16 ms·

Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018)

274 points by akling 7y ago

timw4mail 7y ago
So Microsoft was agile in the mid 90s....
zozbot234 7y ago
85 major versions ahead of Windows 10... and rightly so.
londons_explore 7y ago
I love the fact that one of the usability issues identified 25 years ago in windows is still the case today. * If you "cut" a bit of text, it disappears from your document, and unless you later paste that text, it's gone forever. * If you "cut" a file, but never paste it, the file stays in its original location, contrary to the users expectations. This kind of thing is really the implementation details showing through into the UI (the clipboard is not a place on disk, and cannot have files and directories moved into it)
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  What happens if you "cut" an important file, and then forget to paste it before copying something else? You could easily loose many hours of work! That can happen with text too, of course, but because text takes up more screen real-estate, selecting lots of text "feels" dangerous, so you're less likely to accidentally screw yourself. -- When you "cut" a file in early Windows, did it disappear from the original location, or did the icon fade out as on modern platforms? IMO, the fade makes it clear what is happening, and is a great example of how minor visual tweaks can be imbued with lots of meaning.
  - JonathonW 7y ago
    Windows 95 behaved like Windows does today: "cutting" a file faded out the icon until it was pasted someplace else. Prior versions of Windows did not have an equivalent to the "cut" operation; for example, Windows 3.1's File Manager moved files via a "File > Move..." menu option, which opened a dialog with two text fields to specify the source and destination. (Copying behaved similarly; the document-editing-inspired Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-X bindings used today were all introduced for file management in the Windows world in Windows 95.)
    - quietbritishjim 7y ago
      > "cutting" a file faded out the icon Cutting a file sets its hidden attribute. If you have turned on display of hidden files then they do indeed appear faded, but you have to be a fairly advanced user for that – for most people they will just seem to disappear. If you cut or copy another file the the first file will be unhidden, and I suppose also on a clean shutdown. Overall it's still confusing for a normal user who doesn't see hidden files, especially if they intentionally used cut without paste to delete a sensitive file.
- unicornfinder 7y ago
  I'm honestly impressed that they thought so in depth about these things. That said, I'm of the opinion that a clipboard manager should be a standard part of an OS and would arguably solve this problem.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    This wouldn't have been considered a problem in the 90s, but my concern with clipboard managers is that they would end up containing a lot of sensitive information, particularly passwords from my password manager. (Not that this isn't a concern otherwise, but there's a difference between a pasteboard that holds one piece of information at a time and immediately purges old information, and one that logs history for an extended period.)
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Clipboard managers, such as the one that ships with Windows 10, allow applications such as password managers to mark something to not be stored in the clipboard history. KeePass supports this functionality as an example. Really though autotype is the safer option.
      - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
        Yeah, my concern is that the user won't necessarily be copying from a proper password manager. Passwords are not the only information that people copy and paste: there are credit card numbers, SSN's, drivers license info, etc etc. You could argue the security trade-off is worthwhile, and I might even agree if the clipboard manager isn't enabled by default. A clipboard manager requires you to treat your clipboard in a certain way that I don't think users do in practice.
        zamadatix 7y ago
        It isn't enabled by default (currently) but there isn't really anything you can do to protect someone who copies important out of a text document and/or leaves open access to their desktop anyways without annoying them so much they work around it in an even worse way. Same thing with browser autofill and password managers.
- zamadatix 7y ago
  Windows 10 has a clipboard manager with clipboard history now. It's largely just an awareness issue at this point.
  - ShamelessC 7y ago
    I had no idea! How do you access it?
  - judah 7y ago
    I've used Windows for decades and didn't know about this until today. Start -> Clipboard Settings -> Clipboard History Once on, Win+V shows clipboard history. Super cool.
- kitsunesoba 7y ago
  This is likely why in macOS, you can’t cut files but instead have to copy them and then move them with Command-Shift-V (holding down Shift changes the title of the Paste menu item) — the intention to move the file is indicated on the pasting half of the operation, dodging the Cut issue entirely. Also, cut never really made metaphorical sense for files… you don’t break out the scissors to transfer documents from one folder to another.
  - jxdxbx 7y ago
    I get the menu item to change name with option, not shift. Incidentally I've been using a Mac for decades, but I never remember to check what modifiers do. I'd always just copy and then go back and delete. I think the right way to deal with this is to have a fancy clipboard manager / shelf, frankly. Cut things, they're put on the shelf, paste pastes in the top thing in the shelf. I suppose lots of people might just end up with cluttered shelves and lose track of stuff. But the shelf concept is a good GUI power user thing.
    - Twixes 7y ago
      Yes, it's Cmd+Alt+V
- derefr 7y ago
  I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Scrap_Object_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Scrap_Object_File s. (Most people didn't realize this was a thing. I'm not at a Windows PC at the moment: is it still a thing?) I've always thought it'd make a lot of sense, for any modern OS, if every time you cut something, you'd be creating a .scrap on the desktop; and then, if you later pasted it, the .scrap would go away. Desktop-as-spool-directory. Same as the way macOS tried to use the desktop as a spool for screenshots until recently (where now the screenshot spool has become a mysterious locationless storage displayed in an ephemeral modal window.)
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    This doesn't work well with multiple drives. If you cut an object from a usb stick, should it get transferred entirely to your desktop (maybe taking many hours for big files), for you to then paste it somewhere else on the usb stick? (When a direct move would be near instant). If instead you want a .scrap directory on every volume, you have a new inconsistency - if something is cut, and the device removed before the paste happens, the paste will fail.
    - derefr 7y ago
      Ah, I wasn’t really suggesting that the (contents of the) clipboard be immediately serialized to disk, but rather that an OS built-in clipboard manager be created that exposes its contents as shell objects living on the shell Desktop (rather than the filesystem Desktop.) So every cut would put a shell object onto the shell desktop, but this would just be a handle to a memory object living in the clipboard manager. Pasting would move that object from the shell Desktop, to the shell Trash, such that emptying the Trash would get rid of it; but it wouldn’t really be “in” the filesystem Trash either. If you select and copied the shell object on the shell Desktop, you’d just be making the “selected” clipboard handle the one referenced by the shell object. If you moved the shell object, you’d be instantiating a physical filesystem .scrap object at the destination. And, of course, since all this is simulating something persistent, you’d expect the clipboard manager to make each clipboard object refcounted, and not get rid of objects as long as something (e.g. a shell object) holds a reference to them; even meaning that the clipboard objects with nonzero reference-counts would need to be persisted to an OS “clipboard database” on shutdown, such that the shell objects referencing them would still be valid on next startup.
tolger 7y ago
I really like the Windows 95 UI. That's why Windows 2000 was my favorite version of Windows, ever. It was very consistent and functional throughout.
- pier25 7y ago
  I agree. Even if 95/98/2000 look outdated by today's standards, these are still the best designed Windows IMO. Windows 10 is really a frankenstein.
  - airstrike 7y ago
    The fact that the Settings app and the Control Panel are allowed to coexist baffles me
    - microcolonel 7y ago
      The investment is too great in custom Control Panel extensions from hardware vendors, including for hardware supplied to basically all major OEMs. If they toss that, a lot of hardware will become unconfigurable.
    - zamadatix 7y ago
      Control panel has to stick around for compatibility with legacy apps, including those that register functionality into it and call it's paths directly. It's pretty well hidden from users at this point and basically just a collection of links to compatibility components. I've never understood the concern.
      - pvg 7y ago
        There are plenty of perfectly mundane, common settings that are only accessible through the old control panels. And, of course, there are a couple of different styles of old control panel to begin with - the more recent 'modular'-ish ones and then ur-panels with lots of tabs and 'Advanced' buttons. As a UI thing, it's easily Windows at its ugliest and most baffling.
sproketboy 7y ago
Focus stealing - still an issue. Sad.
cmrdporcupine 7y ago
One of the trends that W95 started that I still find objectionable is putting the 'X' close button gadget next to the other window controls, so sloppy mousing can lead to accidental closures when the intent was minimization or maximization. This is one thing that the original Lisa and MacOS got right (and NeXTstep, and GEM and I think AmigaOS) but W95 and its successors did not. The close button was on the far left, and the other actions on the right. (EDIT: my recollection was wrong about the Lisa, I think. Its window controls were not as clear as Mac OS) Unfortunately OS X inexplicably adopted the W95 conventions. And in the first Aqua releases made it even worse by hiding the functionality icons until mouse-over.
- swiley 7y ago
  If we’re going to talk about wm. CWM is definitely the best: the mouse is only used for sloppy positioning and focus changing (not even topping/level changing.) Everything else is done via the comparatively precise keyboard.
- elweston2 7y ago
  It was annoying. The problem they had was the upper left already had a control there. The system menu. In some programs it is still 'there' but hidden. You can see it if you left click on the upper left corner. They could not get rid of it as some old win3x programs went trolling around in that menu and changed it.
  - cmrdporcupine 7y ago
    I guess? Couldn't they just have moved that control to the right? Or put minimize & maximize next to it and had close on right, like in NeXTstep? Somehow everyone thought it was a great idea to copy them. I change this in most of my window managers on Linux, but Chrome stubbornly insists on doing its own window controls.
    - elweston2 7y ago
      Remember one of the goals was 'just works' too. As they wanted to move people off win3x. The win3x apps had to work/look the same but pick up some of the nice styling from win9x. Some programs would also roll their own system menu and put it in that spot. That would cause a cover up of the close. For a run of the mill application it was just a style and they could have put it anywhere. For programs that controlled the whole window including the title bar area it was a tough choice. Even then it did not always come out looking right. The win95 style guide basically told everyone to knock it off and let windows control it. Was it all a good choice? For some it was annoying. There was a shortcut that did the same thing. If you double clicked the upper left it would close the window too. Which is how they taught people to use win3x. Most certainly it was an interesting compromise to the constraints they had. Copying the style was all on everyone else though. They wanted it to be familiar to windows users. All to 'gain market-share' I guess.
Timberwolf 7y ago
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as "running" has been undone - it's back to icons with only a subtle indicator to distinguish between those that represent shortcuts and those that represent a running program. The Start Menu is now assumed knowledge that the furthest left icon on the taskbar is "special" and does something different to all the other shortcuts. I guess the modern equivalent of "Start" is "Type here to search" in the Cortana bar but that's not a great experience for new users. We all know the propensity for it to decide to search Bing at the slightest provocation but if you try some natural "never used a computer before" things like searching for "power off" or "shut down" you get some quite unhelpful results. (The former wants me to set up a power plan, the latter directs me to Add or Remove Programs) It feels like computer use is assumed knowledge in 2019 - that everyone who buys a computer already knows what the Windows logo represents, how minimising and overlapping works, what the difference between an app icon and a notification tray icon is, and so on. Microsoft no longer feel the need to design so much for people buying their first ever family computer, having never even used one before. Probably true in the first world, but I wonder if this holds out globally?
- vbezhenar 7y ago
  Similar thing happened in Apple with iOS 7. Before they used skeuomorphic design using realistic images to represent UI which was supposed to help people using computing devices first time. E.g. leather notepad to represent reminders application, 3D buttons, etc. They abandoned this design paradigm and switched to minimalist one probably because most of their users became computer-literate and did not need those analogues to understand UI.
  - goalieca 7y ago
    I think going with a simple icon is far better. Consider the design of symbols such as corrosive or the street is icy, or s-curve coming up ahead. They do not look like real-world images but they are so wonderfully intuitive. We do not need to stare at the detail to understand what it is. Likewise, the new icons are brilliant. The reminders app has basically a list. Music is a musical note, etc. The only one that really sucks is "photos". It looks more like a colour wheel.
petercooper 7y ago
It struck me earlier today that while Windows 95 took many big steps forward, iOS was actually inspired a lot more by Windows 3.1. Springboard is very much like Program Manager.. every icon is an app, no documents, plus you can build up single depth 'groups' of other apps. iOS 'Files' is basically the same as 3.1's File Manager, without the desktop/explorer approach to file organization offered by 95 onward.
- webwielder2 7y ago
  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that iOS was in no way, shape, or form inspired by Windows 3.1.
  - petercooper 7y ago
    It would certainly be going out on a limb to say that the people involved in designing iOS had not used Windows 3.1 and held no memory of it. Of course, I am happy to use the word "inspired" in a loose way, like how many modern musicians were inspired by The Beatles or Kraftwerk even if they are not deliberately indulging in pastiche.
gambler 7y ago
Worth remembering: the original windowed interface on Xerox machines was a view into underlying system objects. It was designed around a unified vocabulary of interactions that allowed user to message those objects and also direct inter-object communication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q Xerox -> Apple -> Microsoft interface transfer preserved nothing of those core concepts. UI became a crutch developers grudgingly added to the system for "those stupid users". Thus, most software engineers today are still convinced that a teletype emulation is the best possible interface to the underlying OS that can possibly exist. Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems.
- g4d 7y ago
  A recent example of this for me is using Abaqus (an FE solver). When using it to set up models I usually set all of the boundary conditions and contact interactions in a script. It wasn't until I was helping a colleague (who was using the gui) with a problem that I realised some of the options just aren't available through the gui.
- swiley 7y ago
  > Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems. I would argue that’s an artifact of corporate software development culture and not GUI design.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    Settings > System > Clipboard Make sure "Clipboard history" is turned on. It will also tell you how to access the manager: "Press the Windows logo key + V".
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
I feel like Microsoft... well, basically everyone in tech really, hasn't actually given a damn about the user experience of their products for quite a while now. Personal computing used to be about enabling people to use technology to make their lives better and OSs like Win95 were focused on allowing the user to leverage the power of computing for themselves. Nowadays, computing is apparently about herding users like cattle so you can get them to look at more ads and harvest their sweet sweet data. Developers stopped caring about user experience because thinking of users as people would make their job of treating them like cattle harder.
- Timberwolf 7y ago
  Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, pull back, and ask myself, "how did computing get this BAD?" Especially in the web context, I think it's as you say: the real product has little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying to distract you away from that task. The end experience is as if the people who used to run warez pages with 9 giant buttons to download dodgy IE toolbars and one 20px link to get the actual file grew up and got jobs running mainstream news sites.
  - mschuster91 7y ago
    At least the cookie panels are not the fault of IT, they're the fault of greedy marketers and clueless politicians trying to rein them in. For the inventor of floating video ads, let's just say I hope that hell exists.
    - Timberwolf 7y ago
      They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a multi-stage process of "no -> manage preferences -> categories -> reject all -> find the actual 'save' button, not the 'enable and save' one -> confirmation page where 'cancel' is lined up in the same place as 'save' was previously".
0wis 7y ago
I find this incredibly humbling and inspiring. 18 month is not much to lay down fondations of quite a lot of today’s work, 20 years later. Especially the really simple relational database presented at the end : simple yet super powerful. Each steps seemed relatively simple yet had a tremendous impact on the product development, user experience and on everyone that discovered computers through Win 95 and following versions. It gives me a lot of hope that I could one day work on an impactful and fulfilling project ! Thanks for sharing !
hota_mazi 7y ago
I remember booting Windows 95 for the first time when it came out and being completely gobsmacked at how good it looked and felt. I was still a heavy Amiga fan back then, even though I was painfully aware that my favorite computer of all times was slowly falling behind. But it was still able to do preemptive multitasking, something that was still widely unavailable across all OS at the time (except for Windows NT). AmigaOS was still definitely better than Windows 3, of that I was still very convinced (and quite distraught that despite this technical superiority, Windows 3 reigned supreme). All of my convictions got shattered that fatal day I booted Windows 95. The UI was beautiful, preemptive multitasking was working fine despite the memory and CPU conditions at the time. I just couldn't get enough of launching various apps on Windows 95 just to see how they looked. On that very day, I thought "This is it, Amiga is truly dead". I sold my Amiga and bought a Windows box in the weeks that followed, with a heart that was both heavy and excited.
- Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
  My dad was a huge Amiga fan. I always felt that the Amiga was a bit ahead of its time. It was doing SNES graphics and sound in the NES era. It's a shame it never caught on beyond the Video Toaster being used in TV/movie studios.
  - ido 7y ago
    You're right but to be a nitpicker a more appropriate comparison would be the sega megadrive/genesis - it had very similar hardware and capabilities to the original amiga (1000/500/early 2000s).
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Then I burned my first CD on Windows 95, ended up with a coaster because I moved the mouse or Windows played a sound, and my "obsolete" Amiga would end up sticking around for another half decade... Amiga simply crashed far less and could do pre-emptive properly. A screen saver or music app didn't ruin CD burning. I ended up finally migrating to Win with Windows 2000 as Win was consistently worse until then -- at everything. The Win 95 box, bought at insane cost as I spcced top end everything including SCSI and 10k drives became my first FreeBSD server - v2.1 IIRC - within months of (finally) buying into Windows. Kept the subscription to BSD CD releases until they shuttered it to support them... Granted I was on 040 A3000 and A4000 with 24 bit retargetable graphics by the time of Windows 95, and was no longer earning the living off Amiga by then.
Pete_D 7y ago
I hope chunky bevelled edges come back into fashion soon. The UI in these screenshots looks reassuringly solid somehow, like how you'd expect a tool to feel. Not to mention proper scrollbars.
- JohnFen 7y ago
  Or, at least, I wish Win 10 had some option to increase the size of the window frame. Those almost nonexistent ones are a serious pain in my butt.
  - motivated 7y ago
    @Johnfen - I came across your comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785 and unfortunately I am unable to post a follow-up question/comment. What's the best way to get in touch?
    - JohnFen 7y ago
      try johnfenderson23 at gmail
starsinspace 7y ago
And they figured this all out without so-called "telemetry" in Win 3.1. Isn't that amazing. Almost as if today's "telemetry is absolutely necessary for improving UX" mantra isn't actually true...
- BenjiWiebe 7y ago
  Telemetry could be an indicator of when they've pushed the user too far in swallowing the horrible design decisions.
tus88 7y ago
Win95 is still probably the biggest software launch of all time. Coming from MSDOS, there has never been that kind of jump forward for PC users since.
seminatl 7y ago
Can we talk about the ethics of just reposting, verbatim, a paper written by others, but with an advertisement inserted between every paragraph? How did that become OK?
dang 7y ago
Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105
asmosoinio 7y ago
Worth reading the comments - as the original author of the paper Kent Sullivan chimes in: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/#comment-176 https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
Qahlel 7y ago
How would these engineers approached to same design knowing what we know now? (I mean as in Internet). Every upgrade is a step taken on the same ladder. Maybe sometimes, designing a elevator (read:innovating a new UI) might be the real solution.
ohlookabird 7y ago
Thanks, very interesting! OT: Great to see FoxPro as an example application. I used to work with it and liked it quite a bit. As far as as I know it isn't really supported anymore. Does any one use it still or know if there are similar environments available today?
teddyh 7y ago
Unstated first step in the design of Windows 95: Copy the window title bar buttons more or less pixel-for-pixel from NeXTSTEP, but change the NeXT “iconify” button to do “maximize” instead. But don’t copy the useful mechanism of having the middle of the “close” button “×” be incomplete and look more like “⸬” if the window can’t be closed, like if the document in that window hasn’t been saved. I can see the reason W95 changed the iconify button; the NeXT iconify button looks like a NeXTSTEP iconified window, so on NeXTSTEP the button is self-explanatory. But Windows 95 does not make windows into icons, W95 minimizes windows to the bottom of the screen into a little line of text. W95 therefore, intuitively enough, made the “minimize” button similar to a minimized window line; the “_” button. The NeXT iconify button, on the other hand, more resembles a W95 window. (W95 was made to run on PCs with low graphical resolutions and memory, both of which made it reasonable to only run and show one program at a time. This made “maximizing” a window a reaonable operation, unlike on a NeXT, where high resolution and multi-tasking was the norm.) Therefore, the change is understandable. It’s just odd that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody mention this.
gandalfian 7y ago
Sometimes I hold down the Start and R keys and quickly type wordpad or calculator. It works but then I realise I'm basically back to the MS-DOS prompt where I started 20 years ago. But minus the 4dos autocomplete enhancement.
- marcoseliziario 7y ago
  just press the window key and search for the program you want.
  - gandalfian 7y ago
    Thank you but that involves the mouse and more time. Using just the keyboard and ctrl R only takes half a second.
    - marcoseliziario 7y ago
      It doesn't involve the mouse at all. press windows key. start menu opens, search field is focused automatically. start typing, windows start doing an incremental search, heavily biased towards your most used programs in the list ordering, press enter if your choice is first on the list, or navigate with directional keys on the program. Your method only works if the program you want is on the PATH, and if you type the full name of the executable.
tomc1985 7y ago
> We realized that a truly usable system would scale to the needs of different users: it would be easy to discover and learn yet would provide efficiency (through shortcuts and alternate methods) for more-experienced users. I feel like the UI designers of today need to memorize this principle. Good, versatile software allows users of all skill levels to accomplish their goals through multiple pathways supporting a variety of interaction paradigms. Much of the software I'm forced to use today seems to adhere to the theres-only-one-way-to-do-it school of thought, which is the biggest source of why software sucks so much now.
ahaferburg 7y ago
It's very interesting how the hierarchical file system was something that users couldn't understand, and today with mobile and web we see an almost complete rejection of the file system or hierarchies as a principle of user interaction. I always found the hierarchical start menu a pain to use. Every company insisted on creating a submenu for their company, then another submenu for their program. And it's quite unfortunate that Microsoft didn't take charge until Windows 10. They didn't set a much better example with their software, and they let everyone do whatever they wanted in the Start menu, resulting in a poor user experience. What I have been doing since Windows 2000 was to move the shortcuts to the actual programs into the top level start menu folder, and all these useless folders into a top-level folder named Crap. So conceptually the home screen of today's phones. That's what the Start menu should have been about, exclusively: Start programs. Not a help.chm. Not the uninstall.exe. Not a link to the company home page that nobody ever uses. Just the program. And Microsoft should have enforced that from the beginning. Hierarchies are not needed most of the time. To locate an item, a hierarchy of folders where the items are mostly hidden is probably the worst solution. It's easier for me to locate something in a list sorted alphabetically where every item is visible. And the best solution is spatial consistency: Put the items in a fixed place on the screen (or keyboard). That's how it works in the real world, and that's what the brain is optimized for.
- ahaferburg 7y ago
  Oh and if you're willing to dust off a flash player, check out Windows RG (Really good edition). It really is really good. https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg

274 points by akling 7y ago

timw4mail 7y ago

So Microsoft was agile in the mid 90s....

zozbot234 7y ago

85 major versions ahead of Windows 10... and rightly so.

londons_explore 7y ago

I love the fact that one of the usability issues identified 25 years ago in windows is still the case today. * If you "cut" a bit of text, it disappears from your document, and unless you later paste that text, it's gone forever. * If you "cut" a file, but never paste it, the file stays in its original location, contrary to the users expectations. This kind of thing is really the implementation details showing through into the UI (the clipboard is not a place on disk, and cannot have files and directories moved into it)

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
What happens if you "cut" an important file, and then forget to paste it before copying something else? You could easily loose many hours of work! That can happen with text too, of course, but because text takes up more screen real-estate, selecting lots of text "feels" dangerous, so you're less likely to accidentally screw yourself. -- When you "cut" a file in early Windows, did it disappear from the original location, or did the icon fade out as on modern platforms? IMO, the fade makes it clear what is happening, and is a great example of how minor visual tweaks can be imbued with lots of meaning.
- JonathonW 7y ago
  Windows 95 behaved like Windows does today: "cutting" a file faded out the icon until it was pasted someplace else. Prior versions of Windows did not have an equivalent to the "cut" operation; for example, Windows 3.1's File Manager moved files via a "File > Move..." menu option, which opened a dialog with two text fields to specify the source and destination. (Copying behaved similarly; the document-editing-inspired Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-X bindings used today were all introduced for file management in the Windows world in Windows 95.)
  - quietbritishjim 7y ago
    > "cutting" a file faded out the icon Cutting a file sets its hidden attribute. If you have turned on display of hidden files then they do indeed appear faded, but you have to be a fairly advanced user for that – for most people they will just seem to disappear. If you cut or copy another file the the first file will be unhidden, and I suppose also on a clean shutdown. Overall it's still confusing for a normal user who doesn't see hidden files, especially if they intentionally used cut without paste to delete a sensitive file.
unicornfinder 7y ago
I'm honestly impressed that they thought so in depth about these things. That said, I'm of the opinion that a clipboard manager should be a standard part of an OS and would arguably solve this problem.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  This wouldn't have been considered a problem in the 90s, but my concern with clipboard managers is that they would end up containing a lot of sensitive information, particularly passwords from my password manager. (Not that this isn't a concern otherwise, but there's a difference between a pasteboard that holds one piece of information at a time and immediately purges old information, and one that logs history for an extended period.)
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Clipboard managers, such as the one that ships with Windows 10, allow applications such as password managers to mark something to not be stored in the clipboard history. KeePass supports this functionality as an example. Really though autotype is the safer option.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      Yeah, my concern is that the user won't necessarily be copying from a proper password manager. Passwords are not the only information that people copy and paste: there are credit card numbers, SSN's, drivers license info, etc etc. You could argue the security trade-off is worthwhile, and I might even agree if the clipboard manager isn't enabled by default. A clipboard manager requires you to treat your clipboard in a certain way that I don't think users do in practice.
      - zamadatix 7y ago
        It isn't enabled by default (currently) but there isn't really anything you can do to protect someone who copies important out of a text document and/or leaves open access to their desktop anyways without annoying them so much they work around it in an even worse way. Same thing with browser autofill and password managers.
zamadatix 7y ago
Windows 10 has a clipboard manager with clipboard history now. It's largely just an awareness issue at this point.
- ShamelessC 7y ago
  I had no idea! How do you access it?
- judah 7y ago
  I've used Windows for decades and didn't know about this until today. Start -> Clipboard Settings -> Clipboard History Once on, Win+V shows clipboard history. Super cool.
kitsunesoba 7y ago
This is likely why in macOS, you can’t cut files but instead have to copy them and then move them with Command-Shift-V (holding down Shift changes the title of the Paste menu item) — the intention to move the file is indicated on the pasting half of the operation, dodging the Cut issue entirely. Also, cut never really made metaphorical sense for files… you don’t break out the scissors to transfer documents from one folder to another.
- jxdxbx 7y ago
  I get the menu item to change name with option, not shift. Incidentally I've been using a Mac for decades, but I never remember to check what modifiers do. I'd always just copy and then go back and delete. I think the right way to deal with this is to have a fancy clipboard manager / shelf, frankly. Cut things, they're put on the shelf, paste pastes in the top thing in the shelf. I suppose lots of people might just end up with cluttered shelves and lose track of stuff. But the shelf concept is a good GUI power user thing.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Yes, it's Cmd+Alt+V
derefr 7y ago
I remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Scrap_Object_File https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_Scrap_Object_File s. (Most people didn't realize this was a thing. I'm not at a Windows PC at the moment: is it still a thing?) I've always thought it'd make a lot of sense, for any modern OS, if every time you cut something, you'd be creating a .scrap on the desktop; and then, if you later pasted it, the .scrap would go away. Desktop-as-spool-directory. Same as the way macOS tried to use the desktop as a spool for screenshots until recently (where now the screenshot spool has become a mysterious locationless storage displayed in an ephemeral modal window.)
- londons_explore 7y ago
  This doesn't work well with multiple drives. If you cut an object from a usb stick, should it get transferred entirely to your desktop (maybe taking many hours for big files), for you to then paste it somewhere else on the usb stick? (When a direct move would be near instant). If instead you want a .scrap directory on every volume, you have a new inconsistency - if something is cut, and the device removed before the paste happens, the paste will fail.
  - derefr 7y ago
    Ah, I wasn’t really suggesting that the (contents of the) clipboard be immediately serialized to disk, but rather that an OS built-in clipboard manager be created that exposes its contents as shell objects living on the shell Desktop (rather than the filesystem Desktop.) So every cut would put a shell object onto the shell desktop, but this would just be a handle to a memory object living in the clipboard manager. Pasting would move that object from the shell Desktop, to the shell Trash, such that emptying the Trash would get rid of it; but it wouldn’t really be “in” the filesystem Trash either. If you select and copied the shell object on the shell Desktop, you’d just be making the “selected” clipboard handle the one referenced by the shell object. If you moved the shell object, you’d be instantiating a physical filesystem .scrap object at the destination. And, of course, since all this is simulating something persistent, you’d expect the clipboard manager to make each clipboard object refcounted, and not get rid of objects as long as something (e.g. a shell object) holds a reference to them; even meaning that the clipboard objects with nonzero reference-counts would need to be persisted to an OS “clipboard database” on shutdown, such that the shell objects referencing them would still be valid on next startup.

tolger 7y ago

I really like the Windows 95 UI. That's why Windows 2000 was my favorite version of Windows, ever. It was very consistent and functional throughout.

pier25 7y ago
I agree. Even if 95/98/2000 look outdated by today's standards, these are still the best designed Windows IMO. Windows 10 is really a frankenstein.
- airstrike 7y ago
  The fact that the Settings app and the Control Panel are allowed to coexist baffles me
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    The investment is too great in custom Control Panel extensions from hardware vendors, including for hardware supplied to basically all major OEMs. If they toss that, a lot of hardware will become unconfigurable.
  - zamadatix 7y ago
    Control panel has to stick around for compatibility with legacy apps, including those that register functionality into it and call it's paths directly. It's pretty well hidden from users at this point and basically just a collection of links to compatibility components. I've never understood the concern.
    - pvg 7y ago
      There are plenty of perfectly mundane, common settings that are only accessible through the old control panels. And, of course, there are a couple of different styles of old control panel to begin with - the more recent 'modular'-ish ones and then ur-panels with lots of tabs and 'Advanced' buttons. As a UI thing, it's easily Windows at its ugliest and most baffling.

sproketboy 7y ago

Focus stealing - still an issue. Sad.

cmrdporcupine 7y ago

One of the trends that W95 started that I still find objectionable is putting the 'X' close button gadget next to the other window controls, so sloppy mousing can lead to accidental closures when the intent was minimization or maximization. This is one thing that the original Lisa and MacOS got right (and NeXTstep, and GEM and I think AmigaOS) but W95 and its successors did not. The close button was on the far left, and the other actions on the right. (EDIT: my recollection was wrong about the Lisa, I think. Its window controls were not as clear as Mac OS) Unfortunately OS X inexplicably adopted the W95 conventions. And in the first Aqua releases made it even worse by hiding the functionality icons until mouse-over.

swiley 7y ago
If we’re going to talk about wm. CWM is definitely the best: the mouse is only used for sloppy positioning and focus changing (not even topping/level changing.) Everything else is done via the comparatively precise keyboard.
elweston2 7y ago
It was annoying. The problem they had was the upper left already had a control there. The system menu. In some programs it is still 'there' but hidden. You can see it if you left click on the upper left corner. They could not get rid of it as some old win3x programs went trolling around in that menu and changed it.
- cmrdporcupine 7y ago
  I guess? Couldn't they just have moved that control to the right? Or put minimize & maximize next to it and had close on right, like in NeXTstep? Somehow everyone thought it was a great idea to copy them. I change this in most of my window managers on Linux, but Chrome stubbornly insists on doing its own window controls.
  - elweston2 7y ago
    Remember one of the goals was 'just works' too. As they wanted to move people off win3x. The win3x apps had to work/look the same but pick up some of the nice styling from win9x. Some programs would also roll their own system menu and put it in that spot. That would cause a cover up of the close. For a run of the mill application it was just a style and they could have put it anywhere. For programs that controlled the whole window including the title bar area it was a tough choice. Even then it did not always come out looking right. The win95 style guide basically told everyone to knock it off and let windows control it. Was it all a good choice? For some it was annoying. There was a shortcut that did the same thing. If you double clicked the upper left it would close the window too. Which is how they taught people to use win3x. Most certainly it was an interesting compromise to the constraints they had. Copying the style was all on everyone else though. They wanted it to be familiar to windows users. All to 'gain market-share' I guess.

Timberwolf 7y ago

I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as "running" has been undone - it's back to icons with only a subtle indicator to distinguish between those that represent shortcuts and those that represent a running program. The Start Menu is now assumed knowledge that the furthest left icon on the taskbar is "special" and does something different to all the other shortcuts. I guess the modern equivalent of "Start" is "Type here to search" in the Cortana bar but that's not a great experience for new users. We all know the propensity for it to decide to search Bing at the slightest provocation but if you try some natural "never used a computer before" things like searching for "power off" or "shut down" you get some quite unhelpful results. (The former wants me to set up a power plan, the latter directs me to Add or Remove Programs) It feels like computer use is assumed knowledge in 2019 - that everyone who buys a computer already knows what the Windows logo represents, how minimising and overlapping works, what the difference between an app icon and a notification tray icon is, and so on. Microsoft no longer feel the need to design so much for people buying their first ever family computer, having never even used one before. Probably true in the first world, but I wonder if this holds out globally?

vbezhenar 7y ago
Similar thing happened in Apple with iOS 7. Before they used skeuomorphic design using realistic images to represent UI which was supposed to help people using computing devices first time. E.g. leather notepad to represent reminders application, 3D buttons, etc. They abandoned this design paradigm and switched to minimalist one probably because most of their users became computer-literate and did not need those analogues to understand UI.
- goalieca 7y ago
  I think going with a simple icon is far better. Consider the design of symbols such as corrosive or the street is icy, or s-curve coming up ahead. They do not look like real-world images but they are so wonderfully intuitive. We do not need to stare at the detail to understand what it is. Likewise, the new icons are brilliant. The reminders app has basically a list. Music is a musical note, etc. The only one that really sucks is "photos". It looks more like a colour wheel.

petercooper 7y ago

It struck me earlier today that while Windows 95 took many big steps forward, iOS was actually inspired a lot more by Windows 3.1. Springboard is very much like Program Manager.. every icon is an app, no documents, plus you can build up single depth 'groups' of other apps. iOS 'Files' is basically the same as 3.1's File Manager, without the desktop/explorer approach to file organization offered by 95 onward.

webwielder2 7y ago
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that iOS was in no way, shape, or form inspired by Windows 3.1.
- petercooper 7y ago
  It would certainly be going out on a limb to say that the people involved in designing iOS had not used Windows 3.1 and held no memory of it. Of course, I am happy to use the word "inspired" in a loose way, like how many modern musicians were inspired by The Beatles or Kraftwerk even if they are not deliberately indulging in pastiche.

gambler 7y ago

Worth remembering: the original windowed interface on Xerox machines was a view into underlying system objects. It was designed around a unified vocabulary of interactions that allowed user to message those objects and also direct inter-object communication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q Xerox -> Apple -> Microsoft interface transfer preserved nothing of those core concepts. UI became a crutch developers grudgingly added to the system for "those stupid users". Thus, most software engineers today are still convinced that a teletype emulation is the best possible interface to the underlying OS that can possibly exist. Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems.

g4d 7y ago
A recent example of this for me is using Abaqus (an FE solver). When using it to set up models I usually set all of the boundary conditions and contact interactions in a script. It wasn't until I was helping a colleague (who was using the gui) with a problem that I realised some of the options just aren't available through the gui.
swiley 7y ago
> Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems. I would argue that’s an artifact of corporate software development culture and not GUI design.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  Settings > System > Clipboard Make sure "Clipboard history" is turned on. It will also tell you how to access the manager: "Press the Windows logo key + V".

AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago

I feel like Microsoft... well, basically everyone in tech really, hasn't actually given a damn about the user experience of their products for quite a while now. Personal computing used to be about enabling people to use technology to make their lives better and OSs like Win95 were focused on allowing the user to leverage the power of computing for themselves. Nowadays, computing is apparently about herding users like cattle so you can get them to look at more ads and harvest their sweet sweet data. Developers stopped caring about user experience because thinking of users as people would make their job of treating them like cattle harder.

Timberwolf 7y ago
Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, pull back, and ask myself, "how did computing get this BAD?" Especially in the web context, I think it's as you say: the real product has little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying to distract you away from that task. The end experience is as if the people who used to run warez pages with 9 giant buttons to download dodgy IE toolbars and one 20px link to get the actual file grew up and got jobs running mainstream news sites.
- mschuster91 7y ago
  At least the cookie panels are not the fault of IT, they're the fault of greedy marketers and clueless politicians trying to rein them in. For the inventor of floating video ads, let's just say I hope that hell exists.
  - Timberwolf 7y ago
    They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a multi-stage process of "no -> manage preferences -> categories -> reject all -> find the actual 'save' button, not the 'enable and save' one -> confirmation page where 'cancel' is lined up in the same place as 'save' was previously".

0wis 7y ago

I find this incredibly humbling and inspiring. 18 month is not much to lay down fondations of quite a lot of today’s work, 20 years later. Especially the really simple relational database presented at the end : simple yet super powerful. Each steps seemed relatively simple yet had a tremendous impact on the product development, user experience and on everyone that discovered computers through Win 95 and following versions. It gives me a lot of hope that I could one day work on an impactful and fulfilling project ! Thanks for sharing !

hota_mazi 7y ago

I remember booting Windows 95 for the first time when it came out and being completely gobsmacked at how good it looked and felt. I was still a heavy Amiga fan back then, even though I was painfully aware that my favorite computer of all times was slowly falling behind. But it was still able to do preemptive multitasking, something that was still widely unavailable across all OS at the time (except for Windows NT). AmigaOS was still definitely better than Windows 3, of that I was still very convinced (and quite distraught that despite this technical superiority, Windows 3 reigned supreme). All of my convictions got shattered that fatal day I booted Windows 95. The UI was beautiful, preemptive multitasking was working fine despite the memory and CPU conditions at the time. I just couldn't get enough of launching various apps on Windows 95 just to see how they looked. On that very day, I thought "This is it, Amiga is truly dead". I sold my Amiga and bought a Windows box in the weeks that followed, with a heart that was both heavy and excited.

Sohcahtoa82 7y ago
My dad was a huge Amiga fan. I always felt that the Amiga was a bit ahead of its time. It was doing SNES graphics and sound in the NES era. It's a shame it never caught on beyond the Video Toaster being used in TV/movie studios.
- ido 7y ago
  You're right but to be a nitpicker a more appropriate comparison would be the sega megadrive/genesis - it had very similar hardware and capabilities to the original amiga (1000/500/early 2000s).
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Then I burned my first CD on Windows 95, ended up with a coaster because I moved the mouse or Windows played a sound, and my "obsolete" Amiga would end up sticking around for another half decade... Amiga simply crashed far less and could do pre-emptive properly. A screen saver or music app didn't ruin CD burning. I ended up finally migrating to Win with Windows 2000 as Win was consistently worse until then -- at everything. The Win 95 box, bought at insane cost as I spcced top end everything including SCSI and 10k drives became my first FreeBSD server - v2.1 IIRC - within months of (finally) buying into Windows. Kept the subscription to BSD CD releases until they shuttered it to support them... Granted I was on 040 A3000 and A4000 with 24 bit retargetable graphics by the time of Windows 95, and was no longer earning the living off Amiga by then.

Pete_D 7y ago

I hope chunky bevelled edges come back into fashion soon. The UI in these screenshots looks reassuringly solid somehow, like how you'd expect a tool to feel. Not to mention proper scrollbars.

JohnFen 7y ago
Or, at least, I wish Win 10 had some option to increase the size of the window frame. Those almost nonexistent ones are a serious pain in my butt.
- motivated 7y ago
  @Johnfen - I came across your comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785 and unfortunately I am unable to post a follow-up question/comment. What's the best way to get in touch?
  - JohnFen 7y ago
    try johnfenderson23 at gmail

starsinspace 7y ago

And they figured this all out without so-called "telemetry" in Win 3.1. Isn't that amazing. Almost as if today's "telemetry is absolutely necessary for improving UX" mantra isn't actually true...

BenjiWiebe 7y ago
Telemetry could be an indicator of when they've pushed the user too far in swallowing the horrible design decisions.

tus88 7y ago

Win95 is still probably the biggest software launch of all time. Coming from MSDOS, there has never been that kind of jump forward for PC users since.

seminatl 7y ago

Can we talk about the ethics of just reposting, verbatim, a paper written by others, but with an advertisement inserted between every paragraph? How did that become OK?

dang 7y ago

Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105

asmosoinio 7y ago

Worth reading the comments - as the original author of the paper Kent Sullivan chimes in: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/#comment-176 https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

Qahlel 7y ago

How would these engineers approached to same design knowing what we know now? (I mean as in Internet). Every upgrade is a step taken on the same ladder. Maybe sometimes, designing a elevator (read:innovating a new UI) might be the real solution.

ohlookabird 7y ago

Thanks, very interesting! OT: Great to see FoxPro as an example application. I used to work with it and liked it quite a bit. As far as as I know it isn't really supported anymore. Does any one use it still or know if there are similar environments available today?

teddyh 7y ago

Unstated first step in the design of Windows 95: Copy the window title bar buttons more or less pixel-for-pixel from NeXTSTEP, but change the NeXT “iconify” button to do “maximize” instead. But don’t copy the useful mechanism of having the middle of the “close” button “×” be incomplete and look more like “⸬” if the window can’t be closed, like if the document in that window hasn’t been saved. I can see the reason W95 changed the iconify button; the NeXT iconify button looks like a NeXTSTEP iconified window, so on NeXTSTEP the button is self-explanatory. But Windows 95 does not make windows into icons, W95 minimizes windows to the bottom of the screen into a little line of text. W95 therefore, intuitively enough, made the “minimize” button similar to a minimized window line; the “_” button. The NeXT iconify button, on the other hand, more resembles a W95 window. (W95 was made to run on PCs with low graphical resolutions and memory, both of which made it reasonable to only run and show one program at a time. This made “maximizing” a window a reaonable operation, unlike on a NeXT, where high resolution and multi-tasking was the norm.) Therefore, the change is understandable. It’s just odd that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody mention this.

gandalfian 7y ago

Sometimes I hold down the Start and R keys and quickly type wordpad or calculator. It works but then I realise I'm basically back to the MS-DOS prompt where I started 20 years ago. But minus the 4dos autocomplete enhancement.

marcoseliziario 7y ago
just press the window key and search for the program you want.
- gandalfian 7y ago
  Thank you but that involves the mouse and more time. Using just the keyboard and ctrl R only takes half a second.
  - marcoseliziario 7y ago
    It doesn't involve the mouse at all. press windows key. start menu opens, search field is focused automatically. start typing, windows start doing an incremental search, heavily biased towards your most used programs in the list ordering, press enter if your choice is first on the list, or navigate with directional keys on the program. Your method only works if the program you want is on the PATH, and if you type the full name of the executable.

tomc1985 7y ago

> We realized that a truly usable system would scale to the needs of different users: it would be easy to discover and learn yet would provide efficiency (through shortcuts and alternate methods) for more-experienced users. I feel like the UI designers of today need to memorize this principle. Good, versatile software allows users of all skill levels to accomplish their goals through multiple pathways supporting a variety of interaction paradigms. Much of the software I'm forced to use today seems to adhere to the theres-only-one-way-to-do-it school of thought, which is the biggest source of why software sucks so much now.

ahaferburg 7y ago

It's very interesting how the hierarchical file system was something that users couldn't understand, and today with mobile and web we see an almost complete rejection of the file system or hierarchies as a principle of user interaction. I always found the hierarchical start menu a pain to use. Every company insisted on creating a submenu for their company, then another submenu for their program. And it's quite unfortunate that Microsoft didn't take charge until Windows 10. They didn't set a much better example with their software, and they let everyone do whatever they wanted in the Start menu, resulting in a poor user experience. What I have been doing since Windows 2000 was to move the shortcuts to the actual programs into the top level start menu folder, and all these useless folders into a top-level folder named Crap. So conceptually the home screen of today's phones. That's what the Start menu should have been about, exclusively: Start programs. Not a help.chm. Not the uninstall.exe. Not a link to the company home page that nobody ever uses. Just the program. And Microsoft should have enforced that from the beginning. Hierarchies are not needed most of the time. To locate an item, a hierarchy of folders where the items are mostly hidden is probably the worst solution. It's easier for me to locate something in a list sorted alphabetically where every item is visible. And the best solution is spatial consistency: Put the items in a fixed place on the screen (or keyboard). That's how it works in the real world, and that's what the brain is optimized for.

ahaferburg 7y ago
Oh and if you're willing to dust off a flash player, check out Windows RG (Really good edition). It really is really good. https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg