9 ms·

I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the

I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and at worst provide zero indication of what functionality is available. I once used a phone app for months not knowing there was an extra screen you could open by sliding right on the main UI page. I only found it by accident one day, because there were no hints in the UI..

dec0dedab0de 4y ago
Many dos programs with a gui had all the same menus and fields before Windows. They just ran one at a time.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  I still believe that the file manager XTree for MS-DOS had the best user interface of any file manager that I have ever used, in Windows, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or MacOS, allowing one to perform any task with a minimum of key presses. It already had separate histories for each text field of the user interface, in which items could be made persistent. Even today, most programs with GUIs have much more poorly implemented histories, if they have them. Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring. Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS. Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    Oh dear lord, Xtree? That's a name I've not heard in some time..
  - xen2xen1 4y ago
    I might try unixtree.org..
- int_19h 4y ago
  The best DOS TUIs were generally those that adopted CUA (e.g. Borland's IDEs and other software written in Turbo Vision). Windows UX also built heavily on it, and it is the source of most of its core keyboard shortcuts to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
_trampeltier 4y ago
Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech people.
- rvba 4y ago
  I still dont know how to easily save files on local computer in MS Office without pressing F12.
  - phcreery 4y ago
    Oh wow, I just tried this and it bring up the Save As.. dialog! I have been so frustrated that MS Office apps don's have a Ctrl+Shift+S Save As.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    I don't understand. Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations". This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse". What part wasn't obvious to you? If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
    - 411111111111111 4y ago
      I haven't used it in a while but I've got to admit that I've missed a lot of extremely obviously placed buttons in the Microsoft office suite. They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.
PraetorianGourd 4y ago
I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural. I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  Some of the stuff's purely a step back. The "flat" craze was and remains obviously a bad over-correction (it's not clear to me that any correction was called for at all, really) and UIs auto-updating out from under people then constantly splashing "helpful" modals and such over the UI to tell you a bunch of stuff you don't want or need to know is all straight-up UI poison. [EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
- robinsonb5 4y ago
  Very true - I'm a little bit older, so I view the Amiga user interface as superior (at least in some ways - I describe it as "the feeling that you have the computer's full attention". Windows doesn't give me that even today.) - and also recognise how much Windows 95 borrowed from other systems. (RiscOS in particular) It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
  - 13of40 4y ago
    > mouse I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
Kranar 4y ago
My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
- bojan 4y ago
  Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
  - Baeocystin 4y ago
    FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
  - 4y ago
agumonkey 4y ago
this era had one massive flaw: huge amount of side effects, you would have to guess what would be the impact of checking a radio button in some deep settings without any way to test most of the time. the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).
butz 4y ago
Not to mention all "online" help included in help file and even context sensitive help available from "question mark" icon in title bar.
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Those "three books" help apps were so good. It is infuriating nowadays to be forwarded to some unsearchable web mess somewhere that might or might not exist.
russellbeattie 4y ago
I think it should be mentioned that during this era, the whole idea of a GUI was still a relatively new concept to most people. It had been less than a decade since the Mac popularized the idea. It's akin to how long it took for cars to standardize on the accelerator, brake and clutch configuration. It didn't happen overnight. When I went to college in the early 90s, most of my fellow students had dedicated word processors or, less commonly, DOS PCs (and one Amiga), as an example of what was the norm. The only reason I used a Mac was that I was in the design program, where Desktop Publishing was experiencing its heyday. But I could never have afforded one. In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success. Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Interestingly, Windows 3.1 came with a 7-minute tutorial activated from the installer, about half of which is on using the mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM If I remember correctly, this part wasn't there in Windows 95, so presumably they decided that users mostly don't need it anymore.
  - russellbeattie 4y ago
    Hah! This reminds me of an old adage when teaching people how to use the mouse. Don't ever mention the right mouse button until the absolute last moment, if ever. Because from the second you mention it, every time you say, "OK, now click the [window, button, menu, etc.]" they will instantly ask, "Right or left button?". Every. Single. Time.
    - wmf 4y ago
      Apple discovered this problem and preemptively fixed it in 1984.
GuB-42 4y ago
There is a simple explanation: mobile. You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things. Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa. There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.
kccqzy 4y ago
Snapchat ushered in the era of undiscoverable UIs. There were other apps that did that, but Snapchat was the most prominent. Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable. Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.
- pavo-etc 4y ago
  To be fair to Snapchat, their camera interface does also have a button to switch cameras. The double tab is just a shortcut. Other apps that have aped this interface also have a button to switch cameras (e.g. Instagram).
panzi 4y ago
I somewhere heard/read someone say that gesture based interfaces are the new CLI (in terms of discoverability).
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I'd wish. What's the gesture for "apropos"?
rewgs 4y ago
That mobile app you mentioned was Snapchat right? Worst discoverability of any mobile app I’ve ever used.
harha 4y ago
Curious how we got here, given that so much effort is being made in UI research, product management, etc. There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
npteljes 4y ago
On one hand, this is true, phone UIs are a bit harder to discover. However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.
rkagerer 4y ago
There's a reason I still primarily use Word 2003 instead of the newer versions. Having normal toolbars instead of dealing with the takes-twice-as-many-clicks Ribbon is another benefit.

dec0dedab0de 4y ago

Many dos programs with a gui had all the same menus and fields before Windows. They just ran one at a time.

adrian_b 4y ago
I still believe that the file manager XTree for MS-DOS had the best user interface of any file manager that I have ever used, in Windows, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or MacOS, allowing one to perform any task with a minimum of key presses. It already had separate histories for each text field of the user interface, in which items could be made persistent. Even today, most programs with GUIs have much more poorly implemented histories, if they have them. Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring. Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS. Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  Oh dear lord, Xtree? That's a name I've not heard in some time..
- xen2xen1 4y ago
  I might try unixtree.org..
int_19h 4y ago
The best DOS TUIs were generally those that adopted CUA (e.g. Borland's IDEs and other software written in Turbo Vision). Windows UX also built heavily on it, and it is the source of most of its core keyboard shortcuts to this day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

_trampeltier 4y ago

Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech people.

rvba 4y ago
I still dont know how to easily save files on local computer in MS Office without pressing F12.
- phcreery 4y ago
  Oh wow, I just tried this and it bring up the Save As.. dialog! I have been so frustrated that MS Office apps don's have a Ctrl+Shift+S Save As.
- Arainach 4y ago
  I don't understand. Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations". This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse". What part wasn't obvious to you? If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
  - 411111111111111 4y ago
    I haven't used it in a while but I've got to admit that I've missed a lot of extremely obviously placed buttons in the Microsoft office suite. They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.

PraetorianGourd 4y ago

I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural. I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.

yamtaddle 4y ago
Some of the stuff's purely a step back. The "flat" craze was and remains obviously a bad over-correction (it's not clear to me that any correction was called for at all, really) and UIs auto-updating out from under people then constantly splashing "helpful" modals and such over the UI to tell you a bunch of stuff you don't want or need to know is all straight-up UI poison. [EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
robinsonb5 4y ago
Very true - I'm a little bit older, so I view the Amiga user interface as superior (at least in some ways - I describe it as "the feeling that you have the computer's full attention". Windows doesn't give me that even today.) - and also recognise how much Windows 95 borrowed from other systems. (RiscOS in particular) It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
- 13of40 4y ago
  > mouse I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.

Kranar 4y ago

My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...

bojan 4y ago
Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
- 4y ago

agumonkey 4y ago

this era had one massive flaw: huge amount of side effects, you would have to guess what would be the impact of checking a radio button in some deep settings without any way to test most of the time. the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).

butz 4y ago

Not to mention all "online" help included in help file and even context sensitive help available from "question mark" icon in title bar.

rightbyte 4y ago
Those "three books" help apps were so good. It is infuriating nowadays to be forwarded to some unsearchable web mess somewhere that might or might not exist.

russellbeattie 4y ago

I think it should be mentioned that during this era, the whole idea of a GUI was still a relatively new concept to most people. It had been less than a decade since the Mac popularized the idea. It's akin to how long it took for cars to standardize on the accelerator, brake and clutch configuration. It didn't happen overnight. When I went to college in the early 90s, most of my fellow students had dedicated word processors or, less commonly, DOS PCs (and one Amiga), as an example of what was the norm. The only reason I used a Mac was that I was in the design program, where Desktop Publishing was experiencing its heyday. But I could never have afforded one. In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success. Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.

int_19h 4y ago
Interestingly, Windows 3.1 came with a 7-minute tutorial activated from the installer, about half of which is on using the mouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM If I remember correctly, this part wasn't there in Windows 95, so presumably they decided that users mostly don't need it anymore.
- russellbeattie 4y ago
  Hah! This reminds me of an old adage when teaching people how to use the mouse. Don't ever mention the right mouse button until the absolute last moment, if ever. Because from the second you mention it, every time you say, "OK, now click the [window, button, menu, etc.]" they will instantly ask, "Right or left button?". Every. Single. Time.
  - wmf 4y ago
    Apple discovered this problem and preemptively fixed it in 1984.

GuB-42 4y ago

There is a simple explanation: mobile. You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things. Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa. There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.

kccqzy 4y ago

Snapchat ushered in the era of undiscoverable UIs. There were other apps that did that, but Snapchat was the most prominent. Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable. Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.

pavo-etc 4y ago
To be fair to Snapchat, their camera interface does also have a button to switch cameras. The double tab is just a shortcut. Other apps that have aped this interface also have a button to switch cameras (e.g. Instagram).

panzi 4y ago

I somewhere heard/read someone say that gesture based interfaces are the new CLI (in terms of discoverability).

TeMPOraL 4y ago
I'd wish. What's the gesture for "apropos"?

rewgs 4y ago

That mobile app you mentioned was Snapchat right? Worst discoverability of any mobile app I’ve ever used.

harha 4y ago

Curious how we got here, given that so much effort is being made in UI research, product management, etc. There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?

npteljes 4y ago

On one hand, this is true, phone UIs are a bit harder to discover. However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.

rkagerer 4y ago

There's a reason I still primarily use Word 2003 instead of the newer versions. Having normal toolbars instead of dealing with the takes-twice-as-many-clicks Ribbon is another benefit.