4 ms·

I think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and let us know what could be clicked or r

by gfody 5y ago

I think that era of Windows stuck to the literature and best practices, the UI spoke to us in its own visual language and let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked or that it had focus and might do something if you hit the spacebar etc. etc. things that behave similarly look alike, all the clues you need to learn some software on your own were there, the visual language was teaching us how we're meant to use it, the more familiar we were with windows software the quicker we could pickup new windows software. and then I don't know what happened Steven Sinofsky showed up with radical ideas that software should be beautiful and everything sort of went to hell? curious if there was actually some kind of event marking the beginning of the end of intuitive software design for MS

nmstoker 5y ago
Mac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in the 90s. With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.
bluedino 5y ago
I think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of clean Interfaces. It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  I think a lot of these things make interactions more pleasant, definitely more aesthetically pleasing. I know people love to hate on everything new but I grew up on early windows (my first PC was Windows 95) and I always thought it was kinda ugly but PCs couldn’t handle much more.
  - tpxl 5y ago
    I think you can face-lift the W95/W2000 system without losing the usability, people just didn't do that. That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty. What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      What would you say the modern windows shell is missing that existed in Windows 2000?
    - chillfox 5y ago
      XP is basically the W95/W2000 interface but pretty.
- doubled112 5y ago
  I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple visual cue telling you where it went. A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines. That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off. Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited window manager on the RPi 4 now.
  - ori_b 5y ago
    > I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. Why is this desirable? Objects in the real world have many inconvenient properties.
    - BobbyJo 5y ago
      It can make things more intuitive. If you use mental models people already have, they tend to pick things up faster. I think the point of the cube, for instance, was to help people keep track of multiple windows a little easier by making it spacial as opposed to just a list. Maybe it wasn't very effective in that case, but I think the hypothesis was sound.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  > It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. When you release a new OS version it has to look fresh or nobody will want it.
- michaelbrave 5y ago
  I remember really old Macs had a thing to pull the bottom corner up to take a peek at what was behind that window, it was neat and never seen again
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. But about half of Linux YouTubers proudly display them. (Between you and them, the clueless one isn't you.)
laurent92 5y ago
And the keyboard shortcuts! Don’t forget the keyboard shortcuts! Which could help you automate, if you save a Windows macro and repeat it. And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available. And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears. And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays everything is ordered by “Most recently seen” so you can go back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you didn’t reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays. Windows had reached an incredible level of usability, complete with blind and disability support, scriptable, standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs. Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it.
- 1_player 5y ago
  > the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have to right click, and carefully pick the option between "Print" and "Copy". Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common operation I do in a browser.
  - garaetjjte 5y ago
    I use Ctrl-C Ctrl-T Ctrl-V ENTER for this.
  - jbbe 5y ago
    All my browsers (firefox, chrome and safair) on mac have this behavior at least. Do none of the windows browsers have the feature?
rodgerd 5y ago
The biggest problem - across a lot of fronts - was that we abandoned the idea of consistency and rooting these things in research. The original success of the Mac interface was rooted in the HIG which provided rigorous, clear, and (at least sometimes) evidence-based principles for UI/UX. Sun paid a bunch for work to be done on the GNOME 1.x series at one point, to try and significantly improve it. The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no particularly good reason.
ansible 5y ago
> ... let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked ... Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery settings menu that used to do something, but no, not anymore. Seriously, what is so damn awful about having some visual indication of what is a button?
robbedpeter 5y ago
Fundamentally, ui has to be a consequence of function - there's a pragmatic reality to how a thing is used that informs the limits of the representation of controls. In a visual context, it's less about skeumorphic analogs and more about how the brain maps those controls to things we already know. This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a child learning the alphabet. "Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you should not ever touch elements upon which the users have built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter. Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is evidence of why that shouldn't be done. Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their current dominance in desktop as something absolute.
pjmlp 5y ago
Not only on the UI level, they were also responsible for COM's revenge on .NET after Longhorn, and the golden spot it now enjoys on Windows APIs, although most that don't do Windows think of it as gone.

by gfody 5y ago

nmstoker 5y ago

Mac also caved after a real highpoint of good definition in the 90s. With MS, they just seemed to stop paying attention to their own guidance and much preferred doing their own thing (see most editions of Office!), people just got fed up and it seems like it crumbled from there.

bluedino 5y ago

I think that Windows 2000 and Max OS were the pinnacle of clean Interfaces. It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. Remember when moving windows in Linux had a "jiggle" to them? The genie effect in OS X? What about the "cube" of multiple desktop? I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. A few effects are useful - like aero peek in Windows.

edgyquant 5y ago
I think a lot of these things make interactions more pleasant, definitely more aesthetically pleasing. I know people love to hate on everything new but I grew up on early windows (my first PC was Windows 95) and I always thought it was kinda ugly but PCs couldn’t handle much more.
- tpxl 5y ago
  I think you can face-lift the W95/W2000 system without losing the usability, people just didn't do that. That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > That's what I hate the most about "modern" UIs, designers make them look pretty and degrade usability, instead of just making them pretty. What's worse is, (at least IMO) they aren't even particularly pretty.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    What would you say the modern windows shell is missing that existed in Windows 2000?
  - chillfox 5y ago
    XP is basically the W95/W2000 interface but pretty.
doubled112 5y ago
I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. For minimize, whether it's a line that shrinks, a genie lamp, a simple shrink effect, it's all the same. A simple visual cue telling you where it went. A little form with the function is fine with me. There's a ton of computing power in even the weakest of machines. That said, I hope we'll always be able to turn it off. Even a default install of Raspberry Pi OS uses a composited window manager on the RPi 4 now.
- ori_b 5y ago
  > I think some of those animations make the desktop behave a little more like objects would in the real world. Why is this desirable? Objects in the real world have many inconvenient properties.
  - BobbyJo 5y ago
    It can make things more intuitive. If you use mental models people already have, they tend to pick things up faster. I think the point of the cube, for instance, was to help people keep track of multiple windows a little easier by making it spacial as opposed to just a list. Maybe it wasn't very effective in that case, but I think the hypothesis was sound.
qwerty456127 5y ago
> It seems like once the graphics capabilities became common, OS interface developers used them even when they shouldn't have. When you release a new OS version it has to look fresh or nobody will want it.
michaelbrave 5y ago
I remember really old Macs had a thing to pull the bottom corner up to take a peek at what was behind that window, it was neat and never seen again
CRConrad 5y ago
> I still don't know what the point of transparent windows is. But about half of Linux YouTubers proudly display them. (Between you and them, the clueless one isn't you.)

laurent92 5y ago

And the keyboard shortcuts! Don’t forget the keyboard shortcuts! Which could help you automate, if you save a Windows macro and repeat it. And the F1-Help! In context, boring but always available. And the rearrangeable toolbars, native!! The status bar, not the flimsy tooltip at the bottom which disappears. And the treeviews! And the files ordered by name! Nowadays everything is ordered by “Most recently seen” so you can go back to the past because of the infinite roll. Everything was ordered and safe there. But you would lose your mind if you didn’t reorganize your desktop regularly, and that has faded away, no-one needs to organize files nowadays. Windows had reached an incredible level of usability, complete with blind and disability support, scriptable, standardized, reorganizable, repeatable UIs. Then the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it.

1_player 5y ago
> the web appeared and despite having a searchbox in every app, there still isn’t a keyboard shortcut for it This infuriates me. None of the browsers have a shortcut to "search this highlighted text with Google". I instead have to right click, and carefully pick the option between "Print" and "Copy". Not a single one, for an operation I do 200 times a day. I do not understand how it is possible. It's the most common operation I do in a browser.
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  I use Ctrl-C Ctrl-T Ctrl-V ENTER for this.
- jbbe 5y ago
  All my browsers (firefox, chrome and safair) on mac have this behavior at least. Do none of the windows browsers have the feature?

rodgerd 5y ago

The biggest problem - across a lot of fronts - was that we abandoned the idea of consistency and rooting these things in research. The original success of the Mac interface was rooted in the HIG which provided rigorous, clear, and (at least sometimes) evidence-based principles for UI/UX. Sun paid a bunch for work to be done on the GNOME 1.x series at one point, to try and significantly improve it. The HIG is no more at Apple. GNOME design decisions are justified with comments like "I asked some friends and they liked this better". Most of the pain in Windows 10 are all the jagged edges where you cut from one era to another for no particularly good reason.

ansible 5y ago

> ... let us know what could be clicked or right-clicked ... Oh my gosh, yes. This is what drives me to distraction with recent Android releases. I'm tapping on things in the battery settings menu that used to do something, but no, not anymore. Seriously, what is so damn awful about having some visual indication of what is a button?

robbedpeter 5y ago

Fundamentally, ui has to be a consequence of function - there's a pragmatic reality to how a thing is used that informs the limits of the representation of controls. In a visual context, it's less about skeumorphic analogs and more about how the brain maps those controls to things we already know. This is muscle memory and plasticity in action - the relative locations, stateful appearance, and behavior of controls gets mapped in our brains in the same way as taxi drivers learning the routes in a city, a violinist learning fingerings, or a child learning the alphabet. "Muscle memory" is required to establish foundations of more complex behaviors. Once you've built a user interface, you should not ever touch elements upon which the users have built those muscle memory mappings. Yo Yo Ma would be as lost as a child if you told him he had to play the bassoon instead of cello. After a couple years of practice, some of the higher level artistry could be brought to bear on the new instrument, but it's the low level fundamentals that matter. Firefox screwed with fundamentals, and their market share is evidence of why that shouldn't be done. Windows keeps pushing down that path as well, mistaking their current dominance in desktop as something absolute.

pjmlp 5y ago

Not only on the UI level, they were also responsible for COM's revenge on .NET after Longhorn, and the golden spot it now enjoys on Windows APIs, although most that don't do Windows think of it as gone.