4 ms·

> And the usability is worse. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new soft

> And the usability is worse. This isn't exclusive to Microsoft, but it seems like all the research that went into Windows 95 isn't being repeated for new software. Windows 95, despite its flaws had actual UX research going into designing the project. It doesn't seem like that type of work is being done anymore, Apple also isn't exactly perfect here either, their new control/settings app is equally awful. There's is an aversion to making software boring, but functional, but that's what most of us need. Microsoft could have frozen their UI in Windows 2000 era and it would have been fine for the majority of uses.

da_chicken 2y ago
There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time. Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.
- Gud 2y ago
  Indeed. Windows 2000 was a great OS.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    the best.
- mystified5016 2y ago
  > it shuts up and gets out of the way God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work. And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code. This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
    - timlatim 2y ago
      I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names). Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS. [1] https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
      - jerf 2y ago
        Windows search is so bad that you can type "NOTE" and it'll be seconds, on a freaking supercomputer, before "Notepad" appears. This is insane. The list of applications on my computer is in the very low hundreds total, and the number of users with literally hundreds of thousands or millions of apps is very, very low. It can and should be in the search bar's RAM at all times and a linear search should be orders of magnitude below my human perception speed to say nothing of better algorithms. So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years? The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows. The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.
- tomrod 2y ago
  I used it almost 25 years ago! I couldn't do anything with WinME and so switched over. I miss the days of performant OS. Even my lovely Fedora+KDE is getting more feature bloat than I can manage.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    Try xfce.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  One of the things I remember most about win2k was how remarkably easy to install it was compared to previous OSes (NT 3/4, win9[58]).
deelowe 2y ago
Oh there's plenty of ux but it's all focused on dark patterns at this point.
safety1st 2y ago
You are the product now. They're still doing plenty of research into your behavior, you just aren't the benefactor of it. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users." -Richard Stallman
everforward 2y ago
This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface. I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95. I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones. Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.
- 6510 2y ago
  I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory. Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X No we don't like the new Slashdot.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    > "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
  - keyringlight 2y ago
    In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.
philwelch 2y ago
Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.
- 6510 2y ago
  Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses. Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.

da_chicken 2y ago

There have been very few advancements in OS design for Windows that have really improved since Windows 2000. USB support. WiFi manager. Firewall. SATA support. 64-bit. Native TRIM support. Native antivirus. And some things like desktop search have just gotten significantly less usable over time. Win2k still very much feels like a nearly feature complete OS. It's got one of my favorite features: it shuts up and gets out of the way.

Gud 2y ago
Indeed. Windows 2000 was a great OS.
- BoredPositron 2y ago
  the best.
mystified5016 2y ago
> it shuts up and gets out of the way God, yes. It's exactly this. Windows 10 is always in my way, bothering me, nagging me. When it isn't being actively hostile, it's still in the way because so much just doesn't work. And it just keeps getting worse over time, it's really astounding.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  The start menu search rarely works. I have been using the app constantly. It has come up in search many times previously. Then, nothing. I have to drill down through the file system to start mutherfucking Notepad++ or Visual Studio Code. This bug has been present since after Windows 7, which was definitely my favorite Windows version. It was done.
  - timlatim 2y ago
    I have to use Windows at work, and one thing that hugely improves the experience is the "Everything" search tool [1]. It searches across all files you have in something like a second or two, and when you type it narrows down suggestions as you'd expect instead of randomly bringing up something completely unrelated. I even use it to launch programs I don't have pinned to the taskbar (it will find both .exes and .lnk shortcuts with readable names). Compared to that, search in the start menu (or Windows Explorer for that matter) is so comically bad it makes me weep. Before I knew about Everything, I could maybe believe there is something about NTFS or Windows security or whatever that makes it impossible to do fast quality search across the filesystem in modern Windows. But no, it's clearly possible, and it's such a shame that Microsoft is incapable of doing that in its own OS. [1] https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/
    - jerf 2y ago
      Windows search is so bad that you can type "NOTE" and it'll be seconds, on a freaking supercomputer, before "Notepad" appears. This is insane. The list of applications on my computer is in the very low hundreds total, and the number of users with literally hundreds of thousands or millions of apps is very, very low. It can and should be in the search bar's RAM at all times and a linear search should be orders of magnitude below my human perception speed to say nothing of better algorithms. So, OK, sure, the alpha version couldn't do that, and the beta version couldn't do that, and by golly, launching apps quickly didn't make the release list... sure. But why hasn't this obvious optimization ever risen to the top of the feature list in the last several years? The obvious answer is that nobody in Microsoft is empowered to care about the experience as a whole anymore, and it shows. The slightly less obvious answer is that I bet Microsoft management has simply written off Windows now. It's not Cloud enough and too hard to make services- and subscription-based even if they put their best efforts in. I think they're going to discover that it was more foundational to their business than they realized.
tomrod 2y ago
I used it almost 25 years ago! I couldn't do anything with WinME and so switched over. I miss the days of performant OS. Even my lovely Fedora+KDE is getting more feature bloat than I can manage.
- fsflover 2y ago
  Try xfce.
usefulcat 2y ago
One of the things I remember most about win2k was how remarkably easy to install it was compared to previous OSes (NT 3/4, win9[58]).

deelowe 2y ago

Oh there's plenty of ux but it's all focused on dark patterns at this point.

safety1st 2y ago

You are the product now. They're still doing plenty of research into your behavior, you just aren't the benefactor of it. "With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users." -Richard Stallman

everforward 2y ago

This may be related to smartphones now being old enough that your average young adult entering the workforce is more familiar with their interface than a Win95 style interface. I would bet the average 20 year old can connect a new Bluetooth device on a phone OS faster than they can get to the Sound settings page of Win95. I don’t think UX is static. The UI patterns we recognize change with what we’re exposed to. The Control Panel doesn’t look terribly far off from a terminal app ported to a GUI. It’s also pretty alien to someone accustomed to smartphones. Older adults have used smartphones, but young adults have never used Win95, so a smartphone style interface is more usable for more people. I’m with you, I prefer the Control Panel, but Settings may be more utilitarian.

6510 2y ago
I remember having to point people to the hamburger menu because they couldn't figure out it was a menu. The other week a girl said it would be nice if my website had a menu. Turns out the new generation only understands flat icons. If you make a row of the machine like win 95 buttons they don't see it. "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" The moral of the story is that it is all about conditioning. MS should have left everything the way it was. The money they could have made! I could thoughtlessly click around and do everything on muscle memory. Change things often enough and no one is comfortable. There are no improvements. A new user might like it, they might even like it more than the old user liked their iteration. Say, 5% better for 3% of the users 0.15% improvement in total vs 15% worse for 97% making it 14.55% worse. The difference is 100X No we don't like the new Slashdot.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  > "you can click on that? I thought those were just decoration!" That is hilarious, that is one of my main complaint about modern flat UI is that it's almost never clear that you can click something. Everything looks like decorations or just text.
- keyringlight 2y ago
  In a way that goes back to the skeuomorphism debate around buttons whether they should be drawn flat or 3D effect, where even Office 97 was trying to get rid of buttons looking like buttons and the affordance that they can be pressed, and whether that makes sense on a non-physical thing.

philwelch 2y ago

Windows 95 might have been the last time anyone actually sat down and thought through how to design a UI. Everything since then has been a reiteration on previous ideas.

6510 2y ago
Back then you could still tell someone the thing they worked hard on sucked, it's terrible, it needs to be deleted and we need to pretend it never happened. Then you worked all night to prove it sucked only to be told you made it worse. And then, you started over. No crocodile tears, no excuses. Besides all this politeness getting in the way of honest opinion, scaling this to throwing away a multi million project 10 times in a row is hard. Might even seem illogical.