drop simplicity. Multiple windows or tiling tabs in Windows explorer could accomplish this as well, of course.
  - Too 9y ago
    win+right, ctrl+N, win+left, alt+up+up

SNACKeR99 9y ago

Clearly there was some magic on that team. Exhibit A: hiring Eno to create the startup sound.

msie 9y ago

I really miss the Windows 95 ui. Tried to repro it on Windows 10 but no luck.

jaredcwhite 9y ago

Windows 95 and its immediate successors had a lot of problems regarding stability, memory usage, performance in certain cases, etc. That and the comparison with the NT OS line is a separate discussion however. What is important about Windows 95 was the design of the GUI. At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. Even though I jumped on the Mac OS X bandwagon from the very first moment in 2001 and was happy to leave the Windows world behind, the fact remains that for a few years time in the mid 90s, Microsoft showed a strong ability to design GUIs that were easy to use, relatively consistent, and flexible enough to suit a large array of first and third-party application designs. It's a shame that, IMHO, Windows XP took things in a highly negative direction after that, and Microsoft never fully recovered. With the possible exception of Windows 7, every OS release since XP has been a mishmash of competing ideas and confusing discrepancies, and macOS has continually outpaced Windows in usability. I still hold out hope that there's a solid future for Windows when it comes to UX/UI design, if only because I want macOS to have real competition on that front.

romaniv 9y ago
> At the time, it was a huge leap forward in desktop computing. After seeing some old demos of Xerox Star, I'd question that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q
ghostcluster 9y ago
The Task Bar and Start Menu metaphors have held up well. At the time on the Mac, it was harder to see an overview of running Applications and windows at a glance.
- jaredcwhite 9y ago
  True. I didn't have much experience with the Mac back in the Mac OS classic era, but that was one thing I found very annoying coming from the Windows side. While it took a while to get the Dock right in OS X, it was a big improvement over the previous Mac UI.
guelo 9y ago

digi_owl 9y ago

That tabbed beginners UI gets me thinking of the netbook UIs that popped up for a short while before Intel and Microsoft buried the segment in red tape.

richard_todd 9y ago

It was great to read about the early iterations that didn't pan out, and it reminds me of how far the average person has come in terms of computer knowledge (even though I know several people that _still_ have trouble double-clicking). I would love to see a similar Windows 8 document, because I have no idea how they convinced themselves that non-tablet users would like it. Things like charms and even the freaking start button were hard to discover.

sangnoir 9y ago

> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or “context”) menus, even after training. This is a lesson the Android team re-discovered decades later, resulting in Android dropping the "Menu" button. Apple still hasn't gotten the memo yet (3D Touch). The biggest usability negatives with context-menus are poor discoverability and inconsistency in different contexts.

NeoBasilisk 9y ago

Ah yes, the introduction of the start menu. A widget that even 20 years later, when Microsoft dared to change it even a bit, people absolutely lost their minds.

yarrel 9y ago

To be fair to Windows 95 it was as much a copy of NeXT as it was of MacOS.

makecheck 9y ago

Windows 95 (and later) always seemed to just miss the mark: they added new things but were just so close to having something that would work much better. It was as if they saw useful features to add from other systems but only copied what they could see without really understanding the behaviors that needed to be copied too. Examples... The original Start menu was in a corner of the screen but without the crucial zero pixels of separation from the physical corner, turning what could have been a massive target into a tiny one. (Fixed in XP though.) Menus were sluggish as hell to open, and they lacked hysteresis to make diagonal traversal a lot easier. Also, there was no consideration for how to handle a task that might take awhile, such as locating the names and icons of dozens of items; the menu would not show anything, you’d just wait. Sadly they were experts at efficiently making menus go away so one accidental mouse movement and you start all over. The ordering of frame buttons, “minimize, maximize, close”, on Windows does not clearly separate the most-dangerous action from the least-dangerous action, nor are the actions ordered by similarity. Instead, a very common action on Windows (“Maximize”) is right next to the most dangerous and polar opposite action (“Blow This Away Forever”), with zero pixels of separation. On the Mac, the order is “close, minimize, maximize”: if you mis-hit Minimize on a Mac while moving toward Close, the window will still go away (more or less what you wanted) instead of becoming gigantic and still visible (polar opposite). Also, on a Mac there is significant pixel space between the distinct options so it is harder to mis-click. The ordering of dialog buttons, such as “OK, Cancel”, meant that it was not possible for memory to take over. In some dialogs “OK” was in the position that Cancel would be in, in others it wasn’t. Also, Windows tended to have very generic names (Yes, No, Cancel), probably because entire APIs for opening messages had only those options; this required reading every word of a long-winded message to understand the options, rather than just clicking something obvious like Save. Windows 95+ tend to add hierarchy in lots of places that don’t benefit at all from hierarchy. I hate having to remember some obscure vendor’s name so I can find “Unnecessary Company Name, Inc. >> Unnecessary Product Suite Name >> App Name” in a menu for example, when “App Name” in a flat list is the only sensible option. (Fortunately, Search was a reasonable way to avoid this. Until it became slow and couldn’t actually find things that clearly exist.)

collinmanderson 9y ago

Amazing to see all of this design work happening starting in 1992. I always thought of iterative design and development as becoming popular staring around 2001, and usability studies only becoming popular around that time too. > the design documented in the spec was suddenly out of date. The team faced a major decision: spend weeks changing the spec to reflect the new ideas and lose valuable time for iterating or stop updating the spec and let the prototypes and code serve as a “living” spec. > After some debate, the team decided to take the latter approach. While this change made it somewhat more difficult for outside groups to keep track of what we were doing, it allowed us to iterate at top speed. The change also had an unexpected effect: it brought the whole team closer together because much of the spec existed in conversations and on white boards in people’s offices. Many “hallway” conversations ensued and continued for the duration of the project.