10 ms·

The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

362 points by ksec 8mo ago

leonidasv 8mo ago
Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899
- tomhow 8mo ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded... The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 - Aug 2016 (72 comments)
VerifiedReports 8mo ago
Look how crisp, professional, and usable it all is. This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today. Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.
- virtue3 8mo ago
  I hate liquid glass with a burning passion. I've never understood why people get so irritated at design changes until now.
  - titzer 8mo ago
    Sadly, it won't be the last time you'll feel that angry passion.
  - Telaneo 8mo ago
    Welcome to the club. We all hate it here.
  - josephg 8mo ago
    Ugh I couldn't agree more. The new macos feels like a step backwards on many fronts. I'm going to delay updating my mac for as long as I can. I wonder if its nearly time to say goodbye to the apple ecosystem. Those framework laptops look snazzy.
- gedy 8mo ago
  I like to jest that packaging designer would of course wrap things in clear plastic...
- titzer 8mo ago
  To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working, resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.
  - bigstrat2003 8mo ago
    Apple has long been a "style over substance" company, unfortunately. Not always (I mean, you couldn't accuse the Apple II of being stylish for example), but certainly since the year 2000 at least. It has often meant that their products were less pleasant to use because someone refused to add functionality that wasn't as sleek-looking.
    - bitwize 8mo ago
      The Apple II was more stylish than any other personal computer in 1977. In the mid-1980s, the Apple IIc and IIGS were built to Apple's "Snow White" design language and looked slicker than most contemporaries.
  - fainpul 8mo ago
    Apple was very early to remove floppy disk drives, then later DVD drives from their computers, even when those media were still commonly used. At least that fixed your problem of the stuck DVD :)
- socalgal2 8mo ago
  Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative. The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident. This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs. This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative. There are many more.
  - Telaneo 8mo ago
    Apparently, the idea of an edit mode is some foreign concept for a lot of people.
    - wtallis 8mo ago
      There are a lot of UI concepts that are foreign to younger developers, simply because they grew up using web apps and smartphones. I think computer science departments need to make a class on human-computer interaction a mandatory part of the curriculum, and those classes need to require students to sit down with and actually use a variety of UIs from two, three, four decades ago. There's a ton of value in being conversant in the basic building blocks and paradigms of multiple UI systems, and in knowing what problems have been solved in the past so we don't keep badly reinventing the same features or failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. There are a lot of things in older UIs that I think every developer should have hands-on experience with, eg. using nested menus in classic Mac OS; using an MDI application on Windows 9x; using the file browser and dock on NeXTSTEP; using X11 with focus follows mouse; anything with pie menus. Not because those things are necessarily the right choices for today's GUIs, but because there are valuable lessons to be learned from them, and reading an article like this or studying an old HIG document doesn't have the same impact.
- phendrenad2 8mo ago
  GUIs used to be designed by power users, who would start with an advanced design and strip it down to a simple version the average user could use. Now GUIs are designed by average users who have no idea what to do with advanced features, because they're stuck thinking about the GUI as an average user does. Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.
hnthrowaway0315 8mo ago
I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life. I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies. LOL.
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago
  Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well. Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond. All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
  - cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
    I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic" theme. When MS gutted the theming engine with the release of Windows 8 (flat rectangles only) I was devastated.
    - DaiPlusPlus 8mo ago
      The engine itself isn’t gutted - it’s full of functionality that was never lost. MS just (correctly) reasoned that transparency effects in the UI - introduced in Vista simply to show-off the capabilities of the DWM compositor - ultimately detract from a good UI.
lateforwork 8mo ago
Designers tend to be less open to feedback than developers. That, I think, helps explain why flat UI persists even though it has shown usability drawbacks. It also helps explain why overall usability feels like it's declining ever year — for instance, macOS Tahoe seems noticeably worse in usability compared to macOS Sequoia. Does anyone think Apple is going to rush out a release that fixes the excessive rounding of window corners? Don't hold your breath.
- cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
  On the topic of flat design specifically, developers are likely just as culpable. Back when it was just starting to catch on, by my observation some of the quickest to adopt it were solo developers because it's way easier to build a passable looking app with flat UI since that doesn't require any design talent.
  - lunar_rover 8mo ago
    A passable looking modern flat UI has a lot behind it, just like skeuomorphism and anything in between. Unless something like https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.12.0/spectacle-notification.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.12.0/spectacle-noti... is what you consider to be passable looking of course.
    - VorpalWay 8mo ago
      That looks perfectly functional to me? It only looks a bit ugly because the screenshot appears to have been of a very small part of the screen that got blurry when it was blown up to a larger size. I'll take function over for every day. (I daily drive KDE, it works fine and doesn't get in my way. Most of the time I'm either in my editor or the terminal emulator anyway.)
      - cogman10 8mo ago
        This is also a plasma 5 example. Plasma 6 cleaned it up. But I also agree. KDE is pretty close to my ideal for a desktop environment. It's pretty close to a windows 7 feel which is perfect for me.
casey2 8mo ago
Usability is the wrong metric, paint by numbers is more "usable" (sic accessible) than a canvas but you'd be depressed watching your son graduate art school and that's all he can do. If you do want to optimize for usability you have to make sure you aren't making the system more consumptive at the same time. The prime example from the article is trading a moment where the user must take initiative with a menu. More useable less useful. Lower the floor not the ceiling etc. Windows (and iOS) did make genuine improvements to OSs but because of decisions like these most users are locked out of enjoying them.
ginko 8mo ago
Notice how they moved the ok & cancel buttons to the bottom right since it’s the more logical location to put them. Meanwhile gtk now puts those on opposite sides of the window title bar by default.
- zahlman 8mo ago
  Separating them is good for avoiding misclicks. Decades ago, MacOS properly had the close box for windows on the opposite side from minimize etc. widgets; now the one destructive window action could be reasonably safe without confirmation. Then Windows started gaining popularity and nobody ever did it the right way by default again. A pity for the sharp minds at Xerox PARC.
  - Affric 8mo ago
    Command Q and Command W are still beside each other though
  - ginko 8mo ago
    I don't mind ok and cancel being on opposite sides. It's mainly ok not being bottom-right that bothers me.
- just6979 8mo ago
  How is it more logical? Upper right places them close to the other window controls. Also continues the down-then-right order of most of the other controls. In fact, putting buttons along either _side_ of the windows would be a better fit on the wider aspect screens we use nowadays.
kgwxd 8mo ago
Everything since this style of design feels like a cartoon version, with ridiculous non-sense that only gets in the way.
linguae 8mo ago
Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6. I even liked Internet Explorer 5. These were well-made products when it came to the user interface. Yes, Windows 95 crashed a lot, but so did Macintosh System 7. Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.
- moron4hire 8mo ago
  I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic). I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
- lateforwork 8mo ago
  > 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8mo ago
    That’s an odd way to spell Motif.
    - gnerd00 8mo ago
      please recall that 8bit color was the common capability for CRT displays at that time. Simple one bit display was also common. Any smooth transitions in gray or color had to use dithering, or be very clever in the way they chose the palate. Certainly some historic credit goes to Motif, but, there are "levels to this game" .. Motif did not jump out as "wow that looks good" IMHO. Obviously NeXT was extreme in a different way.. sort of like a symphony orchestra more than an office machine. It is genuinely entertaining to see people defend the dull and pedestrian UI in Windows 95.
khazhoux 8mo ago
This part stands out to me: > The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.
- tbossanova 8mo ago
  Yes and with all these huge and siloed teams you end up with no consistency even within a single app
- titzer 8mo ago
  Microsoft had thousands of people working on Windows. Sun Microsystems had thousands of people working on Java.
  - zokier 8mo ago
    Microsoft had around 5k people in r&d in 1995. And that covered the full wide product range, win95, nt, office, visualc, sql server, and all the other stuff.
- markus_zhang 8mo ago
  From what I remember, Windows NT kernel 3.1 team had about 50 persons, and when they reached 4.0 it was about 200 persons. And then there are application writers. It was definitely a lot than just a few dozens.
- abanana 8mo ago
  Those numbers are UI only. 12 just to design it, another 12 to build it. That's not counting the vastly larger number of developers who built all the various elements of the underlying codebase. Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.
rr808 8mo ago
Wasn't Windows 95 just a copy of Windows NT, which was the real product.
- gattilorenz 8mo ago
  No, Windows NT until 4.0 had the same interface design as Windows 3.x (although there existed a semi-official SP/addon to give NT 3.5 the Chicago interface, making it quite similar to 95), and NT 4.0 came later than 95
  - sillywalk 8mo ago
    From Raymond Chen's Old New Thing: How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=111733 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...
- pndy 8mo ago
  Both OS lines were developed concurrently up until XP release where DOS-based 9x was abandoned and NT became the basis for every subsequent product. Plus of course there's that whole part of the story where MS teamed up with IBM and worked on OS/2. NT got new 9x shell with 4.0 release but a beta package could be installed on 3.51 as well - tho, that could render some compatibility issues.
  - just6979 8mo ago
    Actually I'd say Win2K was the merge point: its internal version is NT 5.0, while XP is NT 5.1 & 5.2. The Win2K UI is the first NT truly usable in a home situation, and last and best iteration of the Win95 UI before the plasti-color of XP. (Yes, that UI was last available as XP's "Classic Theme", but I'm giving it to 2K because XP doesn't really change anything.) However Win2K wasn't really marketed to consumers as there were still some minor compatibility issues: particularly the DOS emulation was not great, so getting things like older games to work often required lots of tweaking to the launch process, and some things still might never work. Those compatibility settings got more options, saner defaults, and more automatic settings, in XP and later to go along with the full commitment of NT for everyone. So, while DOS-based WinMe was actually released after Win2K, it was just a stop-gap to bring some more internet things, directx, and media player stuff, to home users while NT 5.x got it's compatibility and driver model in order. Except it was notoriously unstable, generally hated, and mostly forgotten.
WalterBright 8mo ago
Any user interface designer should take a good look at the controls on a commercial airliner. An awful lot of effort goes into making an intuitive, effective user interface. I have disagreements with it, but there's no denying it's very well done. Designing a programming language is mostly about usability. I'll be giving a talk about that in April at Yale. It's a fun topic!
- socalgal2 8mo ago
  Looking forward to your talk. I feel like there's a taste issue which is similar to tabs vs spaces or other coding styles. Some languages kind of solve this with auto-formatting but just because they choose a standard doesn't mean their standard is as readable as some other. In languages one taste issue that comes to mind. Many languages have the invisible scope issue foo = bar In C++ for example, foo could be a local variable, a member of the enclosing class, a local module static, or a global. Some programmers like this, JBlow for example complained that in C++, switching between standalone function, member function, a lambda required too many changes. (foo = bar) isn't an example but the point is he wants that to be frictionless. Me though, I want the line to be understandable with as little external context as possible. I don't want to have to dig up 10, 50, 100 lines to see if a local foo has been defined or if it's member. So like python or typescript. I like foo has to be this.foo or self.foo if you want it assign the current object's member. Most programmers seem to agree because they end up using mFoo or foo_ or some naming convention to work around the issue but I think I'd prefer the language to enforce it. I don't know which if any languages make all the different scopes more explicit. So far I haven't liked Swift though which seems more explicit. Even though it's more explicit in some areas I feel like the majority of my time is typing boilerplate and fixing trivial syntax errors. I know programming requires syntax and, as an example, I include semicolons everywhere in JavaScript even though they are not required. That said, I would like to get all the time back in my life where I compiled some C++ only to be told "error: missing semicolon at end of class definition" or "error: extra semicolon at end of member function declaration". It feels like a language should fix this stuff for the dumb human rather than make the human do random tedious work. I get there might be times where it's ambiguous but I wonder if it's also a language design issue.
catskull 8mo ago
Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question: “Where do you want to go today?” I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later. I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html Where do you want to go today?
- userbinator 8mo ago
  As I've joked about before, their slogan now has turned into "where do we want you to go today?"
  - bitwize 8mo ago
    That joke's been around since Microsoft tried locking people into Internet Explorer, so ~30 years. Microsoft's been Microsofting for at least that long, Satya hasn't changed that.
  - Pikamander2 8mo ago
    1994: Where do you want to go today? 2014: Where do we want to go today? 2024: Here's where we're going today.
- bitwize 8mo ago
  When Microsoft first established a web presence, 1994 was probably the year if not 1993, www.microsoft.com showed "Welcome to Microsoft's web site. Where do you want to go today?" followed by a list of destinations throughout their site. They promoted the second of those sentences to their official slogan.
- Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
  > Where do you want to go today? Not fussed. It's my information that i can't keep close to home.
coldfingerr 8mo ago
Comdex 1996 DELL (or some company) exposed Windows 95 pcs for the public to mess with. Having used only 3.11 before, I was fascinated with the desktop and also felt it very strange that the contents of the UI were so minimal. Of course I didnt discover anything else: I was afraid of clicking "Start", because I dindt know what that was that going to start, and the computer wasnt mine to brick.
jedberg 8mo ago
If you want a true lesson on design, check out Ask Tog, starting here: https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ Tog was the original design engineer for the Mac, and arguably one of the first true HCI engineers. Then read the rest of his website. He goes into where Windows tried to copy Mac and got it horribly wrong. One of my favorite examples is menu placement. The reason the Mac menus are at the top is because the edges of the screen provide an infinite click target in one direction. So you just go to the top to find what you want. With Windows, the menu was at the top of each Window, making a tiny click target. Then when you maximized the window, the menu was at the top, but with a few pixels of unclickable border. So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse. If you're making a UI, you should read all of Tog's writings.
- bediger4000 8mo ago
  You can generalize this observation to a lot of Microsoft's decisions: a problem exists, so they solve it in a nifty way, a way that makes everything else harder or more error prone. An example: byte order mark. That sure does solve the problem of UTF-16 and UTF-32 byte order determination. It makes every other use of what should be a stream of bytes or words much harder. Concatenate two files? Gotta check for the BOM on both files. Now every app has to look at the first bytes of every "text" file it opens to decide what to do. Suddenly, "text" files have become interpreted, and thus open to allowing security vulnerabilities.
- wmf 8mo ago
  AFAIK Windows 3.x flipped a bunch of Mac decisions to avoid being sued and then MS felt that they had to keep those choices forever for backwards compatibility.
  - jonhohle 8mo ago
    And in my experience, when people moved from Windows to the Mac they're so annoyed that there are differences. When I try to explain that these were present in the Mac long before Windows, people start to understand.
- 8mo ago
tempodox 8mo ago
Seeing “Windows” and “usability” in the same sentence is a surprising combination to me. > Perhaps the best testament to our belief in iterative design is that literally no detail of the initial UI design for Windows 95 survived unchanged in the final product. I shudder to imagine the look and feel of that initial UI design.
ilovefrog 8mo ago
i3 makes a lot more sense they should have just gone with that
abhitriloki 8mo ago
[flagged]
shevy-java 8mo ago
Hmm. I like the simplicity compared to Win10 or the abomination that is Win11. But it is hard to compare 1:1 because the modern UI also improved in some ways, and degraded in other ways. Microsoft does not really seem to understand how to design UIs anymore though, or they simply don't care. I am using Linux most of the time so I don't quite depend on Microsoft anymore, but when I use a MS-specific UI I often wonder why some things are simply not thought through at all. The ribbon interface is an example; my brain can not deal with dynamic willy-nilly changes. It just adds cognitive load. Why isn't it easier to modify the classic interface? In modern HTML/CSS we can filter away things we don't need; I do that with ublock origin all of the time.
askvictor 8mo ago
I was a good step forward. Perhaps with the exception that you had to click "Start" in order to shut down the computer.
fishingisfun 8mo ago
the loss of X to close programs is sad. I dont like the new design philosophy of clicking out the card to close things
unit149 8mo ago
[dead]
NooneAtAll3 8mo ago
I can't wait until this win95 nostalgia phase stops and my nostalgia for actual good UI begins - WinXP for the win
abanana 8mo ago
The Windows 3.1 UI example screenshots are a reminder of how primitive 3.1 felt compared to other OSes of the time. The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective. When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.
pjmlp 8mo ago
The current WinUI, WinAppSDK, Windows 11 teams should have a weekend retreat going down that article.
hughw 8mo ago
"Intermediate users could get around in the hierarchy, but often just barely, and usually saved all of their documents in the default directory for the program they were using." You should see my Documents folder.
quadruple 8mo ago
I believe Windows 7 also had a great user interface. This talk from PDC2008 resonated with me, specifically the concept of "Delights" from 23:45 onward. https://youtu.be/qmZJJ6nMIEU?t=1426 https://youtu.be/qmZJJ6nMIEU?t=1426
just6979 8mo ago
"From the first lab studies it became clear that we needed a baseline with Windows 3.1, to better understand what problems existed prior to Windows 95 and what problems were unique to the new design." This could be the biggest takeaway: iterating without a goal is silly. Though, honestly, it should be the default. If you're creating a new paradigm without ever knowing the problems you're supposed to fixing, you're doing it wrong!

362 points by ksec 8mo ago

leonidasv 8mo ago

Past discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899

tomhow 8mo ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded... The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 - Aug 2016 (72 comments)

VerifiedReports 8mo ago

Look how crisp, professional, and usable it all is. This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today. Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.

virtue3 8mo ago
I hate liquid glass with a burning passion. I've never understood why people get so irritated at design changes until now.
- titzer 8mo ago
  Sadly, it won't be the last time you'll feel that angry passion.
- Telaneo 8mo ago
  Welcome to the club. We all hate it here.
- josephg 8mo ago
  Ugh I couldn't agree more. The new macos feels like a step backwards on many fronts. I'm going to delay updating my mac for as long as I can. I wonder if its nearly time to say goodbye to the apple ecosystem. Those framework laptops look snazzy.
gedy 8mo ago
I like to jest that packaging designer would of course wrap things in clear plastic...
titzer 8mo ago
To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working, resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.
- bigstrat2003 8mo ago
  Apple has long been a "style over substance" company, unfortunately. Not always (I mean, you couldn't accuse the Apple II of being stylish for example), but certainly since the year 2000 at least. It has often meant that their products were less pleasant to use because someone refused to add functionality that wasn't as sleek-looking.
  - bitwize 8mo ago
    The Apple II was more stylish than any other personal computer in 1977. In the mid-1980s, the Apple IIc and IIGS were built to Apple's "Snow White" design language and looked slicker than most contemporaries.
- fainpul 8mo ago
  Apple was very early to remove floppy disk drives, then later DVD drives from their computers, even when those media were still commonly used. At least that fixed your problem of the stuck DVD :)
socalgal2 8mo ago
Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative. The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident. This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs. This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative. There are many more.
- Telaneo 8mo ago
  Apparently, the idea of an edit mode is some foreign concept for a lot of people.
  - wtallis 8mo ago
    There are a lot of UI concepts that are foreign to younger developers, simply because they grew up using web apps and smartphones. I think computer science departments need to make a class on human-computer interaction a mandatory part of the curriculum, and those classes need to require students to sit down with and actually use a variety of UIs from two, three, four decades ago. There's a ton of value in being conversant in the basic building blocks and paradigms of multiple UI systems, and in knowing what problems have been solved in the past so we don't keep badly reinventing the same features or failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. There are a lot of things in older UIs that I think every developer should have hands-on experience with, eg. using nested menus in classic Mac OS; using an MDI application on Windows 9x; using the file browser and dock on NeXTSTEP; using X11 with focus follows mouse; anything with pie menus. Not because those things are necessarily the right choices for today's GUIs, but because there are valuable lessons to be learned from them, and reading an article like this or studying an old HIG document doesn't have the same impact.
phendrenad2 8mo ago
GUIs used to be designed by power users, who would start with an advanced design and strip it down to a simple version the average user could use. Now GUIs are designed by average users who have no idea what to do with advanced features, because they're stuck thinking about the GUI as an average user does. Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.

hnthrowaway0315 8mo ago

I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life. I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies. LOL.

VerifiedReports 8mo ago
Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well. Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond. All of it is now out the window (pun invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
- cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
  I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic" theme. When MS gutted the theming engine with the release of Windows 8 (flat rectangles only) I was devastated.
  - DaiPlusPlus 8mo ago
    The engine itself isn’t gutted - it’s full of functionality that was never lost. MS just (correctly) reasoned that transparency effects in the UI - introduced in Vista simply to show-off the capabilities of the DWM compositor - ultimately detract from a good UI.

lateforwork 8mo ago

Designers tend to be less open to feedback than developers. That, I think, helps explain why flat UI persists even though it has shown usability drawbacks. It also helps explain why overall usability feels like it's declining ever year — for instance, macOS Tahoe seems noticeably worse in usability compared to macOS Sequoia. Does anyone think Apple is going to rush out a release that fixes the excessive rounding of window corners? Don't hold your breath.

cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
On the topic of flat design specifically, developers are likely just as culpable. Back when it was just starting to catch on, by my observation some of the quickest to adopt it were solo developers because it's way easier to build a passable looking app with flat UI since that doesn't require any design talent.
- lunar_rover 8mo ago
  A passable looking modern flat UI has a lot behind it, just like skeuomorphism and anything in between. Unless something like https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.12.0/spectacle-notification.png https://kde.org/announcements/plasma/5/5.12.0/spectacle-noti... is what you consider to be passable looking of course.
  - VorpalWay 8mo ago
    That looks perfectly functional to me? It only looks a bit ugly because the screenshot appears to have been of a very small part of the screen that got blurry when it was blown up to a larger size. I'll take function over for every day. (I daily drive KDE, it works fine and doesn't get in my way. Most of the time I'm either in my editor or the terminal emulator anyway.)
    - cogman10 8mo ago
      This is also a plasma 5 example. Plasma 6 cleaned it up. But I also agree. KDE is pretty close to my ideal for a desktop environment. It's pretty close to a windows 7 feel which is perfect for me.

casey2 8mo ago

Usability is the wrong metric, paint by numbers is more "usable" (sic accessible) than a canvas but you'd be depressed watching your son graduate art school and that's all he can do. If you do want to optimize for usability you have to make sure you aren't making the system more consumptive at the same time. The prime example from the article is trading a moment where the user must take initiative with a menu. More useable less useful. Lower the floor not the ceiling etc. Windows (and iOS) did make genuine improvements to OSs but because of decisions like these most users are locked out of enjoying them.

ginko 8mo ago

Notice how they moved the ok & cancel buttons to the bottom right since it’s the more logical location to put them. Meanwhile gtk now puts those on opposite sides of the window title bar by default.

zahlman 8mo ago
Separating them is good for avoiding misclicks. Decades ago, MacOS properly had the close box for windows on the opposite side from minimize etc. widgets; now the one destructive window action could be reasonably safe without confirmation. Then Windows started gaining popularity and nobody ever did it the right way by default again. A pity for the sharp minds at Xerox PARC.
- Affric 8mo ago
  Command Q and Command W are still beside each other though
- ginko 8mo ago
  I don't mind ok and cancel being on opposite sides. It's mainly ok not being bottom-right that bothers me.
just6979 8mo ago
How is it more logical? Upper right places them close to the other window controls. Also continues the down-then-right order of most of the other controls. In fact, putting buttons along either _side_ of the windows would be a better fit on the wider aspect screens we use nowadays.

kgwxd 8mo ago

Everything since this style of design feels like a cartoon version, with ridiculous non-sense that only gets in the way.

linguae 8mo ago

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6. I even liked Internet Explorer 5. These were well-made products when it came to the user interface. Yes, Windows 95 crashed a lot, but so did Macintosh System 7. Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.

moron4hire 8mo ago
I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic). I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
lateforwork 8mo ago
> 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
- DaiPlusPlus 8mo ago
  That’s an odd way to spell Motif.
  - gnerd00 8mo ago
    please recall that 8bit color was the common capability for CRT displays at that time. Simple one bit display was also common. Any smooth transitions in gray or color had to use dithering, or be very clever in the way they chose the palate. Certainly some historic credit goes to Motif, but, there are "levels to this game" .. Motif did not jump out as "wow that looks good" IMHO. Obviously NeXT was extreme in a different way.. sort of like a symphony orchestra more than an office machine. It is genuinely entertaining to see people defend the dull and pedestrian UI in Windows 95.

khazhoux 8mo ago

This part stands out to me: > The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.

tbossanova 8mo ago
Yes and with all these huge and siloed teams you end up with no consistency even within a single app
titzer 8mo ago
Microsoft had thousands of people working on Windows. Sun Microsystems had thousands of people working on Java.
- zokier 8mo ago
  Microsoft had around 5k people in r&d in 1995. And that covered the full wide product range, win95, nt, office, visualc, sql server, and all the other stuff.
markus_zhang 8mo ago
From what I remember, Windows NT kernel 3.1 team had about 50 persons, and when they reached 4.0 it was about 200 persons. And then there are application writers. It was definitely a lot than just a few dozens.
abanana 8mo ago
Those numbers are UI only. 12 just to design it, another 12 to build it. That's not counting the vastly larger number of developers who built all the various elements of the underlying codebase. Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.

rr808 8mo ago

Wasn't Windows 95 just a copy of Windows NT, which was the real product.

gattilorenz 8mo ago
No, Windows NT until 4.0 had the same interface design as Windows 3.x (although there existed a semi-official SP/addon to give NT 3.5 the Chicago interface, making it quite similar to 95), and NT 4.0 came later than 95
- sillywalk 8mo ago
  From Raymond Chen's Old New Thing: How did the Windows 95 user interface code get brought to the Windows NT code base? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=111733 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251028-00/?p=11...
pndy 8mo ago
Both OS lines were developed concurrently up until XP release where DOS-based 9x was abandoned and NT became the basis for every subsequent product. Plus of course there's that whole part of the story where MS teamed up with IBM and worked on OS/2. NT got new 9x shell with 4.0 release but a beta package could be installed on 3.51 as well - tho, that could render some compatibility issues.
- just6979 8mo ago
  Actually I'd say Win2K was the merge point: its internal version is NT 5.0, while XP is NT 5.1 & 5.2. The Win2K UI is the first NT truly usable in a home situation, and last and best iteration of the Win95 UI before the plasti-color of XP. (Yes, that UI was last available as XP's "Classic Theme", but I'm giving it to 2K because XP doesn't really change anything.) However Win2K wasn't really marketed to consumers as there were still some minor compatibility issues: particularly the DOS emulation was not great, so getting things like older games to work often required lots of tweaking to the launch process, and some things still might never work. Those compatibility settings got more options, saner defaults, and more automatic settings, in XP and later to go along with the full commitment of NT for everyone. So, while DOS-based WinMe was actually released after Win2K, it was just a stop-gap to bring some more internet things, directx, and media player stuff, to home users while NT 5.x got it's compatibility and driver model in order. Except it was notoriously unstable, generally hated, and mostly forgotten.

WalterBright 8mo ago

Any user interface designer should take a good look at the controls on a commercial airliner. An awful lot of effort goes into making an intuitive, effective user interface. I have disagreements with it, but there's no denying it's very well done. Designing a programming language is mostly about usability. I'll be giving a talk about that in April at Yale. It's a fun topic!

socalgal2 8mo ago
Looking forward to your talk. I feel like there's a taste issue which is similar to tabs vs spaces or other coding styles. Some languages kind of solve this with auto-formatting but just because they choose a standard doesn't mean their standard is as readable as some other. In languages one taste issue that comes to mind. Many languages have the invisible scope issue foo = bar In C++ for example, foo could be a local variable, a member of the enclosing class, a local module static, or a global. Some programmers like this, JBlow for example complained that in C++, switching between standalone function, member function, a lambda required too many changes. (foo = bar) isn't an example but the point is he wants that to be frictionless. Me though, I want the line to be understandable with as little external context as possible. I don't want to have to dig up 10, 50, 100 lines to see if a local foo has been defined or if it's member. So like python or typescript. I like foo has to be this.foo or self.foo if you want it assign the current object's member. Most programmers seem to agree because they end up using mFoo or foo_ or some naming convention to work around the issue but I think I'd prefer the language to enforce it. I don't know which if any languages make all the different scopes more explicit. So far I haven't liked Swift though which seems more explicit. Even though it's more explicit in some areas I feel like the majority of my time is typing boilerplate and fixing trivial syntax errors. I know programming requires syntax and, as an example, I include semicolons everywhere in JavaScript even though they are not required. That said, I would like to get all the time back in my life where I compiled some C++ only to be told "error: missing semicolon at end of class definition" or "error: extra semicolon at end of member function declaration". It feels like a language should fix this stuff for the dumb human rather than make the human do random tedious work. I get there might be times where it's ambiguous but I wonder if it's also a language design issue.

catskull 8mo ago

Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question: “Where do you want to go today?” I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later. I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html Where do you want to go today?

userbinator 8mo ago
As I've joked about before, their slogan now has turned into "where do we want you to go today?"
- bitwize 8mo ago
  That joke's been around since Microsoft tried locking people into Internet Explorer, so ~30 years. Microsoft's been Microsofting for at least that long, Satya hasn't changed that.
- Pikamander2 8mo ago
  1994: Where do you want to go today? 2014: Where do we want to go today? 2024: Here's where we're going today.
bitwize 8mo ago
When Microsoft first established a web presence, 1994 was probably the year if not 1993, www.microsoft.com showed "Welcome to Microsoft's web site. Where do you want to go today?" followed by a list of destinations throughout their site. They promoted the second of those sentences to their official slogan.
Ylpertnodi 8mo ago
> Where do you want to go today? Not fussed. It's my information that i can't keep close to home.

coldfingerr 8mo ago

Comdex 1996 DELL (or some company) exposed Windows 95 pcs for the public to mess with. Having used only 3.11 before, I was fascinated with the desktop and also felt it very strange that the contents of the UI were so minimal. Of course I didnt discover anything else: I was afraid of clicking "Start", because I dindt know what that was that going to start, and the computer wasnt mine to brick.

jedberg 8mo ago

If you want a true lesson on design, check out Ask Tog, starting here: https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/ Tog was the original design engineer for the Mac, and arguably one of the first true HCI engineers. Then read the rest of his website. He goes into where Windows tried to copy Mac and got it horribly wrong. One of my favorite examples is menu placement. The reason the Mac menus are at the top is because the edges of the screen provide an infinite click target in one direction. So you just go to the top to find what you want. With Windows, the menu was at the top of each Window, making a tiny click target. Then when you maximized the window, the menu was at the top, but with a few pixels of unclickable border. So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse. If you're making a UI, you should read all of Tog's writings.

bediger4000 8mo ago
You can generalize this observation to a lot of Microsoft's decisions: a problem exists, so they solve it in a nifty way, a way that makes everything else harder or more error prone. An example: byte order mark. That sure does solve the problem of UTF-16 and UTF-32 byte order determination. It makes every other use of what should be a stream of bytes or words much harder. Concatenate two files? Gotta check for the BOM on both files. Now every app has to look at the first bytes of every "text" file it opens to decide what to do. Suddenly, "text" files have become interpreted, and thus open to allowing security vulnerabilities.
wmf 8mo ago
AFAIK Windows 3.x flipped a bunch of Mac decisions to avoid being sued and then MS felt that they had to keep those choices forever for backwards compatibility.
- jonhohle 8mo ago
  And in my experience, when people moved from Windows to the Mac they're so annoyed that there are differences. When I try to explain that these were present in the Mac long before Windows, people start to understand.
8mo ago

tempodox 8mo ago

Seeing “Windows” and “usability” in the same sentence is a surprising combination to me. > Perhaps the best testament to our belief in iterative design is that literally no detail of the initial UI design for Windows 95 survived unchanged in the final product. I shudder to imagine the look and feel of that initial UI design.

ilovefrog 8mo ago

i3 makes a lot more sense they should have just gone with that

abhitriloki 8mo ago

[flagged]

shevy-java 8mo ago

Hmm. I like the simplicity compared to Win10 or the abomination that is Win11. But it is hard to compare 1:1 because the modern UI also improved in some ways, and degraded in other ways. Microsoft does not really seem to understand how to design UIs anymore though, or they simply don't care. I am using Linux most of the time so I don't quite depend on Microsoft anymore, but when I use a MS-specific UI I often wonder why some things are simply not thought through at all. The ribbon interface is an example; my brain can not deal with dynamic willy-nilly changes. It just adds cognitive load. Why isn't it easier to modify the classic interface? In modern HTML/CSS we can filter away things we don't need; I do that with ublock origin all of the time.

askvictor 8mo ago

I was a good step forward. Perhaps with the exception that you had to click "Start" in order to shut down the computer.

fishingisfun 8mo ago

the loss of X to close programs is sad. I dont like the new design philosophy of clicking out the card to close things

unit149 8mo ago

[dead]

NooneAtAll3 8mo ago

I can't wait until this win95 nostalgia phase stops and my nostalgia for actual good UI begins - WinXP for the win

abanana 8mo ago

The Windows 3.1 UI example screenshots are a reminder of how primitive 3.1 felt compared to other OSes of the time. The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective. When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.

pjmlp 8mo ago

The current WinUI, WinAppSDK, Windows 11 teams should have a weekend retreat going down that article.

hughw 8mo ago

"Intermediate users could get around in the hierarchy, but often just barely, and usually saved all of their documents in the default directory for the program they were using." You should see my Documents folder.

quadruple 8mo ago

I believe Windows 7 also had a great user interface. This talk from PDC2008 resonated with me, specifically the concept of "Delights" from 23:45 onward. https://youtu.be/qmZJJ6nMIEU?t=1426 https://youtu.be/qmZJJ6nMIEU?t=1426

just6979 8mo ago

"From the first lab studies it became clear that we needed a baseline with Windows 3.1, to better understand what problems existed prior to Windows 95 and what problems were unique to the new design." This could be the biggest takeaway: iterating without a goal is silly. Though, honestly, it should be the default. If you're creating a new paradigm without ever knowing the problems you're supposed to fixing, you're doing it wrong!