8 ms·

What is incredible here is that a UI developed in the 1980s is still attractive, and is arguably better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and Mac OS 12. W

What is incredible here is that a UI developed in the 1980s is still attractive, and is arguably better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and Mac OS 12. What does that say about the last 40 years of usability and user experience research?

justbaker 5y ago
> What does that say about the last 40 years of usability and user experience research? Bias. Attractive and usability/UX are not one in the same. I find this appalling yet likely good usability.
sneak 5y ago
A lot of UI development is resume-driven, or marketing-driven. Users buy hardware based on UI appearance, and regular changes make it feel fresh and new. Those of us who use computers for more serious types of work generally prefer more consistency. The goals are different.
darkwater 5y ago
You know that the "better looking" part is totally personal, don't you? Personally, I never liked NeXTSTEP looks, not even 25 years ago when I saw some reimplementation under *nix (never touched a NeXT workstation unfortunately).
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Indeed. I was around at the time this was considered beautiful. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. I guess not sharing the same taste or fanboyism is offensive. Good thing you weren't flagged. The night is young though Edit: case in point haha. The squad is working overtime to protect the precious from evil non positive words
blacksmith_tb 5y ago
It would be interesting to have some insight into how much UX / UI goes into macOS and Windows releases, especially if things are tested with representative, non-technical users and then sent back for changes. My cynical take aligns with yours, for every clever small touch there seems to be a half-dozen awkward design choices to work around.
- SllX 5y ago
  Not enough if the Dock is any measure. It’s been bad for over 20 years and in some ways still a downgrade from the NeXTSTEP Dock (and to be fair, in some ways an upgrade since it has a few tricks now the NeXTSTEP Dock didn’t). Same for the Finder. There’s been ample opportunity to revisit the original compromises made, fix some of the behavioral and consistency issues and just not touch it ever again. That, hasn’t happened. To be fair, Spotlight and Quick Look are major feature upgrades over the initial Mac OS X Finder, but pretty much all of the criticisms from 20 years ago, well documented by John Siracusa at one point, stand. Also nobody wants .DS_Store files on their servers and it’s probably worth revisiting that decision.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Ugh yeah those DS_Store files... But Windows has a similar equivalent now. You can turn it off by the way with a defaults command. And yeah I miss the in depth reviews from John Siracusa every year.
    - SllX 5y ago
      Problem is turning them off kills your window positioning and view options which are pretty important to me. So I want them, but I don’t want them, but rather an alternative to what they do for me that doesn’t scatter files to every single disk or server I look at in the Finder.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  "if things are tested with representative, non-technical users and then sent back for changes" No. People assume that Apple runs products through some rigorous UI-testing regimen and has arrived at their "standards" through some kind of metrics. THEY DON'T.
KronisLV 5y ago
> What is incredible here is that a UI developed in the 1980s is still attractive, and is arguably better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and Mac OS 12. I somewhat agree. To me, the utilitarian GUI options and desktops have always had some appeal: i've found the likes of LXDE and XFCE to be wonderfully usable and still have a soft spot for the Redmond theme, alongside boring looking pieces of software that just fit in really well with the overall theme and style of the OS. Of course, that's a subjective point and opinions might differ: even in regards to *nix, some much rather would work with something like KDE Plasma, GNOME or something else entirely, and that's okay.
dntrkv 5y ago
The last 40 years of UX research has given us the iPhone that my mom learned how to use within a couple hours. > still attractive I don't think many people outside of the "Everything New Sucks" crowd here on HN would agree there.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  Based on what? There has been a shitload of regression in GUIs since. The idiotic "flat" UI fad, which is thankfully starting to recede, is a great example. We don't need ridiculous "skeuomorphism," but highlights and shadows on buttons (for example) tell everyone what the state of those buttons is at a glance.
- flenserboy 5y ago
  That's only for a certain degree of "use", one most users sadly don't (or can't) get past. Too much good from the past has been buried in the name of making it "easy" for people to do basic things; getting to the really useful things is becoming either a hoop-jumping exercise or no longer allowed.
- jrm4 5y ago
  Sure, but I'd say the problem is it also left us with the idea that "because Mom's iPhone is so popular, everything, no matter how complex, should look and feel like that," leaving out e.g. a great deal of useful complexity.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    I think complexity doesn’t have to be exposed by default on the UI. I’m not an apple fan, but I think ios finds a great balance between not having buttons for every single command (though behind menus it would be ok), yet still exposing it with some niche tricks you have to learn. For example touching the upper left corner’s clock will scroll up, which won’t be discovered by my mum but I can use it.
    - subinsebastien 5y ago
AtlasBarfed 5y ago
How dare you deny the Hamburger? And two paths moved through the forest, and our civilization took the Hamburger Menu path. And nothing was the same ever. What a thing the hamburger menu is. One can only divide the history of UI between the pre-hamburger and post-hamburger days. Plus, I love how we went from 100Mhz to 4 gigahertz and waaayyyy more parallel issue, and yet I still routinely have delayed typing output in 2021 on almost every device and computing platform I use. At least several times a day I count: 4 billion, 8 billion, 12 billion 16 billion... and then my text appears and I can resume typing. NeXT was great. The Magnetic drive, maybe not so much. It was the original borg cube!
- Lammy 5y ago
  > NeXT was great. The Magnetic drive, maybe not so much. It was the original borg cube! There's some lost lore there: the "beachball" cursor that still lives in macOS was a pictogram of a spinning MO disc. It was a lot more obvious in Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 before it was redrawn into Aqua-style in Jagwire.
mythz 5y ago
Guess there's no accounting for taste, it's clearly an ugly developer designed UI. All for maximum UX but prefer not to spend most of my day looking at something so aesthetically displeasing. Cool nostalgic retro project though, looks similar to first Unix OS's CDE Desktop I used 20+ years ago.
- UIZealot 5y ago
  > Guess there's no accounting for taste, That's exactly it. Taste, you either have it or you don't. NeXTSTEP was good enough to pass the Steve Jobs taste test. Outside of Apple products, I double anything you consider "aesthetically pleasing" could say the same.
agumonkey 5y ago
Good is good is timeless, same goes for other fields. For instance chopin will mesmerize any human like brain for eternity. Anyway, I guess mainstream had to experiment with UX possibilities and will rediscover the value of simple (and pretty enough) nextstep like GUIs.

justbaker 5y ago

> What does that say about the last 40 years of usability and user experience research? Bias. Attractive and usability/UX are not one in the same. I find this appalling yet likely good usability.

sneak 5y ago

A lot of UI development is resume-driven, or marketing-driven. Users buy hardware based on UI appearance, and regular changes make it feel fresh and new. Those of us who use computers for more serious types of work generally prefer more consistency. The goals are different.

darkwater 5y ago

You know that the "better looking" part is totally personal, don't you? Personally, I never liked NeXTSTEP looks, not even 25 years ago when I saw some reimplementation under *nix (never touched a NeXT workstation unfortunately).

beebeepka 5y ago
Indeed. I was around at the time this was considered beautiful. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. I guess not sharing the same taste or fanboyism is offensive. Good thing you weren't flagged. The night is young though Edit: case in point haha. The squad is working overtime to protect the precious from evil non positive words

blacksmith_tb 5y ago

It would be interesting to have some insight into how much UX / UI goes into macOS and Windows releases, especially if things are tested with representative, non-technical users and then sent back for changes. My cynical take aligns with yours, for every clever small touch there seems to be a half-dozen awkward design choices to work around.

SllX 5y ago
Not enough if the Dock is any measure. It’s been bad for over 20 years and in some ways still a downgrade from the NeXTSTEP Dock (and to be fair, in some ways an upgrade since it has a few tricks now the NeXTSTEP Dock didn’t). Same for the Finder. There’s been ample opportunity to revisit the original compromises made, fix some of the behavioral and consistency issues and just not touch it ever again. That, hasn’t happened. To be fair, Spotlight and Quick Look are major feature upgrades over the initial Mac OS X Finder, but pretty much all of the criticisms from 20 years ago, well documented by John Siracusa at one point, stand. Also nobody wants .DS_Store files on their servers and it’s probably worth revisiting that decision.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Ugh yeah those DS_Store files... But Windows has a similar equivalent now. You can turn it off by the way with a defaults command. And yeah I miss the in depth reviews from John Siracusa every year.
  - SllX 5y ago
    Problem is turning them off kills your window positioning and view options which are pretty important to me. So I want them, but I don’t want them, but rather an alternative to what they do for me that doesn’t scatter files to every single disk or server I look at in the Finder.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
"if things are tested with representative, non-technical users and then sent back for changes" No. People assume that Apple runs products through some rigorous UI-testing regimen and has arrived at their "standards" through some kind of metrics. THEY DON'T.

KronisLV 5y ago

> What is incredible here is that a UI developed in the 1980s is still attractive, and is arguably better looking and more usable than Windows 11 and Mac OS 12. I somewhat agree. To me, the utilitarian GUI options and desktops have always had some appeal: i've found the likes of LXDE and XFCE to be wonderfully usable and still have a soft spot for the Redmond theme, alongside boring looking pieces of software that just fit in really well with the overall theme and style of the OS. Of course, that's a subjective point and opinions might differ: even in regards to *nix, some much rather would work with something like KDE Plasma, GNOME or something else entirely, and that's okay.

dntrkv 5y ago

The last 40 years of UX research has given us the iPhone that my mom learned how to use within a couple hours. > still attractive I don't think many people outside of the "Everything New Sucks" crowd here on HN would agree there.

PostThisTooFast 5y ago
Based on what? There has been a shitload of regression in GUIs since. The idiotic "flat" UI fad, which is thankfully starting to recede, is a great example. We don't need ridiculous "skeuomorphism," but highlights and shadows on buttons (for example) tell everyone what the state of those buttons is at a glance.
flenserboy 5y ago
That's only for a certain degree of "use", one most users sadly don't (or can't) get past. Too much good from the past has been buried in the name of making it "easy" for people to do basic things; getting to the really useful things is becoming either a hoop-jumping exercise or no longer allowed.
jrm4 5y ago
Sure, but I'd say the problem is it also left us with the idea that "because Mom's iPhone is so popular, everything, no matter how complex, should look and feel like that," leaving out e.g. a great deal of useful complexity.
- kaba0 5y ago
  I think complexity doesn’t have to be exposed by default on the UI. I’m not an apple fan, but I think ios finds a great balance between not having buttons for every single command (though behind menus it would be ok), yet still exposing it with some niche tricks you have to learn. For example touching the upper left corner’s clock will scroll up, which won’t be discovered by my mum but I can use it.
  - subinsebastien 5y ago

AtlasBarfed 5y ago

How dare you deny the Hamburger? And two paths moved through the forest, and our civilization took the Hamburger Menu path. And nothing was the same ever. What a thing the hamburger menu is. One can only divide the history of UI between the pre-hamburger and post-hamburger days. Plus, I love how we went from 100Mhz to 4 gigahertz and waaayyyy more parallel issue, and yet I still routinely have delayed typing output in 2021 on almost every device and computing platform I use. At least several times a day I count: 4 billion, 8 billion, 12 billion 16 billion... and then my text appears and I can resume typing. NeXT was great. The Magnetic drive, maybe not so much. It was the original borg cube!

Lammy 5y ago
> NeXT was great. The Magnetic drive, maybe not so much. It was the original borg cube! There's some lost lore there: the "beachball" cursor that still lives in macOS was a pictogram of a spinning MO disc. It was a lot more obvious in Mac OS X 10.0 and 10.1 before it was redrawn into Aqua-style in Jagwire.

mythz 5y ago

Guess there's no accounting for taste, it's clearly an ugly developer designed UI. All for maximum UX but prefer not to spend most of my day looking at something so aesthetically displeasing. Cool nostalgic retro project though, looks similar to first Unix OS's CDE Desktop I used 20+ years ago.

UIZealot 5y ago
> Guess there's no accounting for taste, That's exactly it. Taste, you either have it or you don't. NeXTSTEP was good enough to pass the Steve Jobs taste test. Outside of Apple products, I double anything you consider "aesthetically pleasing" could say the same.

agumonkey 5y ago

Good is good is timeless, same goes for other fields. For instance chopin will mesmerize any human like brain for eternity. Anyway, I guess mainstream had to experiment with UX possibilities and will rediscover the value of simple (and pretty enough) nextstep like GUIs.