21 ms·

Windows 95 UI Design

555 points by luu 7y ago

smitty1e 7y ago
. . .and then there was the BSODomy. . . Less cheekily, I recall joy of not needing to look to the bottom for more commands and tabs. First encounter with that paradigm was iTunes. It took me a week to realize that half the functionality was in the nether reaches of the screen. I felt I was the butt of some joke.
- RandomBacon 7y ago
  Idk, back then I had worse luck with Macs crashing on me than Windows.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels were smoothed. Tasteful gradients and transparency replaced harsh outlines. Explanatory text was tucked away. Manuals became brochures, then a lonely slip of paper with a URL. Maybe a QR code. Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. There are no extraneous details. Indeed, there are no details. I caress my phone's surface gently, hoping to see a sliver of its rapturous visage peel back, hinting that I have found the first step in the puzzle box of its interaction model. Alas, no dice. Maybe I can hunt down a how-to video... to show me how to hunt down a video...
- agumonkey 7y ago
  It was a crossroad of limited computing affordance and abstraction necessity. I grew up in CGI land, basically high end CGI programs were what the latest web app is. Reactive redrawing of free form geometries. I wanted this to be mainstream so bad. I got old and it became slightly true. Not keeping aside the drift of website content and pop overs.. something hit me. My brain doesn't want real time and free floating. I want abstraction, solid, and patient. It even contradicts my love for lisp repls (another form of low latency feedback). I look at 90s desktop GUIs with a bit more love and appreciation. They were limited just enough, the limitation forced abstraction and organization. And most of the time it was just right (you could remove spooky side effects, and add a bit of genericity it wouldn't hurt).
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    UI framework designers these days really undervalue “not spooky”.
  - mntmoss 7y ago
    I myself can't tell if this feeling is just me getting older. I liked the shiny dynamic stuff when I was younger. Gradually I found myself ignoring more of it and developing more specific rules for what I wanted out of the UX. When a recent thread on "calm computing" mentioned Fraidycat I took to it immediately. It's nearly the antithesis of the news feed - there's no repetitive rhythm to it, although there is a bit of clicking around. There was a time when I actually wanted news feeds, I would cycle through a few sites and F5 constantly. I know a few twenty-somethings who are still falling for shiny stuff. I don't think that's going away, but I do think the overall culture will come to realize that it's junk food computing.
    - agumonkey 7y ago
      I do think it's both side of the getting old coin. In one way we're getting cranky. But we're also getting wiser. We don't want more data, we want better signal (quantity/quality).
- ordinaryperson 7y ago
  Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a living. Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious. I just wish Apple et al. didn't force these choices on us, that we could disable silliness like force touch and hidden toolbars. But alas one cannot.
  - erikpukinskis 7y ago
    Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple. The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore. My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.
      - thom 7y ago
        All this means is that instead of people accidentally discovering the obscure behaviour as they do now (and then working out how to carefully tap out of it), they'll just never find it. That's certainly less annoying to me, who has never used any of these weird popup menus, but doesn't seem a massive improvement overall.
        zapzupnz 7y ago
        > they'll just never find it Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.
- soheil 7y ago
  > It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. until you get a blue screen of death... Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.
  - spectramax 7y ago
    Come on, UI design and the OS crashing down are two separate orthogonal issues. Yes, they culminate at the end as “User experience”, but the OP is clearly talking about UI elements and how their functional design is eroding away. What’s that to do with BSOD!!??
    - xcv321 7y ago
      Sounds like you probably weren't using computers back in the Win 9x days. For us who remember it, Windows 95 is synonymous with BSOD.
      - spectramax 7y ago
        I did. I get that computers back in the day crashed a lot. BSOD while playing C&C was my childhood. But my point, again, is that computers crashing and UI design are two orthagonal issues.
        xcv321 7y ago
        Yeah, we already know that. He was talking about computers in general, not just the UI design.
      - Cougher 7y ago
        I was. I remember. I've had the BSOD. But Win95 is not synonymous with it for me.
      - chinesempire 7y ago
        I don't like to downvote comments, but this one is particularly bad. First of all, BSOD where not that common, and for sure they are not what all of "us" remember about Windows 95. Secondly, Amiga and Mac had their own version of the BSOD, there were just far less Amiga and Mac around. Third: Windows 95 bootstrapped the PC gaming era, having the GUI code in the Kernel (for performance reasons) and not having the WHQL to test third party drivers yet, made BSOD popular, because many saw them when they were kids playing some game on their parent's computer. Of course you can do what Apple does, forbid third party drivers and give up to Nvidia cards on your OS. It is not a big deal, right? I'm assuming you also never used a Mac with Mac OS classic and never saw the sad Mac... https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/11/17/sad_mac_face.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/11/17/sad_mac_face.jpg
- flippyhead 7y ago
  Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.
  - ptman 7y ago
    You think she learned nothing in the years between?
    - flippyhead 7y ago
      I am embarrassed to say I hadn't considered this actually; and it's a good point. But considering it, no, I don't. She simply doesn't have the mind for it, as far as I can tell.
  - eitland 7y ago
    That is actually a good point. Simple stuff might have become simpler. That said I am firmly in the "we lost something between 95 and here" camp for now. And to while it does explain why pads are different it doesn't explain why we needed to mess up the desktop in the process.
    - jopsen 7y ago
      And the market for simple stuff that is simple to do is a lot larger than the desktop market. That's probably what we learned from the iPhone.
      - ldng 7y ago
        Simple UI is better when you have consumer grade "simple" but problems starts when complex pro app start to do "simple" and you get "simplistic stupid"
    - 7y ago
- andrepd 7y ago
  A consequence of optimising interfaces to look good in screenshots and promo photos, rather than actually being useful? That's the only explanation I can find for the whitespace ridden desktop and phone interfaces that plague us today.
- steve1977 7y ago
  The box! You opened it, we came.
- hatsunearu 7y ago
  The stereotypical "old people with tech" shtick is that they don't know how to do things we contemporaries seem trivial. Considering the trend maybe that isn't too unexpected, and I'm also worried that when I get old I'll feel left out and abandoned by this growing tend towards oversimplification
- raverbashing 7y ago
  I've noticed this happening as well, but I guess every system is built on the affordances and cultural knowledge of the time it was built. The original Macintosh (and Windows before 95) were built for people who were more or less familiar with computers already BUT who didn't know so much about the mouse, etc. (And even if the Mac might have been "easier to use" people wouldn't just jump into an expensive machine without knowing what they would be getting). Hence they would "handhold" more. Even the 1st iPhone was more user friendly (design wise) than the newer ones. Now kids know how to swipe "intuitively" and design will seem less obvious (for people unaccustomed with it) with time.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  > Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.
  - deanCommie 7y ago
    Thank you. I feel like the world is taking crazy pills. Windows 7 was gorgeous. Windows 8 was a mess but at least the were trying to do something bold with consistency with their Windows Phone Look and Feel. Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated. I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and found the clickable areas at least visually pleasant, if a bit hidden. Windows 10 is undiscoverable AND ugly.
    - flowerlad 7y ago
      Take a look at this iOS critique https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ To me Windows XP’s look & feel was among the best. Except for the fat Window title bar.
      - donatj 7y ago
        XP was playschool. Eww. Windows 2k was great however.
    - ckosidows 7y ago
      Maybe I just don't remember enough about Windows 8, but how is Windows 10 that much worse, in your opinion? I feel like it's the exact same as 8 sans the Metro Start section and a few minor (in my opinion) UI tweaks.
    - sdegutis 7y ago
      Windows 3's design was a first shot. Windows 95 was extremely polished and well done. Windows XP was a response to PCs becoming mainstream and figuring what the everyman wanted was more flair and fashion. Windows 7 was a response to desktop Linux (Compiz et al.) capturing people's imaginations. Windows 8 was a response to iOS while trying to avoid Apple's skeuomorphism patents (fortunately). Windows 10 was realizing that none of that really mattered, they already have all the users anyway, so they just need long-term UI stability now.
- zouhair 7y ago
  I hate Material Design with a passion.
- chadlavi 7y ago
  Ok boomer
  - dang 7y ago
    Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
yellow_lead 7y ago
Hey, at least Win95 UI wasn't based on Electron. I'd prefer this UI if it meant Win95's snappyness. (most of the time :)
- nothis 7y ago
  There's something deeply ironic about reading this post as a Twitter thread.
- ygra 7y ago
  Heck, the whole of Windows 95 has a smaller install size than any Electron app ...
twotwotwo 7y ago
The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an analog (e.g. long press is right-click in mobile UI), but not everywhere and not always done the same way. Mobile has some inconsistency; the Web has a good bit. The modern has plenty of its own UI/UX things--URLs and the Back button for the win, dev tools/view source are awesome, and certain cool things can come from services not living entirely on your device. Something like hiding clutter at the cost of discoverability is a win for many people. Still think it's interesting to compare and think about what can be usefully brought forward from the past.
- pcurve 7y ago
  25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.
  - z3t4 7y ago
    I recently spent one week making a dropdown menu. Then I spent another week making it possible to use it with keyboard only and with a screen reader. There are actually standards on how a dropdown menu is supposed to work. But no easy way to implement one. Dropdowns are however very bad UI because it hides info and you need to click or move the mouse to certain places to see more. A unique feature on the web is the scroll to see more. Using the mouse wheel. So instead of putting info in one screen hidden behind menus, tabs etc, you just put All info in one looooong scrollable page. This works great when information is presented like in a book, eg. you read from top to bottom and rarely jump back and forth. So the challenge is to present the functionality in a way so that the user does not have to scroll back and forth to reach it. Key presses or gestures could instead be used to switch between different scrollable screens/pages. And each view should have an unique URL so you can link to it.
_trampeltier 7y ago
Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.
- agumonkey 7y ago
  Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom themed that fits the most seen colours in your rooms.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3. https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win30-1-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...
    - _def 7y ago
      If the apps celebrating their new dark mode feature would use the OS GUI toolkit they wouldn't have to worry about that. Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX
      - userbinator 7y ago
        Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network. (That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)
pcurve 7y ago
Even to this date, there is something oddly satisfying about clicking those buttons. It feels like I'm operating a machine and actually getting things done.
- leetrout 7y ago
  The startup I worked for in 2012 went with some skeuomorphic design elements like lit / unlit LEDs and I loved it then and still love it now. https://dribbble.com/shots/573197-Hal-90 https://dribbble.com/shots/573197-Hal-90
accrual 7y ago
The following link has been posted here before but is an excellent dive into the 95 UI for those looking for more to read: Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018) https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
pvg 7y ago
UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.
- thanatropism 7y ago
  There’s way more file metadata now and the file Explorer smartly displays it when many items in a folder have it.
- jplayer01 7y ago
  The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hit: Multitasking. You literally can’t have multiple copies of Settings open to modify different parts of the settings at the same time. I can’t quickly open a new window to check something while keeping my focus on one main task ... as in, multitask. I’m forced to break my flow and traverse back/forward through a bunch of nested settings instead of letting me alt-tab between what I’m actually interested in. It’s terrible and infuriating and I have no idea how this got released in this state. And that’s before even considering how incredibly wasteful it is with space. I hate myself and wonder where my life went wrong every time I have to open a Settings window on a device that doesn’t have full HD or higher, because it usually results in copious amounts of scrolling for information that could be easily displayed in 1/4th of the space. Hell, and you can forget about using it non-maximized, because then the “advanced” links on the right side disappear to wherever, because fuck showing you what you need at a glance. And they keep changing how you reach the actually sane, usable and functional Control Panel windows (like the sound devices settings) and alternate between making it easier and ridiculously obtuse. It makes me want to bash my head against things really, really hard.
  - pvg 7y ago
    I'm mostly pushing back against the idea of some lost golden age of UI design. The file explorer used in this example is almost the same a quarter of a century later. And some of its deficiencies have lasted a long time - it took a couple of decades for explorer to learn to show a unified list of files and directories sorted by modification time. And it still doesn't have an inlined tree view making the basic task of moving files between adjacent directories clunky. At the same time, for all of its fashions and foibles, the one-app-a-time, direct-manipulating touchscreen UI has made computers more accessible to all sorts of people to whom 'the desktop metaphor' was and remains confusing and unintuitive.
RenRav 7y ago
>The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action. Can't believe I never noticed this.
notadoc 7y ago
Windows 95 had an obvious UI, but was rather cluttered. The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul. The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a modern OS. Nothing is obvious. Multitasking and copy/paste on iPad is befuddling to even the smartest and most technical people I know. UI design that was perfected 30+ years ago has been completely shelved and lost by designers who are designing for other designers and their portfolios, rather than for users.
- jedberg 7y ago
  > The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design Interestingly, that was right around the time Apple's original interaction designer left the company.
- leetrout 7y ago
  I miss IRIX. I loved the tiles when a window was minimized.
  - ddingus 7y ago
    Me too. And a simple virtual desktop implementation I used constantly. How about fun, common sense widgets? Scalable, vector desktop icons... And a CD player featuring, "Save Track As..." :D
- mgerdts 7y ago
  > "The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel." I first used System 7 after having used DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 and a bit of SunOS. With that background, I found System 7 and the silly hardware limitations to be anything but intuitive. To this day I find it annoying to have to go all the way to to top of the monitor to get to a menu. Arguably that was less of a pain on the tiny screen of a Mac SE, but becomes real where than one app is open in a way that the windowed app feature is used in a meaningful way. An example of silly hardware limitations includes substituting an eject button on the floppy drive for dragging it to the trash. The same action used to delete files or folders is used to regain possession of my precious files. The single button on a mouse to make it simple sounds nice, but then there are modifiers using command - giving the same functionality a windows user would expect from a right click.
Causality1 7y ago
"Flat UI" is the bane of my existence.
petilon 7y ago
The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif
- statictype 7y ago
  Wow - does this bring back some memories. I remember when CTL3D.dll was all the rage. Good times. To think we used to worry about VB programs needing a separate runtime to distribute them and Delphi programs, while stand-alone, took up almost 200KB for a minimal app!
  - thom 7y ago
    Ah, THREED.VBX, good times indeed.
    - dguaraglia 7y ago
      Hahah, yes! I was obsessed with THREED.VBX, but because I was learning C at the time ended up writing a whole library of Windows custom-drawn controls that looked exactly the same. I guess it was only later that I learned there was nothing special about VBX libraries and that you could (with some boilerplate) make them work from C. Kids nowadays have it so easy with their Electrons and QTs...
- userbinator 7y ago
  I think it improved on NextStep by adding things like the underlines for keyboard accessibility, but the basic style (i.e. buttons that look like buttons) is very similar.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  That.. doesn’t actually functionally change a whole lot? Though I can see how it would be super cool at the time.
est 7y ago
I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.
- k__ 7y ago
  Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?
  - slovenlyrobot 7y ago
    There are more or less 2 major modes of managing a product relative to the current technological zeitgeist: - expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately - remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!) VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.
    - Too 7y ago
      The powerful RAD from VB continued into C# and .NET. You could in first versions of VS.NET and still today with UWP just drag out a button, double click it to perform some action, hit F5 for close to instant compile and launch and then edit the code while debugging. As others noted, the problem is not the tool, the problem is the lack of interest in desktop apps today. Agree about the experience being unmatched. Compare it to Android Studio which is supposed to be the modern flagship from the competition, even 15 year old versions of Visual Studio provides much smoother RAD experience. No matter how good code editing in IntelliJ is, everything around it with gradle slowness and app relaunches just makes you look back and wonder what happened to technological progress.
tus88 7y ago
I still use Win98 daily for gaming and love it, fight me.
- jedberg 7y ago
  The last patch for Win98 was in 2013. I really hope you don't put that thing on the internet.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    Who cares? If it is just for gaming, then if it gets infected it isn't going to compromise anything important.
    - jedberg 7y ago
      The most common infection is the one where they turn your computer into a node of a botnet. From there it can consume your bandwidth, launch attacks on other people, or be used to distribute files, such as child porn. Do you want to be implicated in a child porn ring, and have the evidence sitting right on your computer?
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
        Chances are said Win98 box is off when not in use, and it is very unlikely that there is much of that kind of malware targeting Win98 anyway since it has a nigh-0% install base. What does actually run on it is probably going to be noticed because it's probably running on period hardware and the resource usage will not be nearly so negligible as it is today.
  - tus88 7y ago
    It doesn't have any connection to a network of any kind. I mainly copy stuff over on USB. GOG games don't install on Win98, but if you install them on XP you can often just copy the directory across.
anjel 7y ago
My two favorite things to hate about the windows UI: white on white text entry fields have been difficult to find since win 7 and have been held over into win10. Now the scroll bars are white on white and you have to hover your mouse cursor over the invisible scrolling square button to reveal where it is in order to see how far along in the scroll you are instead of referring at a glance. What were they thinking?
gitgud 7y ago
Windows 95 followed an extremely standardised approach to design. This allowed for incredible ease of use, but people get tired of standards and want to set themselves apart... This is not always good for UX, but new and different GUI's are an inevitable progression from homogeneous ecosystems like; Windows 95, Bootstrap, Material... People just want to be different from the standard
OrgNet 7y ago
Windows 2000 was the best... please bring it back (without the new tracking ideas, of course).
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  64bit XP in classic UI mode was purty good as well. My Mate desktop is still not as good but one of the closest modern options.
FpUser 7y ago
It looks a bit ugly but it is very functional and straight to the point. Needed just a little visual touch to account for modern monitors. Instead we have fucking light gray text on white background, window borders/title area that are indistinguishable from the rest accompanied by great hunting game of: find an interactive element on on a screen
- Narishma 7y ago
  It doesn't look ugly to me. It looks better than most modern interfaces.
Stratoscope 7y ago
> The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action. That's not exactly what the ellipsis is intended to communicate. Have you ever wondered why File/Open... has the ellipsis, but in a properly designed app, Help/About does not have it? Even though Help/About opens a dialog too? The distinction is that the ellipsis indicates that a command will take some action after further user input. The user input may be anything like text entry, selecting from a list, or just a Yes/No or OK/Cancel confirmation. But the key point is that the command will do something after that user input (unless the user cancels). An About box should not take any action or cause any change to the state of your document or system. It's just information displayed that the user can dismiss with the OK button or close icon. So it doesn't get the ellipsis.
- Stratoscope 7y ago
  For the curious, there is a detailed discussion of the ellipsis in menus in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (PDF): http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf Search for "ellipsis" or go to pages 91-95 of the PDF (labeled as pages 67-71), in particular: > The ellipsis character doesn’t simply mean that a dialog box or window will appear. For example in the Finder File menu, the Get Info command doesn’t have an ellipsis character and shouldn’t. When you select a Finder object and choose Get Info, a window appears displaying information about the object. The window appearing simply completes the command. The command doesn’t require additional input from the user before it executes. Also in the Windows 95 Interface Guidelines (PDF): https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M... Again search for "ellipsis" or go to page 109 of the PDF (labeled along with several other pages as page 143): > If you provide access to copyright and version information for your application, include an About application name command on this menu. When the user chooses this command, display a window containing the application's name, version number, copyright information, and any other informational properties related to the application. Display this information in a dialog box or alternatively as a copyright page of the property sheet of the application's main executable (.EXE) file. Do not use an ellipsis at the end of this command because the resulting window does not require the user to provide any further parameters.
alkonaut 7y ago
I still make windows desktop software in my day job and a lot of these things are still there. Like ellipses for elements launching dialog. I also think resizable windows etc are still displaying a draggable corner as a hint? All of this is pretty natural - so long as you design native desktop software using native controls.
philefstat 7y ago
There's a React component library based on the Windows 95 UI: https://react95.github.io/React95 https://react95.github.io/React95 https://github.com/arturbien/React95 https://github.com/arturbien/React95
bronz 7y ago
back before UI was designed by committee and guided by feedback from brain-dead iPhone users.
jonny383 7y ago
Writing a post about usability design as a Twitter thread is horribly ironic.
bdcravens 7y ago
Here's some anti-UX I observed from Uber: https://twitter.com/bdcravens/status/1197220786156834817 https://twitter.com/bdcravens/status/1197220786156834817
divbzero 7y ago
I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.
- andrepd 7y ago
  The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
  - grawprog 7y ago
    But toolbars are essentially the same thing except they don't waste space, are moveable, resizable, typically customizable, and can be hidden.
    - mavhc 7y ago
      Pretty sure having every toolbar open at once would use more space. Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.
      - catalogia 7y ago
        > Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available. So were toolbars in Microsoft Office were similarly dynamic.
        akho 7y ago
        Toolbars were not keyboard accessible, and usually unlabeled. The ribbon is a huge improvement.
        eitland 7y ago
rosybox 7y ago
If you still want this kind of UI you can have it with a Gnome or KDE linux desktop.
- petepete 7y ago
  I'd recommend LXDE or XFCE for this kind of desktop. With this theme, you can even make XFCE look just like Windows 95. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    I'd like to see a KDE1/GNOME1/FVWM version of this. Something that could be packaged in a Linux distribution and be accessible out of the box.
    - petepete 7y ago
      There's a theme for Gnome 2/Mate that looks quite extensive. Pretty niche market these days I guess. https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1012363/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1012363/
- ahartmetz 7y ago
  I've been saying for a long time that one thing the free DEs have going for them is that they don't consist so much of separate parts, each of which needing to advertise for itself. No need for FooApp to look extra special, no need to shove the name into the user's face. Universal document readers with format plugins, such as Okular, are a nice example. Not great at most things not PDF but you can see the idea. A universal tagging and rating system kind of exists in KDE but somehow it hasn't turned out as useful as it promised initially (IMO). There is still a lot of unrealized potential in that area.
doomlaser 7y ago
The big innovations in Windows 95 UI were the Start Button and the Task Bar. Both were excellent additions proven most evidently by their continuing presence in Windows 10 today.
jstewartmobile 7y ago
Looks like my entire wardrobe is coming back in style. About damn time!
mtm7 7y ago
I appreciate this analysis and agree with some of the points, although I have to add: for any interface that I use daily (such as a file management system), I prefer the modern version — flat design and all. I don’t want heavy borders to show that something can be resized (just show me a different cursor when I hover), or column titles styled like buttons, or an always-visible scrollbar (I rarely need to know a “vague” measurement of files in a folder). To me, this just makes an interface more confusing. Although I’ve been spoiled by Mac over the last few years, so maybe this argument is more about Windows.
Darkphibre 7y ago
As a certified MSDE in the late 90s, I cringed frequently in the early 2000s as design guideline after guideline was violated and landed by the wayside. There was so much thought put into every element, and guidelines of placement down to the pixels. And you were tested on all of it to get/retain certification. As others have said, targeting multiple resolutions and dpis, and supporting reactive/resizable canvases, has driven most of those guidelines to the curb. A different era.
meerita 7y ago
Win 95 made me buy a PC, basically. I owned macs (from 7.5 to 9.2) but 95 made me buy a PC and start enjoying another kind of computing.
masswerk 7y ago
I think, much of the recent developments in UI design (and its conceptual space) is owed to display technology. Modern displays have different contrast ratios from CRTs. Generally, fine details used to look softer on CRTs. So, when flat displays were introduced, bevels didn't look right, Apple got rid of realistic icons (formerly introduced in OS X), etc. On the other hand, extensive regions of flat color where always a bit of a problem on CRTs (too bright, maybe there were some artefacts from some interference – who remembers the stripes caused by a cell phone placed next to a CRT?), but rendered impressively on flat screens. Meaning, the old UIs didn't work like they used to be on the new technology, while the new displays provided for a few things which had always been a bit problematic on the old ones. Enter double resolution displays and the necessity to render the same content on varying resolutions. Flat design and parametric scaling seems to be the answer. However, there's now a limited range of ways to add unobtrusive visual clues and of compartmentalisation/grouping as compared to the old visual vocabulary. Moreover, with the old vocabulary, a single element could have multiple visual clues attached to it (e.g., a bevel indicated a button, the icon and its color a task and a category, an underline in the associated text a shortcut key, etc), while now a single element can have just a single clue added to it for the most. Reduced visual complexity, as necessitated by the display technology, also meant reduced conceptual complexity.
- steve1977 7y ago
  Not sure about that. I personally found Windows 95 (or XP/Windows 7 in classic mode) looked great on flat screens - better than on CRTs actually.
  - masswerk 7y ago
    This is actually true for Win 95 / classic Win UI. (However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.) P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can also see, even if I do not appreciate the road taken specifically, why this wasn't sustainable with high resolution displays.
pkorzeniewski 7y ago
I use Windows 98 quite often and it's sad how crappy modern UIs have become and how we just got used to it.. really feels like a huge step backwards and it only gets worse
veselin 7y ago
Many people probably didn't notice that Microsoft Office at that time used custom controls and was a little off from this design. The design was very nice, but a bit over complicated. Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. The open dialog is a good example. Drop down elements, lists, directory list, label for selected directory. Later iterations fixed this and nowadays apps try to avoid selecting files altogether if possible. Overall, design has improved a lot since then, maybe except for the touch additions.
- ErotemeObelus 7y ago
  > Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. "Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, 'I was surprised by this feature of the language, so Ruby violates the principle of least surprise.' Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprises me." Modern user interfaces are like C++. They still surprise me after years of using them. Even Apple's OS X and Mac OS surprise me after about two years of using the former and various years of using the latter during grade school. The only user desktop user interface that never surprised me after years of usage was Windows 95. But because the tech industry values newness it's never ever coming back.
thdrdt 7y ago
I see a lot of designers who are very creative but are creating artwork instead of interaction designs. The problem is: it sells. Customer wants a website, designer makes a peace of art, customer thinks it looks amazing, contracts are signed. The the trouble starts when it is getting build. Real texts are much longer than designed, the available pictures don't fit as good as the hand picked stock pictures, and the interaction.. well it all looked great on paper. I believe it's dumb to get contracts this way because the project always delays because the client doesn't get what works. It's better to sell customers a moodboard and then design interaction as the project moves along.
ksputana 7y ago
will a new OS come with W95 design ever? I would love that
- muterad_murilax 7y ago
  ReactOS 1.0 perhaps.
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    You don’t need to wait, the current version is pretty close, if not better.
- Narishma 7y ago
  Serenety.
csomar 7y ago
Here is something else: The interface was "responsive". And I don't mean the responsive designs we have today for HTML but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating. I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and HTML/JS. First, it used around 4.1Gb of memory. The interface was not responsive and then it crushed. I'm using a 16Gb/i7 2018 MacBook Pro and there is lags for most of the buttons in the Finder application.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. This was important enough back then that some of the UI was implemented in kernel mode on NT-class operating systems, specifically in order to preserve that responsiveness. AIUI, Win9x did not have a complete user-mode/supervisor-mode distinction, but the UI code was written on a very low level and tightly coupled with the OS itself, for similar reasons.
- blattimwind 7y ago
  Many applications take longer to respond to a button click than it takes to send data around the entire globe.
- tiffanyh 7y ago
  This isn’t your imagination. It’s been measured that over the years, operating systems have become more laggy. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- donatj 7y ago
  Photoshops "New" dialog in newer versions takes seconds to show up. It's horrific. Someone should get fired. I am both distracted and irritated by it every time I create a new file.
- zouhair 7y ago
  Electron and Material Design need to die with fire.
boksiora 7y ago
very true
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
taf2 7y ago
All I can add to this is my experience with my daughter and the switch from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Our iPad was about a year old and I decided to upgrade to ios7. She was 3 and we would take her on walks and she’d hold her iPad and watch shows (bad parents I know). Anyways with iOS 7 she got so frustrated because she could figure out how to watch her favorite show (play button was nearly impossible to see and they started including shows that you need to be online to watch but with no clear indicator). She threw the iPad an amazing distance with unreal strength. I wished it was more obvious for her as ios6 a 3 year old could master...
buboard 7y ago
Sadly , this is a theme with tech, it progresses in cycles. FB replaces forums which replace yahoo which replace newsgroups. In terms of ideas, there is very few that wasn't there in the 90s, (infinite scrolling maybe; afforded by increased RAM - i can't think of others). Since CPU performance has stangated, the last few cycles of generic computing have focused on design. That's the main selling point now, and you see that in the proliferation of UX jobs and attempts to squeeze the last drops of user engagement with things such as 'onboarding' etc. Design has become inane, of course, it completely ignores human capacities such as contour-perception, response time, consistency, but it doesn't matter, because the game has changed: it's now about how you capture the user faster and then lock her in. Wasting their time trying to figure out the app is now a positive sign: "the user is engaged".
fnord77 7y ago
old windows CUA allowed any ui interaction to be done with the keyboard. it was really well thought out
Kenji 7y ago
Material design is pure garbage and everyone who has the faintest clue of UI design knows it.
pcdoodle 7y ago
it was easier to explain over the phone too. EXP: Click Start > Control Panel > Sound > Playback Tab > Right Click the Speakers > Set as default audio device. Grandma can hear her youtube videos again while i'm still at the beach.
qwtel 7y ago
I think about windows 95 at least once a month, wondering why the web apps I work on still can’t match it in terms of performance and usability, never mind resource utilization. One thing that has been a staple since win95 days is the ability to resize windows, sidebars, columns; almost everything, really. Rarely is this found on the web today, or so poorly implemented that it’s thrashing the UI thread when one or more resize callbacks are triggered. Even without that, layout + painting alone would probably lose the race against 95 UI tech. Another “legacy” UI that stood out to me is blender. It looks decades old (until it was revamped recently), is probably a hodgepodge of C/C++ but stays smooth as everything can be resized even on dated hardware. I can’t help but think that the UI engineers of old were a much more professional bunch, and that the field has mostly regressed since then.
rb808 7y ago
That Active Desktop with pointcast ActiveX control though...

555 points by luu 7y ago

. . .and then there was the BSODomy. . . Less cheekily, I recall joy of not needing to look to the bottom for more commands and tabs. First encounter with that paradigm was iTunes. It took me a week to realize that half the functionality was in the nether reaches of the screen. I felt I was the butt of some joke.

RandomBacon 7y ago
Idk, back then I had worse luck with Macs crashing on me than Windows.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels were smoothed. Tasteful gradients and transparency replaced harsh outlines. Explanatory text was tucked away. Manuals became brochures, then a lonely slip of paper with a URL. Maybe a QR code. Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. There are no extraneous details. Indeed, there are no details. I caress my phone's surface gently, hoping to see a sliver of its rapturous visage peel back, hinting that I have found the first step in the puzzle box of its interaction model. Alas, no dice. Maybe I can hunt down a how-to video... to show me how to hunt down a video...

agumonkey 7y ago
It was a crossroad of limited computing affordance and abstraction necessity. I grew up in CGI land, basically high end CGI programs were what the latest web app is. Reactive redrawing of free form geometries. I wanted this to be mainstream so bad. I got old and it became slightly true. Not keeping aside the drift of website content and pop overs.. something hit me. My brain doesn't want real time and free floating. I want abstraction, solid, and patient. It even contradicts my love for lisp repls (another form of low latency feedback). I look at 90s desktop GUIs with a bit more love and appreciation. They were limited just enough, the limitation forced abstraction and organization. And most of the time it was just right (you could remove spooky side effects, and add a bit of genericity it wouldn't hurt).
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  UI framework designers these days really undervalue “not spooky”.
- mntmoss 7y ago
  I myself can't tell if this feeling is just me getting older. I liked the shiny dynamic stuff when I was younger. Gradually I found myself ignoring more of it and developing more specific rules for what I wanted out of the UX. When a recent thread on "calm computing" mentioned Fraidycat I took to it immediately. It's nearly the antithesis of the news feed - there's no repetitive rhythm to it, although there is a bit of clicking around. There was a time when I actually wanted news feeds, I would cycle through a few sites and F5 constantly. I know a few twenty-somethings who are still falling for shiny stuff. I don't think that's going away, but I do think the overall culture will come to realize that it's junk food computing.
  - agumonkey 7y ago
    I do think it's both side of the getting old coin. In one way we're getting cranky. But we're also getting wiser. We don't want more data, we want better signal (quantity/quality).
ordinaryperson 7y ago
Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a living. Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious. I just wish Apple et al. didn't force these choices on us, that we could disable silliness like force touch and hidden toolbars. But alas one cannot.
- erikpukinskis 7y ago
  Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple. The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore. My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.
    - thom 7y ago
      All this means is that instead of people accidentally discovering the obscure behaviour as they do now (and then working out how to carefully tap out of it), they'll just never find it. That's certainly less annoying to me, who has never used any of these weird popup menus, but doesn't seem a massive improvement overall.
      - zapzupnz 7y ago
        > they'll just never find it Why not? People always complained about accidentally activating Force Touch when trying to long press. Long press has a precedent in iOS; 3D/Force Touch never did.
soheil 7y ago
> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. until you get a blue screen of death... Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.
- spectramax 7y ago
  Come on, UI design and the OS crashing down are two separate orthogonal issues. Yes, they culminate at the end as “User experience”, but the OP is clearly talking about UI elements and how their functional design is eroding away. What’s that to do with BSOD!!??
  - xcv321 7y ago
    Sounds like you probably weren't using computers back in the Win 9x days. For us who remember it, Windows 95 is synonymous with BSOD.
    - spectramax 7y ago
      I did. I get that computers back in the day crashed a lot. BSOD while playing C&C was my childhood. But my point, again, is that computers crashing and UI design are two orthagonal issues.
      - xcv321 7y ago
        Yeah, we already know that. He was talking about computers in general, not just the UI design.
    - Cougher 7y ago
      I was. I remember. I've had the BSOD. But Win95 is not synonymous with it for me.
    - chinesempire 7y ago
      I don't like to downvote comments, but this one is particularly bad. First of all, BSOD where not that common, and for sure they are not what all of "us" remember about Windows 95. Secondly, Amiga and Mac had their own version of the BSOD, there were just far less Amiga and Mac around. Third: Windows 95 bootstrapped the PC gaming era, having the GUI code in the Kernel (for performance reasons) and not having the WHQL to test third party drivers yet, made BSOD popular, because many saw them when they were kids playing some game on their parent's computer. Of course you can do what Apple does, forbid third party drivers and give up to Nvidia cards on your OS. It is not a big deal, right? I'm assuming you also never used a Mac with Mac OS classic and never saw the sad Mac... https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/11/17/sad_mac_face.jpg https://regmedia.co.uk/2015/11/17/sad_mac_face.jpg
flippyhead 7y ago
Idk, my mom found windows 95 etc very hard to use but has no trouble with her iPhone, iPad or even a Mac (let alone the TV or can-speak-to appliance). Maybe part of is it is that a lot of problems that required UI solutions before just work magically now. Like file sharing, networking or dealing with different document formats. You don't need nearly as many controls for the most part so the UI can be simpler.
- ptman 7y ago
  You think she learned nothing in the years between?
  - flippyhead 7y ago
    I am embarrassed to say I hadn't considered this actually; and it's a good point. But considering it, no, I don't. She simply doesn't have the mind for it, as far as I can tell.
- eitland 7y ago
  That is actually a good point. Simple stuff might have become simpler. That said I am firmly in the "we lost something between 95 and here" camp for now. And to while it does explain why pads are different it doesn't explain why we needed to mess up the desktop in the process.
  - jopsen 7y ago
    And the market for simple stuff that is simple to do is a lot larger than the desktop market. That's probably what we learned from the iPhone.
    - ldng 7y ago
      Simple UI is better when you have consumer grade "simple" but problems starts when complex pro app start to do "simple" and you get "simplistic stupid"
  - 7y ago
andrepd 7y ago
A consequence of optimising interfaces to look good in screenshots and promo photos, rather than actually being useful? That's the only explanation I can find for the whitespace ridden desktop and phone interfaces that plague us today.
steve1977 7y ago
The box! You opened it, we came.
hatsunearu 7y ago
The stereotypical "old people with tech" shtick is that they don't know how to do things we contemporaries seem trivial. Considering the trend maybe that isn't too unexpected, and I'm also worried that when I get old I'll feel left out and abandoned by this growing tend towards oversimplification
raverbashing 7y ago
I've noticed this happening as well, but I guess every system is built on the affordances and cultural knowledge of the time it was built. The original Macintosh (and Windows before 95) were built for people who were more or less familiar with computers already BUT who didn't know so much about the mouse, etc. (And even if the Mac might have been "easier to use" people wouldn't just jump into an expensive machine without knowing what they would be getting). Hence they would "handhold" more. Even the 1st iPhone was more user friendly (design wise) than the newer ones. Now kids know how to swipe "intuitively" and design will seem less obvious (for people unaccustomed with it) with time.
blattimwind 7y ago
> Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.
- deanCommie 7y ago
  Thank you. I feel like the world is taking crazy pills. Windows 7 was gorgeous. Windows 8 was a mess but at least the were trying to do something bold with consistency with their Windows Phone Look and Feel. Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated. I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and found the clickable areas at least visually pleasant, if a bit hidden. Windows 10 is undiscoverable AND ugly.
  - flowerlad 7y ago
    Take a look at this iOS critique https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/ To me Windows XP’s look & feel was among the best. Except for the fat Window title bar.
    - donatj 7y ago
      XP was playschool. Eww. Windows 2k was great however.
  - ckosidows 7y ago
    Maybe I just don't remember enough about Windows 8, but how is Windows 10 that much worse, in your opinion? I feel like it's the exact same as 8 sans the Metro Start section and a few minor (in my opinion) UI tweaks.
  - sdegutis 7y ago
    Windows 3's design was a first shot. Windows 95 was extremely polished and well done. Windows XP was a response to PCs becoming mainstream and figuring what the everyman wanted was more flair and fashion. Windows 7 was a response to desktop Linux (Compiz et al.) capturing people's imaginations. Windows 8 was a response to iOS while trying to avoid Apple's skeuomorphism patents (fortunately). Windows 10 was realizing that none of that really mattered, they already have all the users anyway, so they just need long-term UI stability now.
zouhair 7y ago
I hate Material Design with a passion.
chadlavi 7y ago
Ok boomer
- dang 7y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

yellow_lead 7y ago

Hey, at least Win95 UI wasn't based on Electron. I'd prefer this UI if it meant Win95's snappyness. (most of the time :)

nothis 7y ago
There's something deeply ironic about reading this post as a Twitter thread.
ygra 7y ago
Heck, the whole of Windows 95 has a smaller install size than any Electron app ...

twotwotwo 7y ago

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs. These things often exist now or have an analog (e.g. long press is right-click in mobile UI), but not everywhere and not always done the same way. Mobile has some inconsistency; the Web has a good bit. The modern has plenty of its own UI/UX things--URLs and the Back button for the win, dev tools/view source are awesome, and certain cool things can come from services not living entirely on your device. Something like hiding clutter at the cost of discoverability is a win for many people. Still think it's interesting to compare and think about what can be usefully brought forward from the past.

pcurve 7y ago
25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers. Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu? Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility. Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.
- z3t4 7y ago
  I recently spent one week making a dropdown menu. Then I spent another week making it possible to use it with keyboard only and with a screen reader. There are actually standards on how a dropdown menu is supposed to work. But no easy way to implement one. Dropdowns are however very bad UI because it hides info and you need to click or move the mouse to certain places to see more. A unique feature on the web is the scroll to see more. Using the mouse wheel. So instead of putting info in one screen hidden behind menus, tabs etc, you just put All info in one looooong scrollable page. This works great when information is presented like in a book, eg. you read from top to bottom and rarely jump back and forth. So the challenge is to present the functionality in a way so that the user does not have to scroll back and forth to reach it. Key presses or gestures could instead be used to switch between different scrollable screens/pages. And each view should have an unique URL so you can link to it.

_trampeltier 7y ago

Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.

agumonkey 7y ago
Do not worry for the market is ready for this. Iphone started with fixed backgrounds, then later they demonstrated the oh so amazing feature of custom backgrounds. In some 80s computer chronicles episode you can find the ex-act-same-speech from a windows sales rep explaining how win 1.0 was limited, but now you can set up your own background pattern. iOS 15 will introduce ML generated computer vision trained custom themed that fits the most seen colours in your rooms.
- userbinator 7y ago
  Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3. https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/win30-1-1.png https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...
  - _def 7y ago
    If the apps celebrating their new dark mode feature would use the OS GUI toolkit they wouldn't have to worry about that. Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX
    - userbinator 7y ago
      Many "modern" desktop apps rely on web based technology which throws them back ages in terms of UI and UX For an even more WTF experience, look at how CSS had defined how web apps could use the system-defined colours for UI elements, but then it was deprecated due to a very thin "insufficient" and "security/privacy" argument: https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-4/#deprecated-system-colors Obviously they could be made sufficient (imagine if JS was deprecated because it was deemed "insufficient" for making applications behave natively...), and things like Electron could use them without worrying about "security" since it's not in pages served over the network. (That "security/privacy" argument is really thin, especially when considering how much less customisable the colours have become in newer OSs!)

pcurve 7y ago

Even to this date, there is something oddly satisfying about clicking those buttons. It feels like I'm operating a machine and actually getting things done.

leetrout 7y ago
The startup I worked for in 2012 went with some skeuomorphic design elements like lit / unlit LEDs and I loved it then and still love it now. https://dribbble.com/shots/573197-Hal-90 https://dribbble.com/shots/573197-Hal-90

accrual 7y ago

The following link has been posted here before but is an excellent dive into the 95 UI for those looking for more to read: Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018) https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

pvg 7y ago

UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.

thanatropism 7y ago
There’s way more file metadata now and the file Explorer smartly displays it when many items in a folder have it.
jplayer01 7y ago
The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hit: Multitasking. You literally can’t have multiple copies of Settings open to modify different parts of the settings at the same time. I can’t quickly open a new window to check something while keeping my focus on one main task ... as in, multitask. I’m forced to break my flow and traverse back/forward through a bunch of nested settings instead of letting me alt-tab between what I’m actually interested in. It’s terrible and infuriating and I have no idea how this got released in this state. And that’s before even considering how incredibly wasteful it is with space. I hate myself and wonder where my life went wrong every time I have to open a Settings window on a device that doesn’t have full HD or higher, because it usually results in copious amounts of scrolling for information that could be easily displayed in 1/4th of the space. Hell, and you can forget about using it non-maximized, because then the “advanced” links on the right side disappear to wherever, because fuck showing you what you need at a glance. And they keep changing how you reach the actually sane, usable and functional Control Panel windows (like the sound devices settings) and alternate between making it easier and ridiculously obtuse. It makes me want to bash my head against things really, really hard.
- pvg 7y ago
  I'm mostly pushing back against the idea of some lost golden age of UI design. The file explorer used in this example is almost the same a quarter of a century later. And some of its deficiencies have lasted a long time - it took a couple of decades for explorer to learn to show a unified list of files and directories sorted by modification time. And it still doesn't have an inlined tree view making the basic task of moving files between adjacent directories clunky. At the same time, for all of its fashions and foibles, the one-app-a-time, direct-manipulating touchscreen UI has made computers more accessible to all sorts of people to whom 'the desktop metaphor' was and remains confusing and unintuitive.

RenRav 7y ago

>The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action. Can't believe I never noticed this.

notadoc 7y ago

Windows 95 had an obvious UI, but was rather cluttered. The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul. The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a modern OS. Nothing is obvious. Multitasking and copy/paste on iPad is befuddling to even the smartest and most technical people I know. UI design that was perfected 30+ years ago has been completely shelved and lost by designers who are designing for other designers and their portfolios, rather than for users.

jedberg 7y ago
> The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design Interestingly, that was right around the time Apple's original interaction designer left the company.
leetrout 7y ago
I miss IRIX. I loved the tiles when a window was minimized.
- ddingus 7y ago
  Me too. And a simple virtual desktop implementation I used constantly. How about fun, common sense widgets? Scalable, vector desktop icons... And a CD player featuring, "Save Track As..." :D
mgerdts 7y ago
> "The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel." I first used System 7 after having used DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 and a bit of SunOS. With that background, I found System 7 and the silly hardware limitations to be anything but intuitive. To this day I find it annoying to have to go all the way to to top of the monitor to get to a menu. Arguably that was less of a pain on the tiny screen of a Mac SE, but becomes real where than one app is open in a way that the windowed app feature is used in a meaningful way. An example of silly hardware limitations includes substituting an eject button on the floppy drive for dragging it to the trash. The same action used to delete files or folders is used to regain possession of my precious files. The single button on a mouse to make it simple sounds nice, but then there are modifiers using command - giving the same functionality a windows user would expect from a right click.

Causality1 7y ago

"Flat UI" is the bane of my existence.

petilon 7y ago

The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif

statictype 7y ago
Wow - does this bring back some memories. I remember when CTL3D.dll was all the rage. Good times. To think we used to worry about VB programs needing a separate runtime to distribute them and Delphi programs, while stand-alone, took up almost 200KB for a minimal app!
- thom 7y ago
  Ah, THREED.VBX, good times indeed.
  - dguaraglia 7y ago
    Hahah, yes! I was obsessed with THREED.VBX, but because I was learning C at the time ended up writing a whole library of Windows custom-drawn controls that looked exactly the same. I guess it was only later that I learned there was nothing special about VBX libraries and that you could (with some boilerplate) make them work from C. Kids nowadays have it so easy with their Electrons and QTs...
userbinator 7y ago
I think it improved on NextStep by adding things like the underlines for keyboard accessibility, but the basic style (i.e. buttons that look like buttons) is very similar.
Aeolun 7y ago
That.. doesn’t actually functionally change a whole lot? Though I can see how it would be super cool at the time.

est 7y ago

I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.

k__ 7y ago
Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?
- slovenlyrobot 7y ago
  There are more or less 2 major modes of managing a product relative to the current technological zeitgeist: - expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately - remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!) VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.
  - Too 7y ago
    The powerful RAD from VB continued into C# and .NET. You could in first versions of VS.NET and still today with UWP just drag out a button, double click it to perform some action, hit F5 for close to instant compile and launch and then edit the code while debugging. As others noted, the problem is not the tool, the problem is the lack of interest in desktop apps today. Agree about the experience being unmatched. Compare it to Android Studio which is supposed to be the modern flagship from the competition, even 15 year old versions of Visual Studio provides much smoother RAD experience. No matter how good code editing in IntelliJ is, everything around it with gradle slowness and app relaunches just makes you look back and wonder what happened to technological progress.

tus88 7y ago

I still use Win98 daily for gaming and love it, fight me.

jedberg 7y ago
The last patch for Win98 was in 2013. I really hope you don't put that thing on the internet.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Who cares? If it is just for gaming, then if it gets infected it isn't going to compromise anything important.
  - jedberg 7y ago
    The most common infection is the one where they turn your computer into a node of a botnet. From there it can consume your bandwidth, launch attacks on other people, or be used to distribute files, such as child porn. Do you want to be implicated in a child porn ring, and have the evidence sitting right on your computer?
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      Chances are said Win98 box is off when not in use, and it is very unlikely that there is much of that kind of malware targeting Win98 anyway since it has a nigh-0% install base. What does actually run on it is probably going to be noticed because it's probably running on period hardware and the resource usage will not be nearly so negligible as it is today.
- tus88 7y ago
  It doesn't have any connection to a network of any kind. I mainly copy stuff over on USB. GOG games don't install on Win98, but if you install them on XP you can often just copy the directory across.

anjel 7y ago

My two favorite things to hate about the windows UI: white on white text entry fields have been difficult to find since win 7 and have been held over into win10. Now the scroll bars are white on white and you have to hover your mouse cursor over the invisible scrolling square button to reveal where it is in order to see how far along in the scroll you are instead of referring at a glance. What were they thinking?

gitgud 7y ago

Windows 95 followed an extremely standardised approach to design. This allowed for incredible ease of use, but people get tired of standards and want to set themselves apart... This is not always good for UX, but new and different GUI's are an inevitable progression from homogeneous ecosystems like; Windows 95, Bootstrap, Material... People just want to be different from the standard

OrgNet 7y ago

Windows 2000 was the best... please bring it back (without the new tracking ideas, of course).

mixmastamyk 7y ago
64bit XP in classic UI mode was purty good as well. My Mate desktop is still not as good but one of the closest modern options.

FpUser 7y ago

It looks a bit ugly but it is very functional and straight to the point. Needed just a little visual touch to account for modern monitors. Instead we have fucking light gray text on white background, window borders/title area that are indistinguishable from the rest accompanied by great hunting game of: find an interactive element on on a screen

Narishma 7y ago
It doesn't look ugly to me. It looks better than most modern interfaces.

Stratoscope 7y ago

> The ellipsis hints that this button opens a dialog, instead of immediately executing an action. That's not exactly what the ellipsis is intended to communicate. Have you ever wondered why File/Open... has the ellipsis, but in a properly designed app, Help/About does not have it? Even though Help/About opens a dialog too? The distinction is that the ellipsis indicates that a command will take some action after further user input. The user input may be anything like text entry, selecting from a list, or just a Yes/No or OK/Cancel confirmation. But the key point is that the command will do something after that user input (unless the user cancels). An About box should not take any action or cause any change to the state of your document or system. It's just information displayed that the user can dismiss with the OK button or close icon. So it doesn't get the ellipsis.

Stratoscope 7y ago
For the curious, there is a detailed discussion of the ellipsis in menus in the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines (PDF): http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf http://interface.free.fr/Archives/Apple_HIGuidelines.pdf Search for "ellipsis" or go to pages 91-95 of the PDF (labeled as pages 67-71), in particular: > The ellipsis character doesn’t simply mean that a dialog box or window will appear. For example in the Finder File menu, the Get Info command doesn’t have an ellipsis character and shouldn’t. When you select a Finder object and choose Get Info, a window appears displaying information about the object. The window appearing simply completes the command. The command doesn’t require additional input from the user before it executes. Also in the Windows 95 Interface Guidelines (PDF): https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/M... Again search for "ellipsis" or go to page 109 of the PDF (labeled along with several other pages as page 143): > If you provide access to copyright and version information for your application, include an About application name command on this menu. When the user chooses this command, display a window containing the application's name, version number, copyright information, and any other informational properties related to the application. Display this information in a dialog box or alternatively as a copyright page of the property sheet of the application's main executable (.EXE) file. Do not use an ellipsis at the end of this command because the resulting window does not require the user to provide any further parameters.

alkonaut 7y ago

I still make windows desktop software in my day job and a lot of these things are still there. Like ellipses for elements launching dialog. I also think resizable windows etc are still displaying a draggable corner as a hint? All of this is pretty natural - so long as you design native desktop software using native controls.

philefstat 7y ago

There's a React component library based on the Windows 95 UI: https://react95.github.io/React95 https://react95.github.io/React95 https://github.com/arturbien/React95 https://github.com/arturbien/React95

bronz 7y ago

back before UI was designed by committee and guided by feedback from brain-dead iPhone users.

jonny383 7y ago

Writing a post about usability design as a Twitter thread is horribly ironic.

bdcravens 7y ago

Here's some anti-UX I observed from Uber: https://twitter.com/bdcravens/status/1197220786156834817 https://twitter.com/bdcravens/status/1197220786156834817

divbzero 7y ago

I forgot how nice it was to have underlined alt keyboard shortcuts. We got so much right so early in the age of personal computing. Goodbye to all that, hello Ribbon and flatness everywhere. It’s as if we’re in the Middle Ages now looking back at the great ruins of ancient Athens.

andrepd 7y ago
The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.
- grawprog 7y ago
  But toolbars are essentially the same thing except they don't waste space, are moveable, resizable, typically customizable, and can be hidden.
  - mavhc 7y ago
    Pretty sure having every toolbar open at once would use more space. Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.
    - catalogia 7y ago
      > Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available. So were toolbars in Microsoft Office were similarly dynamic.
      - akho 7y ago
        Toolbars were not keyboard accessible, and usually unlabeled. The ribbon is a huge improvement.
        eitland 7y ago

rosybox 7y ago

If you still want this kind of UI you can have it with a Gnome or KDE linux desktop.

petepete 7y ago
I'd recommend LXDE or XFCE for this kind of desktop. With this theme, you can even make XFCE look just like Windows 95. https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- zozbot234 7y ago
  I'd like to see a KDE1/GNOME1/FVWM version of this. Something that could be packaged in a Linux distribution and be accessible out of the box.
  - petepete 7y ago
    There's a theme for Gnome 2/Mate that looks quite extensive. Pretty niche market these days I guess. https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1012363/ https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1012363/
ahartmetz 7y ago
I've been saying for a long time that one thing the free DEs have going for them is that they don't consist so much of separate parts, each of which needing to advertise for itself. No need for FooApp to look extra special, no need to shove the name into the user's face. Universal document readers with format plugins, such as Okular, are a nice example. Not great at most things not PDF but you can see the idea. A universal tagging and rating system kind of exists in KDE but somehow it hasn't turned out as useful as it promised initially (IMO). There is still a lot of unrealized potential in that area.

doomlaser 7y ago

The big innovations in Windows 95 UI were the Start Button and the Task Bar. Both were excellent additions proven most evidently by their continuing presence in Windows 10 today.

jstewartmobile 7y ago

Looks like my entire wardrobe is coming back in style. About damn time!

mtm7 7y ago

I appreciate this analysis and agree with some of the points, although I have to add: for any interface that I use daily (such as a file management system), I prefer the modern version — flat design and all. I don’t want heavy borders to show that something can be resized (just show me a different cursor when I hover), or column titles styled like buttons, or an always-visible scrollbar (I rarely need to know a “vague” measurement of files in a folder). To me, this just makes an interface more confusing. Although I’ve been spoiled by Mac over the last few years, so maybe this argument is more about Windows.

Darkphibre 7y ago

As a certified MSDE in the late 90s, I cringed frequently in the early 2000s as design guideline after guideline was violated and landed by the wayside. There was so much thought put into every element, and guidelines of placement down to the pixels. And you were tested on all of it to get/retain certification. As others have said, targeting multiple resolutions and dpis, and supporting reactive/resizable canvases, has driven most of those guidelines to the curb. A different era.

meerita 7y ago

Win 95 made me buy a PC, basically. I owned macs (from 7.5 to 9.2) but 95 made me buy a PC and start enjoying another kind of computing.

masswerk 7y ago

I think, much of the recent developments in UI design (and its conceptual space) is owed to display technology. Modern displays have different contrast ratios from CRTs. Generally, fine details used to look softer on CRTs. So, when flat displays were introduced, bevels didn't look right, Apple got rid of realistic icons (formerly introduced in OS X), etc. On the other hand, extensive regions of flat color where always a bit of a problem on CRTs (too bright, maybe there were some artefacts from some interference – who remembers the stripes caused by a cell phone placed next to a CRT?), but rendered impressively on flat screens. Meaning, the old UIs didn't work like they used to be on the new technology, while the new displays provided for a few things which had always been a bit problematic on the old ones. Enter double resolution displays and the necessity to render the same content on varying resolutions. Flat design and parametric scaling seems to be the answer. However, there's now a limited range of ways to add unobtrusive visual clues and of compartmentalisation/grouping as compared to the old visual vocabulary. Moreover, with the old vocabulary, a single element could have multiple visual clues attached to it (e.g., a bevel indicated a button, the icon and its color a task and a category, an underline in the associated text a shortcut key, etc), while now a single element can have just a single clue added to it for the most. Reduced visual complexity, as necessitated by the display technology, also meant reduced conceptual complexity.

steve1977 7y ago
Not sure about that. I personally found Windows 95 (or XP/Windows 7 in classic mode) looked great on flat screens - better than on CRTs actually.
- masswerk 7y ago
  This is actually true for Win 95 / classic Win UI. (However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.) P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can also see, even if I do not appreciate the road taken specifically, why this wasn't sustainable with high resolution displays.

pkorzeniewski 7y ago

I use Windows 98 quite often and it's sad how crappy modern UIs have become and how we just got used to it.. really feels like a huge step backwards and it only gets worse

veselin 7y ago

Many people probably didn't notice that Microsoft Office at that time used custom controls and was a little off from this design. The design was very nice, but a bit over complicated. Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. The open dialog is a good example. Drop down elements, lists, directory list, label for selected directory. Later iterations fixed this and nowadays apps try to avoid selecting files altogether if possible. Overall, design has improved a lot since then, maybe except for the touch additions.

ErotemeObelus 7y ago
> Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. "Everyone has an individual background. Someone may come from Python, someone else may come from Perl, and they may be surprised by different aspects of the language. Then they come up to me and say, 'I was surprised by this feature of the language, so Ruby violates the principle of least surprise.' Wait. Wait. The principle of least surprise is not for you only. The principle of least surprise means principle of least my surprise. And it means the principle of least surprise after you learn Ruby very well. For example, I was a C++ programmer before I started designing Ruby. I programmed in C++ exclusively for two or three years. And after two years of C++ programming, it still surprises me." Modern user interfaces are like C++. They still surprise me after years of using them. Even Apple's OS X and Mac OS surprise me after about two years of using the former and various years of using the latter during grade school. The only user desktop user interface that never surprised me after years of usage was Windows 95. But because the tech industry values newness it's never ever coming back.

thdrdt 7y ago

I see a lot of designers who are very creative but are creating artwork instead of interaction designs. The problem is: it sells. Customer wants a website, designer makes a peace of art, customer thinks it looks amazing, contracts are signed. The the trouble starts when it is getting build. Real texts are much longer than designed, the available pictures don't fit as good as the hand picked stock pictures, and the interaction.. well it all looked great on paper. I believe it's dumb to get contracts this way because the project always delays because the client doesn't get what works. It's better to sell customers a moodboard and then design interaction as the project moves along.

ksputana 7y ago

will a new OS come with W95 design ever? I would love that

muterad_murilax 7y ago
ReactOS 1.0 perhaps.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  You don’t need to wait, the current version is pretty close, if not better.
Narishma 7y ago
Serenety.

csomar 7y ago

Here is something else: The interface was "responsive". And I don't mean the responsive designs we have today for HTML but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating. I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and HTML/JS. First, it used around 4.1Gb of memory. The interface was not responsive and then it crushed. I'm using a 16Gb/i7 2018 MacBook Pro and there is lags for most of the buttons in the Finder application.

zozbot234 7y ago
> but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. This was important enough back then that some of the UI was implemented in kernel mode on NT-class operating systems, specifically in order to preserve that responsiveness. AIUI, Win9x did not have a complete user-mode/supervisor-mode distinction, but the UI code was written on a very low level and tightly coupled with the OS itself, for similar reasons.
blattimwind 7y ago
Many applications take longer to respond to a button click than it takes to send data around the entire globe.
tiffanyh 7y ago
This isn’t your imagination. It’s been measured that over the years, operating systems have become more laggy. https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
donatj 7y ago
Photoshops "New" dialog in newer versions takes seconds to show up. It's horrific. Someone should get fired. I am both distracted and irritated by it every time I create a new file.
zouhair 7y ago
Electron and Material Design need to die with fire.

boksiora 7y ago

very true

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

taf2 7y ago

All I can add to this is my experience with my daughter and the switch from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Our iPad was about a year old and I decided to upgrade to ios7. She was 3 and we would take her on walks and she’d hold her iPad and watch shows (bad parents I know). Anyways with iOS 7 she got so frustrated because she could figure out how to watch her favorite show (play button was nearly impossible to see and they started including shows that you need to be online to watch but with no clear indicator). She threw the iPad an amazing distance with unreal strength. I wished it was more obvious for her as ios6 a 3 year old could master...

buboard 7y ago

Sadly , this is a theme with tech, it progresses in cycles. FB replaces forums which replace yahoo which replace newsgroups. In terms of ideas, there is very few that wasn't there in the 90s, (infinite scrolling maybe; afforded by increased RAM - i can't think of others). Since CPU performance has stangated, the last few cycles of generic computing have focused on design. That's the main selling point now, and you see that in the proliferation of UX jobs and attempts to squeeze the last drops of user engagement with things such as 'onboarding' etc. Design has become inane, of course, it completely ignores human capacities such as contour-perception, response time, consistency, but it doesn't matter, because the game has changed: it's now about how you capture the user faster and then lock her in. Wasting their time trying to figure out the app is now a positive sign: "the user is engaged".

fnord77 7y ago

old windows CUA allowed any ui interaction to be done with the keyboard. it was really well thought out

Kenji 7y ago

Material design is pure garbage and everyone who has the faintest clue of UI design knows it.

pcdoodle 7y ago

it was easier to explain over the phone too. EXP: Click Start > Control Panel > Sound > Playback Tab > Right Click the Speakers > Set as default audio device. Grandma can hear her youtube videos again while i'm still at the beach.

qwtel 7y ago

I think about windows 95 at least once a month, wondering why the web apps I work on still can’t match it in terms of performance and usability, never mind resource utilization. One thing that has been a staple since win95 days is the ability to resize windows, sidebars, columns; almost everything, really. Rarely is this found on the web today, or so poorly implemented that it’s thrashing the UI thread when one or more resize callbacks are triggered. Even without that, layout + painting alone would probably lose the race against 95 UI tech. Another “legacy” UI that stood out to me is blender. It looks decades old (until it was revamped recently), is probably a hodgepodge of C/C++ but stays smooth as everything can be resized even on dated hardware. I can’t help but think that the UI engineers of old were a much more professional bunch, and that the field has mostly regressed since then.

rb808 7y ago

That Active Desktop with pointcast ActiveX control though...