7 ms·

These UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.

by pier25 5y ago

Yhippa 5y ago
For some dumb reason I miss the old squared corners
asddubs 5y ago
if you feel that way, you might want to check out the serenityos project. it's a custom unix with a classic windows interface
- Koshkin 5y ago
  The worst of both worlds. (I’d prefer Windows with a classic Unix interface.)
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    So, DOS?
    - code_duck 5y ago
      If DOS was equivalent to Unix, that sure would have saved some time.
  - tibbetts 5y ago
    You mean VMS?
  - qbasic_forever 5y ago
    OS/2 warp
    - quickthrower2 5y ago
      Runs two apps at the same time!
  - asddubs 5y ago
    I would call that the worst of both worlds
  - dinglejungle 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-WXzLKv_rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-WXzLKv_rc
userbinator 5y ago
The mere presence of buttons that look like buttons, and static text that looks like static text, is innumerably better than the "ambiguous text and icons floating in a sea of flat white/blackspace" that UIs today seem to mostly consist of.
- ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
  Exactly the argument that people are used to all this and hence buttons don't need to be like buttons is such a bad argument.
- srvmshr 5y ago
  A lot of that (dis)credit historically goes to Jonny Ive. Every UI mostly just copied the flat, glassy look. KDE had flatter icons - but not in such disruptive way. They were still skeumorphic
- nsriv 5y ago
  I feel this way about interactions on mobile. I grew up using Android and still have my phone on 3 buttons mode because it seems obvious. Have been using iDevices for work and some of the tap and swipe gestures are so unintuitive, along with the flat text as buttons. It feels like Apple decided "people that use our devices know this already."
  - bouke 5y ago
    There’s an accessibility option to display buttons with an outline. I have enabled that for some relatives as they are also confused by the (lack of) design. All hail flat design, sigh.
Gualdrapo 5y ago
I think usability has to take a part on that. You can scan an interface of this fashion and be almost certain about what is a button, what is a scroll bar, what is a text input, etcetera. While with Windows 8+ the flat UI lets a huge space for ambiguity and causes a bigger cognitive load to the user, who is forced to tell things between flat rectangles and lines.
- kentonv 5y ago
  Consistency is boring, and HTML makes it entirely too easy to do entirely your own thing. The result is most modern designers are trying to make a design that wows people at a glance, which is often at odds with actual usability and discoverability. UI design is basically fashion now, with passing fads and everything. Conforming to any kind of standard makes you look dated. I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again, but I think the cat is out of the bag.
  - endgame 5y ago
    Not sure that's the real cause, given the satirical $STARTUP websites that all use the same bootstrap theme.
  - Gualdrapo 5y ago
    I can't imagine Microsoft designers doing the mockups for Windows in HTML/CSS, but you bring an interesting point - how the web, which afaik at its very beginning was intended for text (and multimedia), eventually brought UIs. And yes, on text you'd want a minimal UI. You don't see books with flashy things everywhere competing for your attention, maybe excepting kids' books. My guess is that, as someone already pointed about design doing a full circle again in a few years, it already has happened in the web several times - plain text and 'brutalist' design, then the native UI controls that had to be used within web interfaces, then skeumorphic design to compensate for the native UI controls, then you could style those UI controls as you wished, then flattening all the design again because most of web is text.
  - kalleboo 5y ago
    > UI design is basically fashion now I remember back in the 90's, when Apple and Microsoft bragged about having big UI labs where they tried to take a scientific approach to UI design where they'd try out minor UI tweaks on users and observe what worked and what didn't. Looking at the designs coming out of both companies now (but mostly Apple) it's extremely clear they they are designed just to look "fresh" and "pretty" with no real justification behind it. > I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again To be fair, in the 90's, there were plenty of crazily themed programs. Basically any media playing app seemed required to have some insane theme (WinAmp is fondly remembered but that was also a non-standard UI, which was so poorly-designed they needed a button to double the size of it so you could hit some buttons easier). Every PC sound card came with a suite of programs that tried to mimic the appearance of a home Hi-Fi system complete with 7-segment displays and fake cassette tape reels.
systemvoltage 5y ago
I predict we're going to come full circle in ~10 years.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  It’s been 25, and we haven’t.
- Frost1x 5y ago
  Tech does a lot of circles. I'm convinced it's some combination of short memory and attention span in industry, industry management, or consumers. Sometimes it's about reapproaching old problems with similar approaches where something is slightly different or new. A lot of times it's just as if people forgot or don't check the history.
- failuser 5y ago
  I don’t know how (voice commands to “AI” chatbots, maybe), but I expect it to get worse. At least in the mainstream.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  Looking forward to Windows 15 looking like DOS Shell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell), once we've done a 720 in circles.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  I forget are we thin or thick clients these days? I guess you have a thick thin client - you need decent specs to run a browser, but then you just show whatever the mainframe serves up.
mopsi 5y ago
The old design makes easier to grasp things at a glance, especially in Control Panel. Each icon has a distinct shape and color, in contrast with Windows 10 Settings app that has much more abstract monochrome icons that are difficult to tell apart. Monochrome vector icons make things like dark mode easier to implement. Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.
- akandiah 5y ago
  > Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons. I had to chuckle. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 days, there used be a separate monochrome set of icons for all Windows (and Microsoft) programs.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  And yet Windows 95 (and all Windows from 3.1 to Vista) let the user set up global color schemes that were inherited by all applications. I set up a "dark" mode in the early '90s and used it until Microsoft inexplicably REMOVED the entire color-scheme editor... just as everyone started to realize how dumb inverse (black text on white) color schemes are.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Now they have light gray on white or dark gray on black. Talk about progress.
    - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
      MS, which advanced UI more than anyone else in the '90s, is now out wandering in the weeds. Sad.
  - zwaps 5y ago
    hmmm dark mode gives me headaches. Why would dark text on light background be dumb?
ngcc_hk 5y ago
One wonder how it compares with the Mac OS 7 in terms of obviousness?
csomar 5y ago
No, it's not nostalgia. Modern UI is simply horrible, user-hostile and non-intuitive.
- quickthrower2 5y ago
  Yep Windows 10 where you better remember the exact name of the app you installed or you’ll never find it again!
bluedino 5y ago
Part of the reason why Mac OS 8 is so timeless. I could use it now if it had modern Apps and features. I feel disgusted using Windows 10.
r00fus 5y ago
Gotta give it up to the creator of this - the UI is very snappy. Well done! I don't remember my experiences on an old Pentium-class processor being the same (except for that old work machine with a dual-proc. NT on a dualie was quite nice for the late 90s)
GuB-42 5y ago
I don't think it is nostalgia, I'd say that Windows 2000 was the peak when it comes to usability, and XP, Vista and 7 made it prettier, taking advantage of improved graphics hardware. And then Windows 8 arrived and broke everything. It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps. Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things, apparently they are still trying, because it is a mess. But now, we have another problem. Desktop UIs and Mobile UIs are very different. And this, in itself, is a bad thing. Mobile and desktop computers do a lot of the same thing, you shouldn't have to learn how to do it twice. So they tried to unify, and in the process, lost decades of UI refinement. The next issue is portability. We have web apps, Desktop UIs, Mobile UIs, different OSes, etc... Developers don't want to make a different UI for every system, and users want consistency. The least common denominator is the web browser, so designers use that, but the web is made for documents, it is terrible for apps, but clever devs make do. So as you see, we now have a lot of hard problems to solve at the same time, and the desktop UI became part of it.
- dragonshed 5y ago
  > Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things... Exactly this. The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, and for what it did, it was (imho) a great way to use a phone. Then the rest of microsoft took what that group was doing and made it one-size-fits-all UI for everything windows.
  - com2kid 5y ago
    > The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, Originally it was for Zune, which inspired Windows Phone 7, and then it was horrifically mangled for Windows 8. WP7 Metro had a ton of affordances to make the phone easy to use, things like scrollable pages of content should always show a peek of content that is below the current view, so users know there is more content down below. Common sense stuff that has been forgotten. :(
  - jaclaz 5y ago
asoneth 5y ago
There's definitely something alluring about "outdated" interfaces. When a product manager asks me to make something look more "modern" these days that usually ends up being code for flattening the UI by eliminating signifiers/affordances like button borders, link indicators, scroll bars, etc. I thought skeuomorphism was garish, but at least it provided the occasional helpful metaphor.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
Probably due to fewer "discoverable" elements. The Win95 GUI is very up front, there's no "do I click here? or here? or maybe over here?" nonsense.
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  To be fair the start button at the time was _huge_ and had never been seen before by most PC users. I remember a ton of the Windows 95 advertising, and every single getting started guide spent a ton of time explaining that you just had to click the start button to start doing anything. If you plopped win 95 in front of someone with very little computer experience at the time they'd be pretty confused and try to open all the stuff on the desktop (like how macs worked at the time).
  - SavantIdiot 5y ago
    Yes! That's what I mean. It's like Win95 put a lot of effort into that GUI. There was a PDF on HN long ago about the Win95 research project. I found this, but it's not what I recall (I remember a loooong PDF): https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
mysterydip 5y ago
There was a lot of focus on making things usable by a computer novice, which many customers at the time were: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...
qbasic_forever 5y ago
You might like XFCE and Xubuntu, it gives me a big Windows 95 feel after making a few tweaks like moving the taskbar to bottom. You can even go wild and go full Windows 95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 It's kind of fun to have the retro looks and a bleeding edge Linux kernel.
FpUser 5y ago
Include other OSes UIs as well. I think those older UI look better because they are ergonomic. To me this quality is way more important than aesthetics.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
They were far better because they conveyed the state (and existence) of controls without much-hated skeuomorphism. "Flat" design is dereliction of design.
move-on-by 5y ago
It’s the lack of thinly veiled, or even outright advertisements. UIs are no longer designed for usability, but for manipulation and greater conversions
_the_inflator 5y ago
I miss rounded corners! ;)
dmos62 5y ago
I like my Windows 10 UI. I'd miss a lot of things if I were using an earlier Windows. That said, I prefer Linux UX, since I can (and do) make it what I want (and it turns out nothing like Win 10).
contravariant 5y ago
Not sure, but I definitely preferred the way windows older UIs made sure to register each keypress. Nowadays when windows has a performance hiccough I need to wait a few seconds to find out which part of my input it actually got. This is especially bad with input fields that are supposed to appear when you type.

These UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.

by pier25 5y ago

These UIs definitely look outdated, but somehow they seem better than current Windows UIs. Not, sure if it's nostalgia or if there's something there.

Yhippa 5y ago

For some dumb reason I miss the old squared corners

asddubs 5y ago

if you feel that way, you might want to check out the serenityos project. it's a custom unix with a classic windows interface

Koshkin 5y ago
The worst of both worlds. (I’d prefer Windows with a classic Unix interface.)
- sidpatil 5y ago
  So, DOS?
  - code_duck 5y ago
    If DOS was equivalent to Unix, that sure would have saved some time.
- tibbetts 5y ago
  You mean VMS?
- qbasic_forever 5y ago
  OS/2 warp
  - quickthrower2 5y ago
    Runs two apps at the same time!
- asddubs 5y ago
  I would call that the worst of both worlds
- dinglejungle 5y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-WXzLKv_rc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-WXzLKv_rc

userbinator 5y ago

The mere presence of buttons that look like buttons, and static text that looks like static text, is innumerably better than the "ambiguous text and icons floating in a sea of flat white/blackspace" that UIs today seem to mostly consist of.

ilrwbwrkhv 5y ago
Exactly the argument that people are used to all this and hence buttons don't need to be like buttons is such a bad argument.
srvmshr 5y ago
A lot of that (dis)credit historically goes to Jonny Ive. Every UI mostly just copied the flat, glassy look. KDE had flatter icons - but not in such disruptive way. They were still skeumorphic
nsriv 5y ago
I feel this way about interactions on mobile. I grew up using Android and still have my phone on 3 buttons mode because it seems obvious. Have been using iDevices for work and some of the tap and swipe gestures are so unintuitive, along with the flat text as buttons. It feels like Apple decided "people that use our devices know this already."
- bouke 5y ago
  There’s an accessibility option to display buttons with an outline. I have enabled that for some relatives as they are also confused by the (lack of) design. All hail flat design, sigh.

Gualdrapo 5y ago

I think usability has to take a part on that. You can scan an interface of this fashion and be almost certain about what is a button, what is a scroll bar, what is a text input, etcetera. While with Windows 8+ the flat UI lets a huge space for ambiguity and causes a bigger cognitive load to the user, who is forced to tell things between flat rectangles and lines.

kentonv 5y ago
Consistency is boring, and HTML makes it entirely too easy to do entirely your own thing. The result is most modern designers are trying to make a design that wows people at a glance, which is often at odds with actual usability and discoverability. UI design is basically fashion now, with passing fads and everything. Conforming to any kind of standard makes you look dated. I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again, but I think the cat is out of the bag.
- endgame 5y ago
  Not sure that's the real cause, given the satirical $STARTUP websites that all use the same bootstrap theme.
- Gualdrapo 5y ago
  I can't imagine Microsoft designers doing the mockups for Windows in HTML/CSS, but you bring an interesting point - how the web, which afaik at its very beginning was intended for text (and multimedia), eventually brought UIs. And yes, on text you'd want a minimal UI. You don't see books with flashy things everywhere competing for your attention, maybe excepting kids' books. My guess is that, as someone already pointed about design doing a full circle again in a few years, it already has happened in the web several times - plain text and 'brutalist' design, then the native UI controls that had to be used within web interfaces, then skeumorphic design to compensate for the native UI controls, then you could style those UI controls as you wished, then flattening all the design again because most of web is text.
- kalleboo 5y ago
  > UI design is basically fashion now I remember back in the 90's, when Apple and Microsoft bragged about having big UI labs where they tried to take a scientific approach to UI design where they'd try out minor UI tweaks on users and observe what worked and what didn't. Looking at the designs coming out of both companies now (but mostly Apple) it's extremely clear they they are designed just to look "fresh" and "pretty" with no real justification behind it. > I wish we could somehow force people to use a standard toolkit again To be fair, in the 90's, there were plenty of crazily themed programs. Basically any media playing app seemed required to have some insane theme (WinAmp is fondly remembered but that was also a non-standard UI, which was so poorly-designed they needed a button to double the size of it so you could hit some buttons easier). Every PC sound card came with a suite of programs that tried to mimic the appearance of a home Hi-Fi system complete with 7-segment displays and fake cassette tape reels.

systemvoltage 5y ago

I predict we're going to come full circle in ~10 years.

Koshkin 5y ago
It’s been 25, and we haven’t.
Frost1x 5y ago
Tech does a lot of circles. I'm convinced it's some combination of short memory and attention span in industry, industry management, or consumers. Sometimes it's about reapproaching old problems with similar approaches where something is slightly different or new. A lot of times it's just as if people forgot or don't check the history.
failuser 5y ago
I don’t know how (voice commands to “AI” chatbots, maybe), but I expect it to get worse. At least in the mainstream.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
Looking forward to Windows 15 looking like DOS Shell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell), once we've done a 720 in circles.
quickthrower2 5y ago
I forget are we thin or thick clients these days? I guess you have a thick thin client - you need decent specs to run a browser, but then you just show whatever the mainframe serves up.

mopsi 5y ago

The old design makes easier to grasp things at a glance, especially in Control Panel. Each icon has a distinct shape and color, in contrast with Windows 10 Settings app that has much more abstract monochrome icons that are difficult to tell apart. Monochrome vector icons make things like dark mode easier to implement. Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons.

akandiah 5y ago
> Such small software shops like Microsoft unfortunately cannot afford to hire designers to do multiple sets of icons. I had to chuckle. I remember back in the Windows 3.11 days, there used be a separate monochrome set of icons for all Windows (and Microsoft) programs.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
And yet Windows 95 (and all Windows from 3.1 to Vista) let the user set up global color schemes that were inherited by all applications. I set up a "dark" mode in the early '90s and used it until Microsoft inexplicably REMOVED the entire color-scheme editor... just as everyone started to realize how dumb inverse (black text on white) color schemes are.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Now they have light gray on white or dark gray on black. Talk about progress.
  - PostThisTooFast 5y ago
    MS, which advanced UI more than anyone else in the '90s, is now out wandering in the weeds. Sad.
- zwaps 5y ago
  hmmm dark mode gives me headaches. Why would dark text on light background be dumb?

ngcc_hk 5y ago

One wonder how it compares with the Mac OS 7 in terms of obviousness?

csomar 5y ago

No, it's not nostalgia. Modern UI is simply horrible, user-hostile and non-intuitive.

quickthrower2 5y ago
Yep Windows 10 where you better remember the exact name of the app you installed or you’ll never find it again!

bluedino 5y ago

Part of the reason why Mac OS 8 is so timeless. I could use it now if it had modern Apps and features. I feel disgusted using Windows 10.

r00fus 5y ago

Gotta give it up to the creator of this - the UI is very snappy. Well done! I don't remember my experiences on an old Pentium-class processor being the same (except for that old work machine with a dual-proc. NT on a dualie was quite nice for the late 90s)

GuB-42 5y ago

I don't think it is nostalgia, I'd say that Windows 2000 was the peak when it comes to usability, and XP, Vista and 7 made it prettier, taking advantage of improved graphics hardware. And then Windows 8 arrived and broke everything. It is easy to find the culprit: tablets, and mobile devices in general, and to a lesser extent, web apps. Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things, apparently they are still trying, because it is a mess. But now, we have another problem. Desktop UIs and Mobile UIs are very different. And this, in itself, is a bad thing. Mobile and desktop computers do a lot of the same thing, you shouldn't have to learn how to do it twice. So they tried to unify, and in the process, lost decades of UI refinement. The next issue is portability. We have web apps, Desktop UIs, Mobile UIs, different OSes, etc... Developers don't want to make a different UI for every system, and users want consistency. The least common denominator is the web browser, so designers use that, but the web is made for documents, it is terrible for apps, but clever devs make do. So as you see, we now have a lot of hard problems to solve at the same time, and the desktop UI became part of it.

dragonshed 5y ago
> Mobile devices needed a new kind of UI, something suitable for small touch screens. People tried things... Exactly this. The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, and for what it did, it was (imho) a great way to use a phone. Then the rest of microsoft took what that group was doing and made it one-size-fits-all UI for everything windows.
- com2kid 5y ago
  > The flat "Metro" UI style was initially modeled and developed on Windows Phone 7, Originally it was for Zune, which inspired Windows Phone 7, and then it was horrifically mangled for Windows 8. WP7 Metro had a ton of affordances to make the phone easy to use, things like scrollable pages of content should always show a peek of content that is below the current view, so users know there is more content down below. Common sense stuff that has been forgotten. :(
- jaclaz 5y ago

asoneth 5y ago

There's definitely something alluring about "outdated" interfaces. When a product manager asks me to make something look more "modern" these days that usually ends up being code for flattening the UI by eliminating signifiers/affordances like button borders, link indicators, scroll bars, etc. I thought skeuomorphism was garish, but at least it provided the occasional helpful metaphor.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

Probably due to fewer "discoverable" elements. The Win95 GUI is very up front, there's no "do I click here? or here? or maybe over here?" nonsense.

qbasic_forever 5y ago
To be fair the start button at the time was _huge_ and had never been seen before by most PC users. I remember a ton of the Windows 95 advertising, and every single getting started guide spent a ton of time explaining that you just had to click the start button to start doing anything. If you plopped win 95 in front of someone with very little computer experience at the time they'd be pretty confused and try to open all the stuff on the desktop (like how macs worked at the time).
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  Yes! That's what I mean. It's like Win95 put a lot of effort into that GUI. There was a PDF on HN long ago about the Win95 research project. I found this, but it's not what I recall (I remember a loooong PDF): https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

mysterydip 5y ago

There was a lot of focus on making things usable by a computer novice, which many customers at the time were: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/ https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

qbasic_forever 5y ago

You might like XFCE and Xubuntu, it gives me a big Windows 95 feel after making a few tweaks like moving the taskbar to bottom. You can even go wild and go full Windows 95 theme: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 It's kind of fun to have the retro looks and a bleeding edge Linux kernel.

FpUser 5y ago

Include other OSes UIs as well. I think those older UI look better because they are ergonomic. To me this quality is way more important than aesthetics.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

They were far better because they conveyed the state (and existence) of controls without much-hated skeuomorphism. "Flat" design is dereliction of design.

move-on-by 5y ago

It’s the lack of thinly veiled, or even outright advertisements. UIs are no longer designed for usability, but for manipulation and greater conversions

_the_inflator 5y ago

I miss rounded corners! ;)

dmos62 5y ago

I like my Windows 10 UI. I'd miss a lot of things if I were using an earlier Windows. That said, I prefer Linux UX, since I can (and do) make it what I want (and it turns out nothing like Win 10).

contravariant 5y ago

Not sure, but I definitely preferred the way windows older UIs made sure to register each keypress. Nowadays when windows has a performance hiccough I need to wait a few seconds to find out which part of my input it actually got. This is especially bad with input fields that are supposed to appear when you type.