12 ms·

Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had: - Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and fea

by alxlaz 8y ago

Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had: - Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless - Good contrast - Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else. - Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use. The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate... I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!

rsync 8y ago
"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent." Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work. One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
    The other thing about OS X is that command-shift-/ opens a little search box in the help menu and then you can pick any menu item by typing a few characters and selecting it with the keyboard.
    - navs 8y ago
      Very underrated feature. Last I used Ubuntu's Unity it had a similar feature. I wish Alfred had a plugin to do this on Mac OS. I remember Quicksilver had something.
      - douglaswlance 8y ago
        Alfred does have such a workflow: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10231-faster-menu-search/ https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10231-faster-menu-search/
  - spdionis 8y ago
    What baffled me is that if you have a mouse with side buttons you just cannot use them in any type of shortcut. Mouse support is generally terrible in OSX.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades.
      - zozbot123 8y ago
        > Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades. I'm kinda out of the loop, do they still sell mice with only one button?
        MereInterest 8y ago
        Sort of. Their desktop mice have two buttons, but only a single plastic shell. This seems to follow Apple's design guideline of wallpapering over complexity, rather than admitting that it exists. Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media/vc/75a2caed-171a-4f76-a5e8-bef3cde6c806._SL300__.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media/vc/75a2caed-...
- rkagerer 8y ago
  Dang right! It's like half the programmers of today have forgotten keyboards are a thing.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    For growing numbers of people they aren't. As an exercize, I very seriously embraced touch a few years back. I will not give up keyboard plus mouse, but I am also amazed at what really can be done with touch keyboard and pen. Lots of people want to expand on that because it expands on phones and tablets. I have a Note 8, and can content create on it to a level I did not think possible a few years ago. I use touch keyboard, voice and pen. At times I carry a small bluetooth keyboard with touch mouse pad. It is not as fast, but is more robust.
    - ori_b 8y ago
      I put up with touch keyboards because real ones are not very portable. It's good enough to get by, but it's not good. The same with touch interaction -- selecting a range of text is an exercise in frustration. I don't want that interface on my desktop. Just because a thing has a CPU and operating system does not mean it needs to have a unified user experience.
  - squarefoot 8y ago
    And many others don't even realize that investing a bit of research on better keyboards would bring us to much better use experience. I don't mean changing the typewriter style keys, those are ok, I mean all other keys; why there is no standard for a reduced keypad with the bare minimum for menu navigation and data entry? Unfortunately the arrow keys are a half solution by not implementing yes/no and other control keys. Why there's no contextual Info key to show information/help pertaining the current task? The computer keyboard as we know it has to be extended, not taken away as the WIMP culture before and touch screen after attempted to do, with disastrous results so far. I would welcome a kit made of say 120 key modules (one key per module, real clicky keys, please!) all with the same pinout, and normal+2x/3x/4x keycaps, special "key" modules such as trackballs, Thinkpad "nipples", analog knobs etc. then a breadboard-style carrier board where i can stick them as I want, plus a decoder board. Then, once the keyboard is ready, I can send a file describing its details to some high quality 3D printing assembly to purchase a pcb and case for my prototype keyboard and turn it into a real one.
- cesarb 8y ago
  When I bought my first computer (which came with Windows 3.1), it didn't come with a mouse. User interfaces back then were designed to be usable without a mouse, because many people didn't have a mouse - it was optional, and used up one of the serial ports.
  - londons_explore 8y ago
    I gave up trying the get my first mouse working after hours of tweaking win.ini...
  - collinmanderson 8y ago
    Yup, I started out with win 3.1 without a mouse. You could do pretty much anything except use paint.
- paulcole 8y ago
  Both your comment and the article use the phrase “real work”. What do you meany by that? And is there “fake work” that Windows fails at?
- zapzupnz 8y ago
  > One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. I actually find that's what I miss when I use Windows. Windows' universal keyboard shortcuts seem to be limited to window management and some basics like new files, save, cut, copy, paste, etc. On the other hand, just about every macOS has the same shortcuts for actions within applications as opposed to without. For items without shortcuts, you can define your own quickly and easily in System Preferences, and those custom shortcuts can apply to just one app or every app. Not only that, every macOS app puts the shortcuts in the same place, the menu bar. They're all searchable via the Help menu. On Windows, there are more often than not keyboard shortcuts that aren't listed in any menus, so one would have no idea what they are without looking them up. Further, because Windows software tends to be developed in any ol' framework with any ol' user interface, lacking in any consistency, quite a lot of programs don't even implement the standard, universal shortcuts.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design. UX apps of Win98 era were much more consistent, and especially the rule that all commands and shortcuts must be in the main menu was usually adhered to, at least by apps that respected the official platform design guidelines. The idea of a drop-down main menu with all commands comes from CUA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...
    - zapzupnz 8y ago
      > All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design I was going to say "not on macOS, they aren't" because this isn't true for any apps that use Cocoa or Carbon (which is to say, all of them). The only apps that exhibit any weirdness are ones that use cross-platform frameworks like Qt, GTK+, or wxWidgets. But nowadays, there are loads of Electron and React Native apps that don't even present anything in the global menu bar; if the developers don't think to add them in themselves, basic functions like copy and paste don't work without secondary clicking!
    - 8y ago
- weliketocode 8y ago
  Yes! yes! 1000x yes! Have spent the vast majority of my time on OSX for the past several years, but still reminisce about the wonderful keyboard shortcuts from Windows.
- city41 8y ago
  I'd argue MacOS classic was the real winner here, especially keyboard shortcuts. For example cmnd+q always quits an app, where as in Windows you had ctrl+q, alt+f4, ctrl+w, and sometimes you just had to do the menu navigation (alt f, then e I think? and sometimes it was alt f, x), and yet other times there was no keyboard shortcut at all.
  - rtpg 8y ago
    It’s funny to mention ctrl+q , because it is one consistency in MacOS that I find unbearable to the point of having set it to spotlight instead Right next to ctrl+q (something I end up hitting once per session of an app, by definition) is ctrl+a (select all, something I hit tens of times a session), ctrl+w (hit in the browser a good amount), ctrl+1, ctrl+2 (also good browser shortcuts) I actually don’t need to close the entire program that often! Please don’t make it so easy to accidentally hit at such a high frequency. Bonus points: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY keyboards a lot. That’s just me but it makes me have a lot of extra pain Alt-F4 is very nice in that regard.
    - thedaemon 8y ago
      Select all in MacOS should be CMD+A, not CTRL+A. Try swapping your muscle memory :)
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Alt+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current top-level window. Ctrl+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current child window/tab. For apps with tabs, this was often duplicated as Ctrl+W. There's no standard shortcut for exit. I believe that this is deliberate, to avoid people hitting it accidentally. However, the accelerator keys to do it via the File menu are always Alt+F ("File") -> X ("eXit"). These are all platform UX guidelines, or at least they were back in the day. Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS. This is much less likely, given that they are set up by default for every new application.
- yhoiseth 8y ago
  I find SizeUp to be a lifesaver. Good example of a finished app. It does what it’s supposed to and is incredibly stable and reliable.
- gerash 8y ago
  One UX issue with the cascading menus in Start menu was when you had to navigate several levels deep to open a program. Since the menus expanded and collapsed on mouse hover every once in a while accidentally moving the mouse in the wrong direction meant all my menu navigation progress was lost and I had to start over.
- IggleSniggle 8y ago
  Shoutout to Shortcat for providing something like "knowledge-free keyboard shortcuts everywhere" on macOS. You hit a search key-chord (I use SHIFT-CMD-SPACE) and it pops up a search modal making all UI elements keyboard selectable. Usually the thing you want is 1 or 2 characters followed by Return. It honestly reminds me of the experience of navigating Windows menus with Alt- and progressive keyboard shortcut learning, but flexible enough to handle things like Electron applications that don't even have a Menu bar or settable shortcuts. Does anyone else use this or something similar? https://shortcatapp.com/ https://shortcatapp.com/
  - Piskvorrr 8y ago
    Jetbrains' IDEA has the "Search everywhere" feature that...well...searches everywhere - menus, commands, project files, etc. I'd love to have that for every app in the OS.
    - trm42 8y ago
      Actually, that would be really, really awesome once you get used to Jetbrains' way of working. It's so unusual to be able to search for all the configuration, functionality, code and files in the same place.
  - explainplease 8y ago
    Emacs is much like that, as everything the user can do is an interactive command, which is typically a named function. So tools like Helm, Ivy/Counsel, as well as the built-in completion for M-x, let the user find and execute commands by name. And, e.g. `helm-M-x` display any bound keys next to the command name.
  - daxelrod 8y ago
    Thank you for teaching me about Shortcat!
bluedino 8y ago
They also worked with what they had. Limited by 640x480, 16 or 256 colors, they weren’t wasting cpu time and memory on alpha blending a menu so it fades in... At least when they started doing animated menus and such you could still turn those features off.
tomc1985 8y ago
This is true but users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once. I love high-density UI but I think the web and modern design has trended the way it has because focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed. Now the prevailing trend is this Fischer-Price children's-toys minimalism, with bright shiny colors and cute mascots. It's insulting
- lucideer 8y ago
  > users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once ... focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed Do you have any links to such studies/focus groups/articles on this? I'd be genuinely curious to read about them.
  - tomc1985 8y ago
    My experience there is more anecdotal, though over the life of my career one thing I am often measured on is the visual complexity of the UIs that I have made My last job we brought in focus groups at times and that was exactly their feedback, for an embedded UI for the machine that we sold. It should be noted that that machine required about a week of operator training to use, which included interacting with our UI
    - nerdponx 8y ago
      I'm not sure screen density is a flaw in the Windows UX/UI style. A lot of Windows programs have really cluttered, disorganized configuration menus and confusing workflows; PuTTY and ConEmu are two particularly egregious offenders. Seems more like a "developer lacking good design sense" issue, rather than something inherent to the Windows environment.
    - ryandrake 8y ago
      Interesting--I've never in my career actually seen a user study or focus group that concluded that users don't like dense UIs or lots of options. Not saying they don't exist--sounds like you experienced a group that found this. I've just never seen it myself. What I see a lot is UI professionals and artists simply declaring that interfaces must be minimal and abstract and that visual complexity is bad. Whether this is just current fashionable dogma, or if there is actually research to support this, I have no idea, but none of the product decision makers I've worked with have ever asked for evidence.
microcolonel 8y ago
I've long believed that Windows 98 is the pinnacle of desktop usability on many fronts, 2000 was the best NT in my view. The performance was spectacular, and it was rarely unclear how to accomplish something (unless it hadn't been thought of before the release of W98). Added: I'd be interested in putting together a Wayland desktop environment around the strengths of Windows 98's interface designs (along with some modern discoveries about human interface, and at least whole number resolution scaling). I feel like there should be at least one well-maintained toolkit which doesn't attempt to support full CSS styling on widgets.
- 0xfeba 8y ago
  I use XFCE4 to imitate Win95/98.
- ddingus 8y ago
  Seconded. On Unix, I also reached a similar point on SGI Indigo Magic Desktop.
jancsika 8y ago
> - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use. New Start menu: 1. Click Windows key 2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run 3. Click <Enter> That's 4 keystrokes, bound only by the time it takes the user to physically make the keypresses. User doesn't need any knowledge of how programs are categorized, nor know a hierarchy of categories. The process by which the system displays programs matching what the user is typing happens as fast as possible. You can even speak to your damned computer and the start menu will probably react accordingly. None of these actions require the user to even know they have a harddrive, or a system path, etc. So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load. Remind me: how does Windows 98 Start Menu compare to that?
- userbinator 8y ago
  discoverable That's the problem. It was far easier to browse through what's available. You can't search for something you don't even know the name of, but you can certainly read through a list.
  - dpwm 8y ago
    Even back then it was inconsistent. Some things were in the start menu under a hierarchy of company name -> program name. Others went just by the program name. Some were (company name) (program name). Some were just a start menu entry, not a folder.
    - nitrogen 8y ago
      But you could move them around as you pleased. I had Graphics, Audio, Video, Games, etc.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
        Indeed. The classic start menu was incredibly simple, it was just a menuized view of an actual folder hierarchy. It is notable that you can create your own such menuized views by right-clicking on the taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar.
sorenjan 8y ago
Agreed. There's two things that seem to be a reoccurring theme in every redesign nowadays, lower contrast and more whitespace. One of the modern design trends I can't stand is buttons with icons and no labels, sometimes without mouse over text as well.
- dvdkon 8y ago
  Buttons with no labels are certainly not a modern design trend. A lot of older (Windows, mostly) software had a complex interface consisting of a menubar, a toolbar (that sometimes had functionality not available elsewhere), and a space for "internal windows". The icons were usually 16x16 and it was really unclear what they were supposed to represent. At least mouseover text was reasonably common.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    Most apps allowed you to customize toolbars, and displaying labels next to the icons was one of the options. However, no conforming app should have had any functionality in the toolbar that was not available in the menu bar. This isn't to say that nobody ever did it, but the OS design guidelines were very clear on that point.
  - OkGoDoIt 8y ago
    But at least mouseover tooltips were common. It’s downright rare to see tooltips nowadays, almost never on mobile apps especially.
sickcodebruh 8y ago
Re: usability of the Start Menu... When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.
- phkahler 8y ago
  One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff. I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I'd propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools. I'd also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu. Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done. I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.
  - pstch 8y ago
    > I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories. Many already do such things (most Desktop Environments provide a shell with some kind of software category menu).
  - jenscow 8y ago
    Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft. Also applies to c:\Program Files and the registry. I can't remember the rationale, but it does make it hard to find things.
    - 8y ago
mrweasel 8y ago
Part of it may also be down to features. Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need. Sadly there seems to be a sense that the next version of Windows or Mac OS needs to add new features, visible features. If you shave a modern OS down to just the features that you'd need to do your work, the economics of carefully designing a desktop and the icons becomes more "reasonable" again. I still think that a clone of the classic Mac desktop, or Windows 3.11 would be great on Linux.
- everyone 8y ago
  If you must use Windows get Windows LTSC A version of windows 10 that is completely free of bloatware (no Microsoft store, no preinstalled apps like candy crush, no tiles on start menu, no Cortana, only windows search, no edge, only Internet explorer). It only gets security updates instead of feature updates, and has support for 10 years. Best version of windows 10 IMO. FYI it was originally called LTSB (Long term servicing branch) and was renamed to LTSC (Long term servicing channel). I put it on my new machine and it the 1st version of Windows I've been ok with since 7. Buying it is basically impossible for a normal person, but its readily available on tpb. (also kms activator)
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - andai 8y ago
    I recently tried out LTSC again in a vm to see how W10 has progressed. Apps take a long time to open. I thought it wasn't registering the clicks or something, until 30 seconds later it opened it 3 times. Start menu takes > 0.5 seconds to even begin animating. Disabling animations actually makes the lag subjectively worse. I installed W7 a few hours later to compare, and I was amazed at the difference in responsiveness. I'm talking like 10-20x faster. I bought 5 year old netbook recently and it didn't have the resources to open W10's start menu. (Well, it could, but it took three minutes.) Did a fresh install of W7, and like magic, you can actually use the computer again. I don't use any version of Windows anymore, but I'd like to be able to. I'm sad support for W7 will be ending soon. With classic theme gone, and everything so slow, the best Windows desktop experience for me in this day and age is XFCE.
Synaesthesia 8y ago
The widgets are great for a resolution of 1024x768 or so but I think larger ones are better for today’s displays eh 27” 2560x1400
- ddingus 8y ago
  2x scale still looks very good.
- seba_dos1 8y ago
  That's what UI scaling is for.
amyjess 8y ago
> Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here) This is one reason why, on Linux, I prefer KDE/Qt applications above all others. Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding, and the widgets just look huge, regardless of what GTK theme you're using. Qt, on the other hand, has a number of theme engines with small, tight widgets. Personally, I'm a huge fan of QtCurve. You can customize it exactly how you want it, and it's a godsend. I just wish the GTK devs didn't torpedo the possibility of making a GTK3 version available. For some examples, I opened up a KWrite window and took a couple screenshots of the main UI and the settings dialog: https://imgur.com/a/bx1dk8h https://imgur.com/a/bx1dk8h
- zozbot123 8y ago
  Heh. I think something like the GTK3 application-managed header bar is actually the best compromise if touch-first interaction is going to become important. I mean, even Windows 10 now has huge titlebars in order to support the touch case, and that's surely no better than what GNOME/GTK does.
- anthk 8y ago
  >Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding Get the Tenebris theme.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
iamgopal 8y ago
And speed.
techslave 8y ago
at the risk of a useless comment, +1. windows 98 may have been the height of desktop UI. the windows file dialog is still, puzzlingly, the very best out there. no idea why other platforms are so resistant to copying it.
ArcticCelt 8y ago
When first tried Windows 10 while is still was in public beta I though "Oh they are still working on the design, things are still pretty crude and indistinguishable from each other". Then a little bit latter I realized it was the final design all along.
monochromatic 8y ago
Not to mention, the operating system was just a product that you bought. Instead of a “free” “upgrade” that get foisted on you to monetize your personal data.
pmorici 8y ago
You could still get that with the Windows Classic theme up until Windows 8 when they took it out. I'm not sure what I'll do when Windows 7 support ends next year all the new windows interfaces have been horrendous.
quicklime 8y ago
There were some things that Windows 98 did better than the UIs of today, but overall I just don't agree that it was "excellent". I definitely wouldn't want to go back to it, and here are a few reasons why: - Even purely from a UI perspective, I much prefer modern Chrome's flat and minimal UI over Internet Explorer 4, and I think most other people do too. At the time, Microsoft claimed that IE4 was an integral part of Windows 98, so I'm going to consider it as part of the Windows UI rather than just a standalone app :) - The taskbar doesn't scale very well, and once you get more than a dozen or so windows, each entry with the same icon becomes indistinguishable. This was particularly bad because browsers at the time didn't have tabs. As I type this, I have 14 tabs open in various browser windows, and this just wouldn't have fit in a Windows 98 style taskbar. Note that I consider the non-tabbed single document interface ("SDI") to be an integral part of the Windows UI here. Both SDI and MDI (multi-document interface) were part of Microsoft's UI guides, and MDI was even worse than SDI. - The Start menu also doesn't scale very well, and could get very deep, which confused users. It lacked a search function like Windows 10, Mac (via Spotlight) and most Linux DEs today have. - No support for virtual desktops, which Windows 10, Mac and Linux DEs today all have. - Network Neighborhood was slow af, and was confusing for users to configure. Apple's AirDrop has a much better UI for sharing files on a network. - Active Desktop. - At the time, Microsoft was experimenting with integrating the web with Windows, and one of the things they did was put hyperlinks all over the place. They even experimented with changing it so that desktop icons and icons in Windows Explorer were links, and this caused a lot of confusion due to the inconsistency between a single-click vs double-click. Some of the problems here are that we have much more computing power now, and (at least I) tend to keep more things open at a time. There were also numerous Internet UIs that Microsoft was experimenting with at the time (NN, AD, MSN, etc.) and many of them didn't work out.
realharo 8y ago
It's not all sunshine and rainbows. - Start menu was crap without search. Search, and being able to just start typing, is extremely important for day-to-day usability. - The toolbars of many applications used to contain far too many buttons that almost nobody ever clicked on. - I consider the taskbar in Windows 7+ to be the best way to handle multitasking and switching between applications (including the previews on hover, the wheel click for new window or closing an existing one - just like browser tabs work, etc.). No other OS/environment even comes close in this regard.

by alxlaz 8y ago

rsync 8y ago

"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent." Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work. One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...

fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
What makes up for this, to some extent, is that you can assign a keyboard shortcut to any menu item in OSX: go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts, click +, select the application (or all applications), type the menu name and set a shortcut.
- fiddlerwoaroof 8y ago
  The other thing about OS X is that command-shift-/ opens a little search box in the help menu and then you can pick any menu item by typing a few characters and selecting it with the keyboard.
  - navs 8y ago
    Very underrated feature. Last I used Ubuntu's Unity it had a similar feature. I wish Alfred had a plugin to do this on Mac OS. I remember Quicksilver had something.
    - douglaswlance 8y ago
      Alfred does have such a workflow: https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10231-faster-menu-search/ https://www.alfredforum.com/topic/10231-faster-menu-search/
- spdionis 8y ago
  What baffled me is that if you have a mouse with side buttons you just cannot use them in any type of shortcut. Mouse support is generally terrible in OSX.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades.
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      > Mouse support for Macs has been terrible for decades. I'm kinda out of the loop, do they still sell mice with only one button?
      - MereInterest 8y ago
        Sort of. Their desktop mice have two buttons, but only a single plastic shell. This seems to follow Apple's design guideline of wallpapering over complexity, rather than admitting that it exists. Image: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media/vc/75a2caed-171a-4f76-a5e8-bef3cde6c806._SL300__.jpg https://m.media-amazon.com/images/S/aplus-media/vc/75a2caed-...
rkagerer 8y ago
Dang right! It's like half the programmers of today have forgotten keyboards are a thing.
- ddingus 8y ago
  For growing numbers of people they aren't. As an exercize, I very seriously embraced touch a few years back. I will not give up keyboard plus mouse, but I am also amazed at what really can be done with touch keyboard and pen. Lots of people want to expand on that because it expands on phones and tablets. I have a Note 8, and can content create on it to a level I did not think possible a few years ago. I use touch keyboard, voice and pen. At times I carry a small bluetooth keyboard with touch mouse pad. It is not as fast, but is more robust.
  - ori_b 8y ago
    I put up with touch keyboards because real ones are not very portable. It's good enough to get by, but it's not good. The same with touch interaction -- selecting a range of text is an exercise in frustration. I don't want that interface on my desktop. Just because a thing has a CPU and operating system does not mean it needs to have a unified user experience.
- squarefoot 8y ago
  And many others don't even realize that investing a bit of research on better keyboards would bring us to much better use experience. I don't mean changing the typewriter style keys, those are ok, I mean all other keys; why there is no standard for a reduced keypad with the bare minimum for menu navigation and data entry? Unfortunately the arrow keys are a half solution by not implementing yes/no and other control keys. Why there's no contextual Info key to show information/help pertaining the current task? The computer keyboard as we know it has to be extended, not taken away as the WIMP culture before and touch screen after attempted to do, with disastrous results so far. I would welcome a kit made of say 120 key modules (one key per module, real clicky keys, please!) all with the same pinout, and normal+2x/3x/4x keycaps, special "key" modules such as trackballs, Thinkpad "nipples", analog knobs etc. then a breadboard-style carrier board where i can stick them as I want, plus a decoder board. Then, once the keyboard is ready, I can send a file describing its details to some high quality 3D printing assembly to purchase a pcb and case for my prototype keyboard and turn it into a real one.
cesarb 8y ago
When I bought my first computer (which came with Windows 3.1), it didn't come with a mouse. User interfaces back then were designed to be usable without a mouse, because many people didn't have a mouse - it was optional, and used up one of the serial ports.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  I gave up trying the get my first mouse working after hours of tweaking win.ini...
- collinmanderson 8y ago
  Yup, I started out with win 3.1 without a mouse. You could do pretty much anything except use paint.
paulcole 8y ago
Both your comment and the article use the phrase “real work”. What do you meany by that? And is there “fake work” that Windows fails at?
zapzupnz 8y ago
> One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. I actually find that's what I miss when I use Windows. Windows' universal keyboard shortcuts seem to be limited to window management and some basics like new files, save, cut, copy, paste, etc. On the other hand, just about every macOS has the same shortcuts for actions within applications as opposed to without. For items without shortcuts, you can define your own quickly and easily in System Preferences, and those custom shortcuts can apply to just one app or every app. Not only that, every macOS app puts the shortcuts in the same place, the menu bar. They're all searchable via the Help menu. On Windows, there are more often than not keyboard shortcuts that aren't listed in any menus, so one would have no idea what they are without looking them up. Further, because Windows software tends to be developed in any ol' framework with any ol' user interface, lacking in any consistency, quite a lot of programs don't even implement the standard, universal shortcuts.
- int_19h 8y ago
  All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design. UX apps of Win98 era were much more consistent, and especially the rule that all commands and shortcuts must be in the main menu was usually adhered to, at least by apps that respected the official platform design guidelines. The idea of a drop-down main menu with all commands comes from CUA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Description https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access#Descrip...
  - zapzupnz 8y ago
    > All the things that you list about Windows apps are deficiencies of the modern era of UX design I was going to say "not on macOS, they aren't" because this isn't true for any apps that use Cocoa or Carbon (which is to say, all of them). The only apps that exhibit any weirdness are ones that use cross-platform frameworks like Qt, GTK+, or wxWidgets. But nowadays, there are loads of Electron and React Native apps that don't even present anything in the global menu bar; if the developers don't think to add them in themselves, basic functions like copy and paste don't work without secondary clicking!
  - 8y ago
weliketocode 8y ago
Yes! yes! 1000x yes! Have spent the vast majority of my time on OSX for the past several years, but still reminisce about the wonderful keyboard shortcuts from Windows.
city41 8y ago
I'd argue MacOS classic was the real winner here, especially keyboard shortcuts. For example cmnd+q always quits an app, where as in Windows you had ctrl+q, alt+f4, ctrl+w, and sometimes you just had to do the menu navigation (alt f, then e I think? and sometimes it was alt f, x), and yet other times there was no keyboard shortcut at all.
- rtpg 8y ago
  It’s funny to mention ctrl+q , because it is one consistency in MacOS that I find unbearable to the point of having set it to spotlight instead Right next to ctrl+q (something I end up hitting once per session of an app, by definition) is ctrl+a (select all, something I hit tens of times a session), ctrl+w (hit in the browser a good amount), ctrl+1, ctrl+2 (also good browser shortcuts) I actually don’t need to close the entire program that often! Please don’t make it so easy to accidentally hit at such a high frequency. Bonus points: I switch between QWERTY and AZERTY keyboards a lot. That’s just me but it makes me have a lot of extra pain Alt-F4 is very nice in that regard.
  - thedaemon 8y ago
    Select all in MacOS should be CMD+A, not CTRL+A. Try swapping your muscle memory :)
- int_19h 8y ago
  Alt+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current top-level window. Ctrl+F4 is a shortcut that closes the current child window/tab. For apps with tabs, this was often duplicated as Ctrl+W. There's no standard shortcut for exit. I believe that this is deliberate, to avoid people hitting it accidentally. However, the accelerator keys to do it via the File menu are always Alt+F ("File") -> X ("eXit"). These are all platform UX guidelines, or at least they were back in the day. Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > Of course, apps can and did ignore them, but that was also possible on macOS. This is much less likely, given that they are set up by default for every new application.
yhoiseth 8y ago
I find SizeUp to be a lifesaver. Good example of a finished app. It does what it’s supposed to and is incredibly stable and reliable.
gerash 8y ago
One UX issue with the cascading menus in Start menu was when you had to navigate several levels deep to open a program. Since the menus expanded and collapsed on mouse hover every once in a while accidentally moving the mouse in the wrong direction meant all my menu navigation progress was lost and I had to start over.
IggleSniggle 8y ago
Shoutout to Shortcat for providing something like "knowledge-free keyboard shortcuts everywhere" on macOS. You hit a search key-chord (I use SHIFT-CMD-SPACE) and it pops up a search modal making all UI elements keyboard selectable. Usually the thing you want is 1 or 2 characters followed by Return. It honestly reminds me of the experience of navigating Windows menus with Alt- and progressive keyboard shortcut learning, but flexible enough to handle things like Electron applications that don't even have a Menu bar or settable shortcuts. Does anyone else use this or something similar? https://shortcatapp.com/ https://shortcatapp.com/
- Piskvorrr 8y ago
  Jetbrains' IDEA has the "Search everywhere" feature that...well...searches everywhere - menus, commands, project files, etc. I'd love to have that for every app in the OS.
  - trm42 8y ago
    Actually, that would be really, really awesome once you get used to Jetbrains' way of working. It's so unusual to be able to search for all the configuration, functionality, code and files in the same place.
- explainplease 8y ago
  Emacs is much like that, as everything the user can do is an interactive command, which is typically a named function. So tools like Helm, Ivy/Counsel, as well as the built-in completion for M-x, let the user find and execute commands by name. And, e.g. `helm-M-x` display any bound keys next to the command name.
- daxelrod 8y ago
  Thank you for teaching me about Shortcat!

bluedino 8y ago

They also worked with what they had. Limited by 640x480, 16 or 256 colors, they weren’t wasting cpu time and memory on alpha blending a menu so it fades in... At least when they started doing animated menus and such you could still turn those features off.

tomc1985 8y ago

This is true but users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once. I love high-density UI but I think the web and modern design has trended the way it has because focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed. Now the prevailing trend is this Fischer-Price children's-toys minimalism, with bright shiny colors and cute mascots. It's insulting

lucideer 8y ago
> users also frequently complained about the number of items on screen at once ... focus groups/"everyone else"/"the mainstream" kept saying they were overwhelmed Do you have any links to such studies/focus groups/articles on this? I'd be genuinely curious to read about them.
- tomc1985 8y ago
  My experience there is more anecdotal, though over the life of my career one thing I am often measured on is the visual complexity of the UIs that I have made My last job we brought in focus groups at times and that was exactly their feedback, for an embedded UI for the machine that we sold. It should be noted that that machine required about a week of operator training to use, which included interacting with our UI
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    I'm not sure screen density is a flaw in the Windows UX/UI style. A lot of Windows programs have really cluttered, disorganized configuration menus and confusing workflows; PuTTY and ConEmu are two particularly egregious offenders. Seems more like a "developer lacking good design sense" issue, rather than something inherent to the Windows environment.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    Interesting--I've never in my career actually seen a user study or focus group that concluded that users don't like dense UIs or lots of options. Not saying they don't exist--sounds like you experienced a group that found this. I've just never seen it myself. What I see a lot is UI professionals and artists simply declaring that interfaces must be minimal and abstract and that visual complexity is bad. Whether this is just current fashionable dogma, or if there is actually research to support this, I have no idea, but none of the product decision makers I've worked with have ever asked for evidence.

microcolonel 8y ago

I've long believed that Windows 98 is the pinnacle of desktop usability on many fronts, 2000 was the best NT in my view. The performance was spectacular, and it was rarely unclear how to accomplish something (unless it hadn't been thought of before the release of W98). Added: I'd be interested in putting together a Wayland desktop environment around the strengths of Windows 98's interface designs (along with some modern discoveries about human interface, and at least whole number resolution scaling). I feel like there should be at least one well-maintained toolkit which doesn't attempt to support full CSS styling on widgets.

0xfeba 8y ago
I use XFCE4 to imitate Win95/98.
ddingus 8y ago
Seconded. On Unix, I also reached a similar point on SGI Indigo Magic Desktop.

jancsika 8y ago

> - And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use. New Start menu: 1. Click Windows key 2. type (typically) three letters of the program you want to run 3. Click <Enter> That's 4 keystrokes, bound only by the time it takes the user to physically make the keypresses. User doesn't need any knowledge of how programs are categorized, nor know a hierarchy of categories. The process by which the system displays programs matching what the user is typing happens as fast as possible. You can even speak to your damned computer and the start menu will probably react accordingly. None of these actions require the user to even know they have a harddrive, or a system path, etc. So modern users have a discoverable, accessible, realtime-responsive start menu that requires minimal cognitive load. Remind me: how does Windows 98 Start Menu compare to that?

userbinator 8y ago
discoverable That's the problem. It was far easier to browse through what's available. You can't search for something you don't even know the name of, but you can certainly read through a list.
- dpwm 8y ago
  Even back then it was inconsistent. Some things were in the start menu under a hierarchy of company name -> program name. Others went just by the program name. Some were (company name) (program name). Some were just a start menu entry, not a folder.
  - nitrogen 8y ago
    But you could move them around as you pleased. I had Graphics, Audio, Video, Games, etc.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
      Indeed. The classic start menu was incredibly simple, it was just a menuized view of an actual folder hierarchy. It is notable that you can create your own such menuized views by right-clicking on the taskbar -> Toolbars -> New Toolbar.

sorenjan 8y ago

Agreed. There's two things that seem to be a reoccurring theme in every redesign nowadays, lower contrast and more whitespace. One of the modern design trends I can't stand is buttons with icons and no labels, sometimes without mouse over text as well.

dvdkon 8y ago
Buttons with no labels are certainly not a modern design trend. A lot of older (Windows, mostly) software had a complex interface consisting of a menubar, a toolbar (that sometimes had functionality not available elsewhere), and a space for "internal windows". The icons were usually 16x16 and it was really unclear what they were supposed to represent. At least mouseover text was reasonably common.
- int_19h 8y ago
  Most apps allowed you to customize toolbars, and displaying labels next to the icons was one of the options. However, no conforming app should have had any functionality in the toolbar that was not available in the menu bar. This isn't to say that nobody ever did it, but the OS design guidelines were very clear on that point.
- OkGoDoIt 8y ago
  But at least mouseover tooltips were common. It’s downright rare to see tooltips nowadays, almost never on mobile apps especially.

sickcodebruh 8y ago

Re: usability of the Start Menu... When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.

phkahler 8y ago
One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe->Photoshop, Microsoft->stuff. I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I'd propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools. I'd also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu. Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done. I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.
- pstch 8y ago
  > I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories. Many already do such things (most Desktop Environments provide a shell with some kind of software category menu).
- jenscow 8y ago
  Putting your application inside your company name was (is?) part of the guidelines from Microsoft. Also applies to c:\Program Files and the registry. I can't remember the rationale, but it does make it hard to find things.
  - 8y ago

mrweasel 8y ago

Part of it may also be down to features. Windows 10 is a mess, there's at least two different control panels and more features than any one person would need. Sadly there seems to be a sense that the next version of Windows or Mac OS needs to add new features, visible features. If you shave a modern OS down to just the features that you'd need to do your work, the economics of carefully designing a desktop and the icons becomes more "reasonable" again. I still think that a clone of the classic Mac desktop, or Windows 3.11 would be great on Linux.

everyone 8y ago
If you must use Windows get Windows LTSC A version of windows 10 that is completely free of bloatware (no Microsoft store, no preinstalled apps like candy crush, no tiles on start menu, no Cortana, only windows search, no edge, only Internet explorer). It only gets security updates instead of feature updates, and has support for 10 years. Best version of windows 10 IMO. FYI it was originally called LTSB (Long term servicing branch) and was renamed to LTSC (Long term servicing channel). I put it on my new machine and it the 1st version of Windows I've been ok with since 7. Buying it is basically impossible for a normal person, but its readily available on tpb. (also kms activator)
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- andai 8y ago
  I recently tried out LTSC again in a vm to see how W10 has progressed. Apps take a long time to open. I thought it wasn't registering the clicks or something, until 30 seconds later it opened it 3 times. Start menu takes > 0.5 seconds to even begin animating. Disabling animations actually makes the lag subjectively worse. I installed W7 a few hours later to compare, and I was amazed at the difference in responsiveness. I'm talking like 10-20x faster. I bought 5 year old netbook recently and it didn't have the resources to open W10's start menu. (Well, it could, but it took three minutes.) Did a fresh install of W7, and like magic, you can actually use the computer again. I don't use any version of Windows anymore, but I'd like to be able to. I'm sad support for W7 will be ending soon. With classic theme gone, and everything so slow, the best Windows desktop experience for me in this day and age is XFCE.

Synaesthesia 8y ago

The widgets are great for a resolution of 1024x768 or so but I think larger ones are better for today’s displays eh 27” 2560x1400

ddingus 8y ago
2x scale still looks very good.
seba_dos1 8y ago
That's what UI scaling is for.

amyjess 8y ago

> Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here) This is one reason why, on Linux, I prefer KDE/Qt applications above all others. Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding, and the widgets just look huge, regardless of what GTK theme you're using. Qt, on the other hand, has a number of theme engines with small, tight widgets. Personally, I'm a huge fan of QtCurve. You can customize it exactly how you want it, and it's a godsend. I just wish the GTK devs didn't torpedo the possibility of making a GTK3 version available. For some examples, I opened up a KWrite window and took a couple screenshots of the main UI and the settings dialog: https://imgur.com/a/bx1dk8h https://imgur.com/a/bx1dk8h

zozbot123 8y ago
Heh. I think something like the GTK3 application-managed header bar is actually the best compromise if touch-first interaction is going to become important. I mean, even Windows 10 now has huge titlebars in order to support the touch case, and that's surely no better than what GNOME/GTK does.
anthk 8y ago
>Ever since I first started using Linux in the early '00s, I've noticed that GTK+ applications have excessive padding Get the Tenebris theme.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

iamgopal 8y ago

And speed.

techslave 8y ago

at the risk of a useless comment, +1. windows 98 may have been the height of desktop UI. the windows file dialog is still, puzzlingly, the very best out there. no idea why other platforms are so resistant to copying it.

ArcticCelt 8y ago

When first tried Windows 10 while is still was in public beta I though "Oh they are still working on the design, things are still pretty crude and indistinguishable from each other". Then a little bit latter I realized it was the final design all along.

monochromatic 8y ago

Not to mention, the operating system was just a product that you bought. Instead of a “free” “upgrade” that get foisted on you to monetize your personal data.

pmorici 8y ago

You could still get that with the Windows Classic theme up until Windows 8 when they took it out. I'm not sure what I'll do when Windows 7 support ends next year all the new windows interfaces have been horrendous.

quicklime 8y ago

There were some things that Windows 98 did better than the UIs of today, but overall I just don't agree that it was "excellent". I definitely wouldn't want to go back to it, and here are a few reasons why: - Even purely from a UI perspective, I much prefer modern Chrome's flat and minimal UI over Internet Explorer 4, and I think most other people do too. At the time, Microsoft claimed that IE4 was an integral part of Windows 98, so I'm going to consider it as part of the Windows UI rather than just a standalone app :) - The taskbar doesn't scale very well, and once you get more than a dozen or so windows, each entry with the same icon becomes indistinguishable. This was particularly bad because browsers at the time didn't have tabs. As I type this, I have 14 tabs open in various browser windows, and this just wouldn't have fit in a Windows 98 style taskbar. Note that I consider the non-tabbed single document interface ("SDI") to be an integral part of the Windows UI here. Both SDI and MDI (multi-document interface) were part of Microsoft's UI guides, and MDI was even worse than SDI. - The Start menu also doesn't scale very well, and could get very deep, which confused users. It lacked a search function like Windows 10, Mac (via Spotlight) and most Linux DEs today have. - No support for virtual desktops, which Windows 10, Mac and Linux DEs today all have. - Network Neighborhood was slow af, and was confusing for users to configure. Apple's AirDrop has a much better UI for sharing files on a network. - Active Desktop. - At the time, Microsoft was experimenting with integrating the web with Windows, and one of the things they did was put hyperlinks all over the place. They even experimented with changing it so that desktop icons and icons in Windows Explorer were links, and this caused a lot of confusion due to the inconsistency between a single-click vs double-click. Some of the problems here are that we have much more computing power now, and (at least I) tend to keep more things open at a time. There were also numerous Internet UIs that Microsoft was experimenting with at the time (NN, AD, MSN, etc.) and many of them didn't work out.

realharo 8y ago

It's not all sunshine and rainbows. - Start menu was crap without search. Search, and being able to just start typing, is extremely important for day-to-day usability. - The toolbars of many applications used to contain far too many buttons that almost nobody ever clicked on. - I consider the taskbar in Windows 7+ to be the best way to handle multitasking and switching between applications (including the previews on hover, the wheel click for new window or closing an existing one - just like browser tabs work, etc.). No other OS/environment even comes close in this regard.