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It's always really cool seeing designs like this, just a reminder that nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then since i

by warent 8y ago

It's always really cool seeing designs like this, just a reminder that nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then since it was totally unexplored territory

PeCaN 8y ago
If anything, they had a better idea what they were doing than people do now. Windows 95 is a case study in good design. They got there by testing it and iterating on it a ton. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Win95 and Win2k where in my opinion the high water mark of Windows UI, everything since has mostly been different or worse. Though with touchscreens I can see why that pattern would have dated badly. That said, 16 year old me would have zero issues with using Cinnamon how I have it setup 22 years later. Well after he stopped pointing at the screen in amazement and trying to get his head around a laptop with 4x2.8GHz cores and 8 threads. Hell he’d even recognise a thinkpad in 2018 mostly because 16yo me really wanted one.
  - j45 8y ago
    Win 2k really was sharp. Xp eventually was able to get close but by then it was replaced by Vista, and I switched to Mac.
- pavlov 8y ago
  This. We’ve gone backwards in informed usability. In my first software job in 1997, the UI department employed an industrial designer, a graphic designer and a researcher with a masters in cognition science. The company had a usability lab where the UI was tested under controlled conditions. Today companies have a graphic designer who calls themselves a “UX expert” and draws pictures of interfaces in Sketch.
hnzix 8y ago
> nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then We evolved to flat design with minimal user cues and abstract icons lacking any text labels sitting inside a giant Javascript blob that breaks the browser's back button and scroll bars and is a 20mb download. Yay?

by warent 8y ago

It's always really cool seeing designs like this, just a reminder that nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then since it was totally unexplored territory

PeCaN 8y ago

If anything, they had a better idea what they were doing than people do now. Windows 95 is a case study in good design. They got there by testing it and iterating on it a ton. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

noir_lord 8y ago
Win95 and Win2k where in my opinion the high water mark of Windows UI, everything since has mostly been different or worse. Though with touchscreens I can see why that pattern would have dated badly. That said, 16 year old me would have zero issues with using Cinnamon how I have it setup 22 years later. Well after he stopped pointing at the screen in amazement and trying to get his head around a laptop with 4x2.8GHz cores and 8 threads. Hell he’d even recognise a thinkpad in 2018 mostly because 16yo me really wanted one.
- j45 8y ago
  Win 2k really was sharp. Xp eventually was able to get close but by then it was replaced by Vista, and I switched to Mac.
pavlov 8y ago
This. We’ve gone backwards in informed usability. In my first software job in 1997, the UI department employed an industrial designer, a graphic designer and a researcher with a masters in cognition science. The company had a usability lab where the UI was tested under controlled conditions. Today companies have a graphic designer who calls themselves a “UX expert” and draws pictures of interfaces in Sketch.

hnzix 8y ago

> nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then We evolved to flat design with minimal user cues and abstract icons lacking any text labels sitting inside a giant Javascript blob that breaks the browser's back button and scroll bars and is a 20mb download. Yay?