[HN Gopher] The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usabi...
___________________________________________________________________
The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability
engineering (1996)
Author : ksec
Score : 337 points
Date : 2026-02-28 22:19 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dl.acm.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (dl.acm.org)
| leonidasv wrote:
| Past discussion:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899
| tomhow wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded...
|
| _The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability
| Engineering (1996)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 - Aug 2016 (72
| comments)
| VerifiedReports wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I hate liquid glass with a burning passion. I've never
| understood why people get so irritated at design changes until
| now.
| titzer wrote:
| Sadly, it won't be the last time you'll feel that angry
| passion.
| Telaneo wrote:
| Welcome to the club. We all hate it here.
| josephg wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I like to jest that packaging designer would of course wrap
| things in clear plastic...
| titzer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Apparently, the idea of an edit mode is some foreign concept
| for a lot of people.
| wtallis wrote:
| 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.
| noinsight wrote:
| > Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went
| into edit mode and edited the lock screen.
|
| This is why I hate the flashlight and camera buttons on the
| lock screen - which you can activate without unlocking. When
| you have your hands in your pockets during cold weather
| you'll suddenly be "filming"... I never use the camera on my
| phone anyway. Thankfully at some point they added support for
| removing them.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| From what I remember it lost the ability to render
| rounded window corners, because while Windows 8 msstyle
| themes existed they all had the hideous boxed corners
| that clashed hard with many looks.
|
| I don't agree that transparency is always a detractor.
| Judicious use can be a net positive, but it doesn't work
| for all themes and there should be an option to turn it
| off. Personally I didn't find the W7 variation of Aero to
| be bad at all.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > From what I remember it lost the ability to render
| rounded window corners,
|
| ...I'm guessing you haven't used Windows 11?
|
| --------
|
| By "rounded corners" are you referring to rounded-off
| corners in the nonclient area (such that the hWnd's rect
| is not clipped at all)? If so, then no: those would be
| rendered using a 9-grid[1] and have always been
| supported.
|
| If you're referring to how so many fan/community-made
| msstyles for Windows 10 retain the sharp corners, I
| understand that's not a limitation of DWM or msstyles,
| just more that you need to do a _lot_ of legwork when
| defining nontrivial corners in an msstyles theme; it can
| be done (there are plenty of examples online, e.g. look
| for Windows XP 's style ported to Windows 10), it's just
| that most people don't go that far.
|
| -----
|
| [1] In msstyles, the 9-grid defines how a rectangular
| bitmap is stretched/scaled/tiled to fill a larger area;
| it's very similar to how CSS image borders are defined
| with `border-image-slice`.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I'm speaking specially about Windows 8/8.1. Obviously 11
| and the new Fluent design language it brought don't
| suffer the same issue.
|
| Whatever the case, rounded corners on the titlebars and
| window chrome were common in XP/Vista/7 custom msstyles
| but were nowhere to be seen for 8/8.1 custom msstyles. It
| was one of the most frustrating aspects of that era of
| Windows for me.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Hmm, yes; I think you're right. I honestly don't know the
| explanation behind that, sorry.
| pndy wrote:
| XP in early betas released had that slightly upgraded 9x
| interface called Watercolor [1] and if they'd keep it, surely
| majority would pick it up over plastic Luna.
|
| Early experiments with totally new theme were rather
| unpleasant [2] and Watercolor was abandoned in favor of more
| familiar 9x looking theme as an option. W11 still comes with
| that old 9x widgets look - slightly flattened because of that
| trend but it's still there buried beneath for compatibility
| reasons. And I'm pretty sure they won't escape with that like
| Apple did with Aqua away from Platinum.
|
| [1] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Watercolor
|
| [2] - https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_XP_build_2416#Gallery
| jonhohle wrote:
| I always installed Watercolor on a new computer. It's still
| beautiful and definitely the look they should have chosen
| and played to their strengths.
|
| I think they were so caught off guard by how incredible Mac
| OS X _looked_, that they didn't realize it wasn't just
| veneer, but a genuine evolution and improvement of how Mac
| OS _worked_. This became Apple's competitive advantage for
| over a decade as Microsoft chased different styles while
| consistently botching how it would impact usability.
| imiric wrote:
| After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the
| realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They _can_
| have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but
| all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible.
| Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and
| mouse input should be optional.
|
| Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many
| challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its
| boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it
| has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually
| distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.
|
| A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11
| is something as simple as resizing windows. Since the modern
| trend is to have rounded corners on _everything_ , it's not
| clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists
| anymore. It seems to exist outside of the physical boundary of
| the window, and the actual activation point is barely a few
| pixels wide. Apparently this is an issue on macOS as well[1].
|
| Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in
| particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's
| designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern
| standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual
| trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX
| improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable
| windows, workspaces, etc.).
|
| So, my point is that eschewing graphics as much as possible,
| and relying on keyboard input to perform operations, gets rid
| of the graphical ambiguities, minimizes the amount of trend
| following making the UI feel timeless, and makes the user feel
| more in command of their experience, making them more efficient
| and quicker.
|
| This UI doesn't have to be some inaccessible CLI or TUI,
| although that's certainly an option for power users, but it
| should generally only serve to enable the user to do their work
| as easily as possible, and get out of the way the rest of the
| time. Unfortunately, most modern OSs have teams of designers
| and developers that need to justify their salary, and a UI that
| is invisible and rarely changes won't get anyone promoted. But
| it's certainly possible for power users to build out this UI
| themselves using some common and popular software. It takes a
| bit of work, but the benefits far outweigh the time and effort
| investment.
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579864
| Telaneo wrote:
| > Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many
| challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its
| boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if
| it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements
| visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and
| so on.
|
| There are standards and common conventions for a lot of this
| in the Windows 9X/2000 design language, and even in basic
| HTML. These challenges could have been solved (for values of)
| by using them consistently, and I think we might have been
| there for a little while, at least within the Windows bubble.
| The fact that we threw all of those out the window with new
| and worse design, then did that again a few more times just
| to make sure all the users learned to never bother actually
| learning the UI, since it will just change on them anyway,
| doesn't entail that this is an unsolvable problem (well, it
| might be now, but I doubt it was back in 1995).
|
| > Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in
| particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's
| designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by
| modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows
| the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of
| the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search,
| tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.).
|
| I fail to see why any of these features couldn't be
| implemented within the design constraints of the Windows
| 9X/2000 design language. There are certainly technical
| constrains, but I can't see any design constrains. They were
| never implemented at the time, and those features didn't
| become relevant until we'd gone through several rounds of
| different designs, so we never had the opportunity to see how
| it would work out.
| imiric wrote:
| > There are standards and common conventions for a lot of
| this in the Windows 9X/2000 design language, and even in
| basic HTML. These challenges could have been solved (for
| values of) by using them consistently [...]
|
| The thing is that GUIs naturally have to evolve to cater to
| their user base. The "office" metaphor was useful in the
| 1980s and 90s for making computing familiar to people who
| were used to "desktops", "folders", "files", etc. Some of
| these terms still exist today, but the vast majority of
| users can't relate to it, so it's meaningless to them.
|
| This is why GUIs will always have to change and adapt to
| trends, which will always cause friction for existing
| users.
|
| My point is that by minimizing the amount of graphical
| elements (note: not completely eliminate them), we minimize
| the amount of this friction. The difficult thing is, of
| course, maintaining the appropriate balance of all elements
| while optimizing for usability, which is ultimately very
| subjective.
|
| But consider that CLIs are effectively timeless. The
| friction comes from their lack of discoverability, arcane
| I/O, every program can have a different UI, etc. And yet
| this interface has persisted and has largely remained the
| same for decades. Most programs rarely change their CLI, so
| the user only needs to learn a few commands to be
| productive.
|
| So I think that the most usable UI is somewhere in the
| middle. It should avoid the constant churn of GUIs, and be
| more accessible than CLIs. This is possible to build for
| power users, but it can also be made approachable for less
| technical users.
|
| > I fail to see why any of these features couldn't be
| implemented within the design constraints of the Windows
| 9X/2000 design language.
|
| That's true. But then again, what exactly is the Windows
| 9x/2000 design language, and what makes it better than the
| modern Windows GUI? Is it the basic Start Menu? The task
| panel with blocks for each window instead of icons? The
| square instead of round windows? The lack of smooth
| transitions, transparency, and graphical effects? The
| overall brutalist theme?
|
| We can certainly add all the features I mentioned to
| Windows 9x/2000, and we had some of them even back then via
| 3rd party tools, but isn't that essentially what modern
| Windows has become? There are ways to revert some Windows
| 11 features today with alternative shells and such, so is
| that the ideal UI then?
|
| When I think of Win2k, I think of the overall simplicity.
| This is mostly due to nostalgia than for any practical
| reasons. I'm sure that I couldn't stand using its barebones
| UI today, as much as I would enjoy the simplicity for a
| brief moment.
| Telaneo wrote:
| > The thing is that GUIs naturally have to evolve to
| cater to their user base. The "office" metaphor was
| useful in the 1980s and 90s for making computing familiar
| to people who were used to "desktops", "folders",
| "files", etc. Some of these terms still exist today, but
| the vast majority of users can't relate to it, so it's
| meaningless to them.
|
| We still 'dial' with our phones, even though phones
| haven't had dials in over 50 years by this point. Nobody
| would even explain phones using that metaphor anymore.
| Even just having a foundation of common terminology is
| helpful in teaching people new systems.
|
| > This is why GUIs will always have to change and adapt
| to trends, which will always cause friction for existing
| users.
|
| I fail to see the connection.
|
| > My point is that by minimizing the amount of graphical
| elements (note: not completely eliminate them), we
| minimize the amount of this friction. The difficult thing
| is, of course, maintaining the appropriate balance of all
| elements while optimizing for usability, which is
| ultimately very subjective.
|
| This is true in today's world, but not necessarily in a
| world where the UI language of computers is stable and
| users can trust their computers to not change render
| their understanding of the system from underneath them.
| If all buttons had the same hints to tell a user 'I'm a
| button', in the same way default HTML links tell users
| 'I'm a link', then we could trust users to have this
| understanding.
|
| > But consider that CLIs are effectively timeless. The
| friction comes from their lack of discoverability, arcane
| I/O, every program can have a different UI, etc. And yet
| this interface has persisted and has largely remained the
| same for decades. Most programs rarely change their CLI,
| so the user only needs to learn a few commands to be
| productive.
|
| It's remained true in a small niche of power users, while
| for the rest of the world, this environment might as well
| not exist (beyond the functionality it provides to them
| after it's been filtered through several layers). CLIs
| are irrelevant dead-end in the story of user accessible
| design; one that there's probably some lessons to take
| from, but not one to entertain in any serious manner.
|
| > That's true. But then again, what exactly is the
| Windows 9x/2000 design language, and what makes it better
| than the modern Windows GUI? Is it the basic Start Menu?
| The task panel with blocks for each window instead of
| icons? The square instead of round windows? The lack of
| smooth transitions, transparency, and graphical effects?
| The overall brutalist theme?
|
| Yes.
|
| > We can certainly add all the features I mentioned to
| Windows 9x/2000, and we had some of them even back then
| via 3rd party tools, but isn't that essentially what
| modern Windows has become? There are ways to revert some
| Windows 11 features today with alternative shells and
| such, so is that the ideal UI then?
|
| The classic theme survived up until Windows 7, and I'll
| give that a pass, since although there still are holes
| where the newer design language of Windows peeks through,
| it's stayed mostly consistent, and even managed to add
| new features without breaking the design language to fit
| them.
|
| Then that died with Windows 8, and there's been no hope
| for consistency in UI language since. The dream of a
| casual user being able to learn a UI and stick to it is
| dead, since even if they do, it will just change out from
| underneath them. That's why they don't even bother. Heck,
| even I barely bother.
|
| > I'm sure that I couldn't stand using its barebones UI
| today, as much as I would enjoy the simplicity for a
| brief moment.
|
| I disagree. I don't use many modern UI features, and the
| few that I do use, like snappable windows, are things I
| can imagine working within the old design language. I
| still write documents using a copy of Word 2000 in a
| Win2K VM every now and then, and when I don't use that, I
| use LibreOffice, a program many people refuse to use
| because it looks ancient to them. That's a feature for
| me. It not changing and thus not breaking my workflow is
| a huge feature that nothing in Windows 11 can even hope
| to compare with.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The issue with this type of design is that it completely
| tanks discoverability. Every visual UI element trimmed is
| another pit of confusion for less-technical computer users.
|
| Modern UIs aren't great with discoverability, either however
| and are not an example that should be followed.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > The issue with this type of design is that it completely
| tanks discoverability.
|
| There are still ways to help, such as having a menu bar,
| and having good documentation. (Documentation is more
| important, in my opinion; but both are helpful.)
| imiric wrote:
| That's not necessarily the case. In fact, if implemented
| well, keyboard/command-driven UIs can be much easier to
| discover than GUIs.
|
| Consider the "Command Palette" and similar features that
| are part of many UIs (VS Code, Obsidian, Vim, Emacs, etc.).
| It allows the user to search _all_ possible actions using
| natural language, and see or assign key bindings to them,
| so that they can get to their most commonly used actions
| faster. This search can be global for the entire program,
| or contextual for the current view.
|
| It is far easier to search for what you want to do, than to
| learn to what action every GUI element is associated with,
| or to navigate arbitrarily nested menu hierarchies. This
| does require the user to be familiar with the domain
| language somewhat in order to know what to search for, but
| this too can be simplified, actions can have different
| names, etc. It also makes the program more accessible for
| speech navigation, screen readers, and so on.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the
| realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can
| have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes,
| but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as
| possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-
| driven, and mouse input should be optional.
|
| I agree, that the interactivity should be primarily keyboard-
| driven. However, mouse input is useful for many things as
| well; if there are many things on the screen, the mouse can
| be a useful way to select one, even if the keyboard can also
| be used (if you already know what it is, you can type it in
| without having to know where on the screen it is; if you do
| not know what it is, you can see it on the screen and select
| it by mouse).
|
| > Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many
| challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its
| boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if
| it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements
| visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and
| so on.
|
| At least older versions of Windows had a more consistent way
| of indicating some of these things, although sometimes they
| did not work very well, often they worked OK. (The
| conventions for doing so might have been improved, although
| at least they had some that, at least partially, worked.)
|
| > A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on
| Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. ...
| it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window
| exists anymore
|
| I had just used ALT+SPACE to do stuff such as resize, move,
| etc. I have not used Windows 11 so I don't know if it works
| on Windows 11, but I would hope that it does if Microsoft
| wants to avoid confusing people. (On other older versions of
| Windows, even if they moved everything I was able to use it
| because most of the keyboard commands still work the same as
| older versions of Windows, so that is helpful (for example,
| you can still push ALT+TAB to switch between full-screen
| programs, ALT+F4 to close a full-screen program, etc; I don't
| know whether or not there is any other way to do such things
| like that). However, many of the changes will cause confusion
| despite this, or will cause other problems, that they removed
| stuff that is useful in favor of less useful or more
| worthless stuff.)
| BrenBarn wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Agreed. I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI
| hit at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then
| it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by. The
| lack of a "classic" mode in Win10 was one thing that motivated
| me to switch fully to Linux. To make the switch, I spent a good
| amount of time trawling the themes to find one that mimicks the
| look of Win95/95/2000. (The one I use is a KDE theme called
| "Reactionary".)
| giantrobot wrote:
| > I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI hit
| at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then
| it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by.
|
| I know some of my preferences for UIs are informed by what I
| first really learned how to use. But I also have preferences
| that are informed by decades of heavy computer use.
|
| I despise UI widgets that just look like the window
| background with no borders or shadows. I can't stand massive
| amounts of useless white space. UI widgets don't require
| oxygen to survive so they don't need to fucking "breath" that
| much. I also despise mystery meat UIs that change their
| arrangement because I clicked one button more often than
| another.
|
| Everything that increases my cognitive load and doesn't allow
| me to build up muscle memory in a UI is supremely
| frustrating. I might like the "look" of Mac System 7, it was
| a great intersection of functional and whimsical in my
| opinion. The consistent behaviors and learnable interface go
| beyond subjective visual appeal however.
| lateforwork wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-
| noti... is what you consider to be passable looking of
| course.
| VorpalWay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| maxloh wrote:
| For reference, Windows' notification look this way: https:/
| /www.lifewire.com/thmb/I4VO9qHrzphTHsZHU5eI73sLL9k=/7...
|
| The screenshot you posted is likely from KDE Plasma. The
| project don't have much funding to hire a UI/UX designer
| IMHO.
| delecti wrote:
| I don't think openness to feedback is the main metric, but
| rather ability to objectively measure outcomes. It's just
| harder to objectively measure usability than the presence or
| absence of a bug or performance problem.
| titzer wrote:
| It's all just rearranging deck chairs at this point.
|
| I feel like UX designers don't realize that their job should
| have a natural tailing off as we discover and lock in the good
| ideas and discard the bad. Even if the ideas aren't that great,
| users can at least get good at however it does work, if it
| stays constant. Instead, we just get more dice rolls, eyecandy,
| and frustration.
|
| I for one hate the power dynamic that OS and website designers
| have over me. They can just sneak into my house and rearrange
| my furniture on a whim. Even if it sucks, I would adapt to it
| if it stayed constant! Instead I both hate it and can't learn
| it, because everything is different _and_ keeps changing when I
| least expect it.
|
| At this point my brain has given into learned helplessness and
| won't retain much of anything at all, but it's next-level
| figured out that it's useless.
|
| Designers seem to have a bad track record, and it's getting
| worse.
|
| Sorry, designers.
| josephg wrote:
| Part of the problem is that each generation of designers want
| to leave their mark on the product - often by undoing the
| work of the last generation of designers. They're not
| entirely wrong. Design has fashions, like clothes. I enjoy
| that the industrial design of laptops and phones changes
| every few years. But good UX isn't good because its
| fashionable. Good UX doesn't go out of date. They've gotta
| learn to stop fixing it when its not broken.
|
| Eg, MacOS's new system preferences panel is worse than the
| old one. And its stupid putting the windows start menu in the
| middle of the screen, where you can't as easily click it with
| the mouse.
| userbinator wrote:
| Once the windows become actually circles, or maybe some point
| along that path, they'll go back to square corners and
| congratulate themselves on how much better and innovative they
| are. It's just a stupid trend to keep rounding things more and
| more... I hope.
| maxloh wrote:
| I think you might be confusing flat design with UI density.
| While they emerged as trends during a similar period, they are
| distinct concepts. You can have small flat elements or large
| skeuomorphic ones.
| casey2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Command Q and Command W are still beside each other though
| ginko wrote:
| I don't mind ok and cancel being on opposite sides. It's
| mainly ok not being bottom-right that bothers me.
| kgwxd wrote:
| Everything since this style of design feels like a cartoon
| version, with ridiculous non-sense that only gets in the way.
| linguae wrote:
| Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not
| having taste (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 wrote:
| 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 it _is_ 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| That's an odd way to spell Motif.
| gnerd00 wrote:
| 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.
| lateforwork wrote:
| Motif 1.0 shipped in 1990. NeXTSTEP in 1988 had 3D beveled
| controls. So I believe I got the spelling right :)
| steve1977 wrote:
| Motif was also 3D, but the actual look of Windows 95/NT 4.0
| clearly took some inspiration from NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP,
| for example the window decorations.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I accept that's possible - if not likely (and everyone
| steals from each other!) - but even-so it only amounts to
| to the gunmetal-grey default colours and use of a 1px
| bevel/inset effect; because NS and NT3/NT4's UX/UI design
| and concepts are just so different otherwise.
|
| ...but I'm not personally convinced: instead, consider
| the demonstrable fact that similar engineering teams,
| working on similar problems, will independently come to
| substantially similar solutions; my favourite example to
| point to is how eerily-similar the Eurofighter Typhoon,
| Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafale all look - even entirely
| indistinguishable at an air-show in-person - despite
| having zero shared pedigree - therefore it's possible
| that - given the constraints of desktop graphics hardware
| of the late-1980s/early-1990s - that a user-friendly
| desktop UI built around the concept of floating
| application windows - will all be similar in one way or
| another.
|
| -------
|
| My pet-theory for why that "Windows 95 1px bevel" look is
| so prevalent is because it suits working with premade UI
| graphics rasters/bitmaps using indexed-colors: for
| example, imagine a Windows-style Property Sheet dialog:
| prior to Windows 95, software would manually draw all of
| the elements of that dialog directly to the framebuffer
| (i.e. using unbuffered graphics) which was slow - ugly -
| and is the cmputer-equivalent of using a lavatory in a
| cramped bathroom actively undergoing renovations without
| any drywall/plastering). Even if there was enough vram
| for double-buffering it's still going to be slow:
| painting each and every button, checkbox (with the
| checkmark!) and tab header. So instead, many individual
| UI graphics elements could be prerendered (at design-
| time, hopefully by an actual artist), but not as single
| bitmaps for the entire dialog - but as an indexed color
| bitmap for each control type, so no slow/expensive
| draw/painting is required: only a simple blitbit for each
| checkbox, for example. Using an indexed-color bitmap
| based on a 4 or 8 colors palette (face, 3D light, 3D
| dark, transparent/BG; etc) means a single blob only a few
| hundred bytes in size can represent a chisel-cut bevelled
| checkbox - while integrating with whatever the user's
| preferred color scheme is.
|
| ----
|
| ....of course now we'll just build a UI in Electron, to
| hell with memory usage or integrating with the user's OS
| appearance settings. Le sigh.
| steve1977 wrote:
| As mentioned, Windows 95 uses more or less the same
| window decorations as NeXTSTEP - although with different
| semantics. What is minimize in NeXTSTEP is maximize in
| Windows 95 IIRC.
|
| https://www.operating-
| system.org/betriebssystem/bsgfx/apple/...
|
| It could be coincidence of course, but...
|
| > my favourite example to point to is how eerily-similar
| the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafale
| all look - even entirely indistinguishable at an air-show
| in-person - despite having zero shared pedigree
|
| Considering that France/Dassault was initially part of
| the Eurofighter / European Fighter Aircraft (EFA)
| project, I'm not sure if that's the best example to make
| your point.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| I think there is distinction there between look and
| functionality.
|
| They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some
| modern abominations.
|
| But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some
| alternatives at the time.
|
| > Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the
| Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft
| Office 2007 ribbon.
|
| Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at
| least not wasting screen space
| layer8 wrote:
| Windows 95 was a vast improvement in looks over 3.x. Of
| course tastes differ, but I found it very aesthetic, not ugly
| at all, and used the classic look until Windows 7 EOLd.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional
| taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company's
| lifetime.
|
| (If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the
| most... design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of
| Windows)
|
| (I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the
| company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn't
| help that every major first-party product is now using their
| own silo'd UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I
| guess)
| derefr wrote:
| I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere
| during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office
| 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were
| all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single
| built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows
| was expected to _supply_ common controls to suit every need.
|
| This was mostly because we were just starting to see
| computers supporting large bitmapped screen resolutions at
| this point; but VRAM was still tiny during this period, and
| so drawing to off-screen buffers, and then compositing those
| buffers together, wasn't really a thing computers could
| afford to do _while_ running at these high resolutions.
|
| Windows GDI + COMCTL32, incl. their control drawing routines,
| their damage tracking for partial redraw, etc., were
| collectively optimized by some real x86-assembly wizards to
| do the absolute minimum amount of computation and blitting
| possible to overdraw just what had changed each frame, right
| onto the screen buffer.
|
| On the other hand, what Windows _didn 't_ yet support in this
| era was DirectDraw -- i.e. the ability of an app to reserve a
| part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or to "run
| fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its screen-buffer
| entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps; and the only way
| to draw _into_ those windows was to tell Windows GDI to draw
| for you.
|
| This gave developers of this era three options, if they
| wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something
| "fancy":
|
| 1. Make it a DOS app. You could do whatever you wanted, but
| it'd be higher-friction for Windows users (they'd have to
| essentially exit Windows to run your program), and you'd have
| to do all that UI-drawing assembly-wizardry yourself.
|
| 2. Create your own library of controls, that ultimately draw
| using GDI, the same way that the Windows common controls do.
| Or license some other vendor's library of controls. Where
| that vendor, out of a desire for their controls to be as
| widely-applicable as possible, probably designed them to
| blend in with the Windows common controls.
|
| 3. Give up and just use the Windows common controls. But be
| creative about it.
|
| #3 is where games like _Minesweeper_ and _Chip 's Challenge_
| came from -- they're both essentially just Windows built-in
| grid controls, where each cell contains a Windows built-in
| button control, where those buttons can be clicked to
| interact with the game, and where those buttons' image labels
| are then collectively updated (with icons from the program's
| own icon resources, I believe?) to display the new game
| state.
|
| For better or worse, this period was thus when Microsoft was
| a _tastemaker_ in UI design. Before this period, early
| Windows just looked like any other early graphical OS; and
| after this period, computers had become powerful enough to
| support redrawing arbitrary windowed UI at 60Hz through APIs
| like DirectDraw. It was only in this short time where compute
| and memory bottlenecks, plus a hard encapsulation boundary
| around the ability of apps to draw to the screen, forced
| basically every Windows app /game to "look like" a _Windows_
| app /game.
|
| And so, necessarily, this is the period where all the best
| examples of what we remember as "Windows-paradigm UI design"
| come from.
| sillywalk wrote:
| > On the other hand, what Windows didn't yet support in
| this era was DirectDraw -- i.e. the ability of an app to
| reserve a part of the screen buffer to draw on itself (or
| to "run fullscreen" where Windows itself releases its
| screen-buffer entirely.) Windows apps were windowed apps;
| and the only way to draw into those windows was to tell
| Windows GDI to draw for you.
|
| > This gave developers of this era three options, if they
| wanted to create a graphical app or game that did something
| "fancy":
|
| > 1. Make it a DOS app.
|
| This vaguely reminds me of WinG[0][1] - the precursor to
| DirectDraw. It existed only briefly ~ 1994-95.
|
| My vague "understanding" of it was to make DOS games easier
| to port to Windows. They'd do "quick game graphics stuff"
| on Device Independent Bitmaps, and WinG would take care of
| the hardware details.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinG
|
| [1] https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/a-whirlwind-
| tour-o...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Sometimes the "any clickable area => make it a Windows
| control/button" works and sometimes it doesn't.
|
| I talked with the programmer for the 16-bit Windows
| calculator app, calc.exe.
|
| Any naive programmer with a first-reading of Charles
| Petzold's Programming Windows book would assume each button
| in the calculator app was an actual Windows button control.
|
| Nope.
|
| All those calculator buttons, back when Windows first
| shipped, used up too many resources.
|
| So the buttons were drawn and the app did hit-testing to
| see if a button was mouse-clicked. see
| https://www.basicinputoutput.com/2017/08/windows-
| calculator-... for a pic of the 16-bit Windows calculator
| app.
| okanat wrote:
| > Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon
|
| Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows
| 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover
| all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.
|
| I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are
| completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and
| younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since
| it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite
| Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either.
| Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the
| workflow of power users.
|
| Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual
| activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid
| way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented
| in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.
| derefr wrote:
| > I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are
| completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and
| younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon.
|
| Well, yes, but that observation doesn't prove the point you
| think it does.
|
| People who were highly experienced with previous non-ribbon
| versions of Office, disliked the ribbon, because the ribbon
| is essentially a "tutorial mode" for Office.
|
| The ribbon reduces cognitive load _on people unfamiliar with
| Office_ , by boiling down the use of Office apps to a set of
| primary user-stories (these becoming the app's ribbon's
| tabs), and then preferentially exposing the most-commonly-
| desired features one might want to engage with during each of
| these user stories, as bigger, friendlier, more self-
| describing buttons and dropdowns under each of these user-
| story tabs.
|
| The Ribbon works great as a _discovery_ mechanism for
| functionality. If an app 's toplevel menu is like the index
| in a reference book, then an app Ribbon is like a set of
| Getting Started guides.
|
| But a Ribbon does nothing to accelerate the usage of an app
| for people who've already come to grips with the app, and so
| already knew where things were in the app's top-level menu,
| maybe having memorized how to activate those menu items with
| keyboard accelerators, etc. These people don't _need_ Getting
| Started guides being shoved in their face! To these people, a
| Ribbon is just a second index to _some random subset_ of the
| features they use, that takes longer to navigate than the
| primary index they 're already familiar with; and which,
| unlike the primary index, isn't organized into categories in
| a way that's common/systematic among other apps for the OS
| (and so doesn't respond to expected top-level-menu keyboard
| accelerators, etc, etc.)
|
| I think apps like Photoshop have since figured out what
| people really want here: a UI layout ("workspace") _selector_
| , offering different UI layouts for new users ("Basic"
| layout) vs. experienced users ("Full" layout); and even
| different UI layouts for users with different high-level use-
| cases such that they have a known set of applicable user-
| stories. A Ribbon is perfect for the "Basic" layout; but in a
| "Full" layout, it can probably go away.
| ink_13 wrote:
| This is it. Ultimately the best interfaces are designed for
| experts, not beginners. "Usability" at some point became
| confused with "approachability", probably because like in
| so many other areas, growth was prioritized over retention.
| It's OK if complex software is hard to use at first if that
| enables advanced users to work better.
|
| Really, the most efficient interfaces are the old-style
| pure text mode mainframe forms, where a power user can tab
| through fields faster than a 3270-style terminal emulator
| can render them.
| Affric wrote:
| So why care about wysiwyg when we have LaTeX?
| jmusall wrote:
| But what if most of your users aren't "experts"? I think
| it's a good thing that computers are usable by a majority
| of the population today.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I forgot the early release but ribbon seemed to have fuller
| keyboard shortcut and could be hidden entirely. Leaving
| power users with more space and faster command triggers
| isn't it ?
| mpyne wrote:
| Yes, the ribbon also showed you the appropriate keyboard
| shortcut. My last job in the Navy involved a _lot_ of
| converting mail merge-style Word docs to PDF for digital
| signature and so I became very adept at using keyboard
| shortcuts in Word and it was all right there in the
| ribbon.
|
| It was _different_ from Word 2003, but that was about all
| the bad you could say for it from the 'power user'
| perspective.
| idle_zealot wrote:
| > I think apps like Photoshop have since figured out what
| people really want here: a UI layout ("workspace")
| selector, offering different UI layouts for new users
| ("Basic" layout) vs. experienced users ("Full" layout); and
| even different UI layouts for users with different high-
| level use-cases such that they have a known set of
| applicable user-stories. A Ribbon is perfect for the
| "Basic" layout; but in a "Full" layout, it can probably go
| away.
|
| In the linked case study on Windows 95 they specifically
| tried this, creating a separate beginner mode for the
| Windows shell. Their conclusion was that it was a bad idea
| and scrapped it because it doesn't allow for organic
| learning and growth of a beginner into a power user on
| account of the wall between modes. Instead they centralized
| common tasks into the Start menu. I'm not sure how you
| would translate that learning to the design of Office or
| Photoshop though. Maybe something like Ribbon, but as a
| fixed "press here to do common actions" button in the app?
| Then next to that "start button" put the full power user
| index of categorized menu buttons?
| VorpalWay wrote:
| I think PrusaSlicer does this in a reasonable way.
| (Context: this is software for preparing files for 3D
| printers.)
|
| It has three modes: Simple, Advanced, Expert. They are
| all the same UI _design_ , all it does is hide some less
| common settings to not overwhelm users. Each level is
| also associated with a colour, and next to each setting
| is a small dot with that colour: this allows you to
| quickly scan for the more common settings even if you
| showed all of them at Expert. At Expert there are easily
| over a thousand different settings organised into a
| 2-level hierarchy.
|
| Docs on this feature:
| https://help.prusa3d.com/article/simple-advanced-expert-
| mode...
|
| I wrote a blog post that has some screenshots from the
| settings pages (5th image for example):
| https://vorpal.se/posts/2025/jun/23/3d-printing-with-
| unconve...
| benrutter wrote:
| I really like this take! A couple years ago I wrote a
| throwaway blog about learning curves in user design[0] but
| the thought has stayed with me a lot since then.
|
| It's especially tricky because things are contextual. I use
| Helix as an editor which has a steeper learning curve than,
| say, VSCode, but is way faster once you're up and running
| with it.
|
| But by contrast, I also really like LazyGit, which is a lot
| quicker to learn than the git CLI, but since all I do is
| branch, commit an push, makes my workflow a lot more
| efficient.
|
| There's such a complex series of trade offs, especially if
| products want to balance bith. I always feel a little sad
| how much interfaces have skewed towards user friendliness
| over power. Sometimes it feels like we've ended up in a
| world of hurdy-gurdies with no violins.
|
| [0] https://benrutter.codeberg.page/site/posts/learning-
| curves/
| omnibrain wrote:
| > people who've already come to grips with the app
|
| They would, or should, be using keyboard shortcuts anyway.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| Ribbon has some good elements to it, but other elements are
| questionable at best. Sizing of buttons for example feels
| completely arbitrary and not connected to frequency of use or
| anything else obvious.
|
| I think the best parts of it could be replicated by just
| combining tabs and traditional toolbars, but that's not
| complex enough of a concept to need a dedicated moniker.
| rkagerer wrote:
| The Ribbon is a disaster. Compared to conventional toolbars,
| it fails across several metrics.
|
| When it first came out, I did studies of myself using it vs.
| the older toolbared versions of Word and Excel, and found I
| was quantifiably slower. This was after spending enough time
| to familiarize myself with it and get over any learning
| curve.
|
| EFFICIENCY
|
| The biggest problem is it introduced more clicks to get
| things done - in some cases twice as many or more. Having to
| "tab" to the correct ribbon pane introduces an extra click
| for every task that used to be one click away, unless the
| button happens to be on the same tab. Unfortunately the
| grouping wasn't as well thought out as it could have been. It
| was designed with a strong bias for "discoverability" over
| efficiency, and I found with many repetitive tasks that I
| commonly carried out, I was constantly having to switch back
| and forth between tabs. That doesn't even get into the extra
| clicks required for fancier elements like dropdowns, etc. And
| certain panes they couldn't figure out where to put are
| clearly "bolted" on.
|
| KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS
|
| At the same time, Microsoft de-emphasized keyboard
| accelerators. So where the old toolbar used to hint you the
| keyboard shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your
| mouse over a button, the new one doesn't - making it unlikely
| users will ever learn the powerful key combos that enable
| more rapid interaction and reduce RSI caused by mousing
| (repetitive strain injury). In my case this manifests as
| physical pain, so I'm very aware of wasteful gestures.
|
| SCREEN REAL ESTATE
|
| The amount of text in the button captions on the ribbon is
| also excessive. It really isn't a toolbar at all, more of a
| fancy dropdown menu that's been pivoted horizontally instead
| of vertical. It turned the menu bar, which used to be a nice,
| compact, single line, into something that now takes up ~4x as
| much vertical screen real estate. As most users' monitors are
| in landscape orientation, vertical space is scare to start
| with; congratulations you just wasted more of those precious
| pixels, robbing me of space to look at what I really care
| about which is the document or whatever thing I'm actually
| working on.
|
| DISCOVERABILITY
|
| You used to be able to get a good sense of most software's
| major functionality by strolling through all the menu
| options. Mastery (or at least proficiency) was
| straightforward. With the more dynamic paradigm Microsoft
| adopted along with the Ribbon, there's lots of functionality
| you don't even see until you're in a new situation (or that's
| hidden to the responsive window layout, which is ironic -
| instead of making the thing more compact, they made portions
| of it disappear if your window is too small). I grant some
| may argue this has benefits for not appearing as overwhelming
| to new users (although personally I've always found clean,
| uniform, well thought out menus to be less jarring than the
| scattered and more artistically inclined ribbon). But easing
| the learning curve had the trade off of making those users
| perceptually stuck in "beginner" mode. They can't customize
| the ribbon as meaningfully (I used to always tailor the
| toolbar by removing all the icons I already knew the keyboard
| shortcuts for, adding some buttons that were missing like
| Strikethrough, and move it to the same row as the menu bar to
| maximize clientarea space)
|
| In my case, after trying out the new versions for a year, I
| made an intentional decision to go back to the 2003 versions
| of Word and Excel, and never look back (forward?). They are
| my daily drivers. These days, I barely touch modern versions
| of Word and Excel, except for the very rare instance I
| actually need a specific new feature (i.e. a spreadsheet with
| more than 65k rows). If someone asks me to use the new
| version, I simply refuse (which has never been a showstopper
| - my work quality is preeminent, and once you get past policy
| bureaucracy it turns out clients/employers don't care what
| tool I use to get it done).
|
| The whole point of a toolbar was always to be a place you
| could pin commands you want instant access to, just a click
| away. The ribbon shredded that paradigm, and in my opinion
| took us a marked step backward in computing. It fails across
| several metrics, compared to regular toolbars. I wanted to
| blog about it at the time in hopes of convincing the world it
| was a mistake, but didn't have the free time. 20 years later,
| I'm curious if more people share these sentiments and
| acknowledge its shortcomings.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > So where the old toolbar used to hint you the keyboard
| shortcut in a tooltip every time you rested your mouse over
| a button, the new one doesn't
|
| Although it is bad that it does not display the keyboard
| shortcuts, you can push ALT and then it will tell you which
| letter to push next. (I just guessed that pushing ALT might
| do something (possibly display a menu?), and I was correct
| (it did not display another menu, but it did help).) This
| is not quite as good as using the other keys such as CTRL,
| or numbered function keys, but it is possible.
|
| (I do not use those programs on my own computer, but on
| some other computers I sometimes have to, and this helps,
| although not as well as it would to use menus and other
| stuff instead. However, in some cases I was able to use it
| because of knowledge of older versions of Microsoft Office;
| many of the keyboard commands are the same.)
|
| I think the menu bar is much better, and toolbars should
| not be needed for most things. With the menu bar it will
| underline the letters to push with ALT and also will tell
| you what other keys to use (if any) for that command. (One
| thing that a toolbar is helpful for is to display status of
| various functions that can change, such as the current
| font. Due to that, you might still have a toolbar, but you
| do not need to put everything in the toolbar. Perhaps
| combine the toolbar with the status bar to make it
| compact.)
|
| (Something else that would improve these word processing
| software would be the "reveal codes" like Word Perfect. A
| good implementation of reveal codes would avoid some of the
| problems of WYSIWYG. For spreadsheet software, arranging
| the grid into zones, and assigning properties (including
| formatting and formulas) to zones, and making references
| work with zones, etc, would be helpful, but I don't know
| that any existing software does that.)
|
| In my own software I do try to make the display compact so
| that there is more room for other stuff, instead of needing
| to put all of the commands and other stuff taking up too
| much space in the screen. Good documentation is helpful to
| make it understandable; this would work much better than
| trying to design the software to not need documentation,
| since then the lack of doumentation makes it difficult to
| understand.
| tombert wrote:
| The thing that bothers me more than ribbon itself is how much
| the performance started degrading once they introduced it.
|
| I got MS Office 97 working in Wine recently, and it's still
| shockingly capable. There are lots of formatting options, it
| can read my system TTF fonts, and it's since it's nearly
| thirty-year-old software, it runs ridiculously fast on modern
| computers.
|
| I don't feel like MS has added many more features to Office
| that I actually care about, but I feel like the software has
| gotten progressively slower.
| quacked wrote:
| Forget modern computers. I booted up my dad's COMPAQ from
| 1998, running Windows 2000, and was blown away by the speed
| and logical layout of the applications. I have to grit my
| teeth using W11 File Explorer because of what I recently
| re-experienced.
| Sophira wrote:
| I imagine Office 365 is to Office 97 as FIFA 23 is to FIFA
| 97, in that it's still essentially the same idea and can
| never be otherwise, but the later versions are designed to
| draw new people in.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I've said before that I don't think there's anything
| missing in Office 2000 for upwards of 90% of users' word
| processor/spreadsheet/etc needs, and this is supported by
| the popularity of the somewhat spartan GSuite apps (Docs is
| basically WordPad with realtime collab tacked on, not even
| a full Word 2000 equivalent for example).
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| It's also stupid in terms of screen real estate.
|
| Earlier Word/CorelDraw/etc had a thin toolbar with lots of
| functionality. Barely occupied any space at just 800x600
| resolution.
|
| Nowadays, the ribbon and all other junk occupy a huge portion
| of the screen, even at 1920x1080.
|
| It's amazing how little screen area today actually shows the
| useful part of a document.
|
| Instead of the Ribbon, a thin context sensitive toolbar would
| have been more useful.
| etbebl wrote:
| You know the ribbon can be collapsed so that it behaves
| more like a drop-down menu, right?
| dingaling wrote:
| It doesn't really act that way, as (1) it can't be
| accessed with keyboard shortcuts and (2) it's difficult
| to scan for the desired feature as it's a visual jumble
| of buttons and text. Oh, and it might not be visible!
| Sometimes features can only be found in pop-out dialogs.
|
| Having used Office products for 30+, my most-used feature
| of the Ribbon is Search, because I don't have time to
| waste hunting through a poorly-organised heap.
| saratogacx wrote:
| To your (1), if you tap Alt all of the alt keys current
| available show up next to their associated buttons. (Top
| level menu). Hit the letter for where you want to go and
| it than will show you the next set of alt keys (available
| items on the ribbon itself). You can also use the arrows
| to move around the menus or tabs when in this mode. It
| isn't obvious but the ribbon, as office implemented it,
| is very keyboard accessible.
| M95D wrote:
| But then, you have to learn the sortcuts (if there are
| any) or click first to open it, then click
| button/funciton, which is 50% slower.
|
| Also, classic button bars were customizable. You could
| add/remove/group buttons in any order you like. And there
| were lots and lots of buttons that were not present in
| any of the default toolbars. The ribbon is fixed AFAIK.
| omnibrain wrote:
| > It's also stupid in terms of screen real estate.
|
| You can't really blame MS that around the same time screen
| manufacturers started to switch to 16:9 for cost reasons
| and cheap laptops all only offered a 1366x786 resolution.
| moron4hire wrote:
| The whole "UIs got smaller because the aspect ratio got
| more rectangular" thing never really made sense to me
| because 786 > 600. The screens got bigger in _both_
| dimensions, regardless of them getting bigger in one more
| than they got bigger in the other.
| Arainach wrote:
| Pixels aren't physical space. The number of square inches
| remained similar.
|
| A wider aspect ratio means that a horizontal line takes
| up a larger percentage of the overall screen and is more
| costly.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| I think the ribbon is terrible. When you are looking for
| something, you can't just look in one direction but you have
| to scan up and down. Then it may be text or just an image.
| And the thing you are looking for may be on some other ribbon
| page.
|
| I much prefer menus with toolbars that have only the most
| used functions.
| bediger4000 wrote:
| _allowing beginners to discover all the functionality_
|
| How many beginners were there in 2007? Hardly any, PC and
| "Word" penetration was pretty close to 100%. We are still
| stuck with "beginners have to figure this out" interfaces in
| 2026.
| linmob wrote:
| As long as new humans are still being born, there's always
| going to be beginners - with a few years delay, once they
| enter school or a work place. ;-)
| wolpoli wrote:
| > For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover
| all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.
|
| Sure, but where are the beginners are we talking about? In
| 2007, Microsoft office had long reached dominance in the
| workplace and school such that the only beginners are
| students learning word prcessing for the first time.
| lunar_rover wrote:
| The beginners are long time workspace and school users who
| were requesting features already in the product.
| omnibrain wrote:
| > 2010 was my favorite Office UI.
|
| Mine too. Office 2010 was what made me switch back to Windows
| after using Linux and OpenOffice for years. I found the
| ribbons to be perfect for my use of Office. They usually
| automatically focused on the task at hand. Everything else
| was just a click away. Advanced stuff stayed in the menu.
| And, at least for me, it helped discoverability of features.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| The ribbon doesnt work for because the options change and
| visibility is decided by how big my windows is.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I don't buy it. My generation used pre-Ribbon Office, from
| elementary school onward, just fine. It wasn't made for
| children; it was made for Boomers who couldn't grok the menu-
| based interface. Not old people; prime workforce-aged Boomers
| who were intimidated by computers, but who were being dragged
| kicking-and-screaming into the Information Age by their jobs.
| It was just another example of the infantilization of
| interfaces provided to that generation whenever they whined
| about not wanting to learn, or being scared by, something
| new. Everyone else just got dragged along with them.
| beloch wrote:
| People need to go back and use Win 3.1 or MacOS 7.x to realize
| what a leap forward Win95 was. MacOS 7.x didn't even have
| preemptive multitasking! The start menu and task bar made their
| debut and immediately anchored the whole UI. Since then,
| Windows has made incremental advances (with the occasional step
| backwards), but no change has been nearly so radical. OS X
| would not have been possible without the influence of win95.
| We're still living in the Win95 age.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| OS X inherited its multitasking model from NeXTSTEP, which
| predates Win95 by several years.
| LtWorf wrote:
| You have to use windows 95 with a computer from 1995 to
| realise how painfully slow it was compared to windows 3.
| hollandheese wrote:
| Windows 3.11 loads in less than a blink of an eye on my
| Pentium MMX, while Windows 98 takes at least a minute to
| boot. This is with a 8 GB CF card as the HDD too, so the
| I/O is going as fast as possible.
| M95D wrote:
| It's because of drivers and PnP and especially USB. When
| you load Win3.1, WinNT4 and lower, drivers load without
| scanning for hardware presence. It's just a disk to
| memory copy. In Win95, the first PnP OS, it scans for PnP
| hardware at every boot. That's slow.
|
| To prove my point, you could try loading some of the USB
| drivers for DOS or one of the ISA PnP configuration
| utilities (such as ICU - Intel Configuration Utility),
| see how fast it boots then!
|
| Also, if you left the network config untouched, it
| defaults to TCPIP+DHCP, and when DHCP doesn't respond
| (cable unplugged), it's another 30s delay. Win311 didn't
| have TCPIP unless you install it manually. It also asks
| you to configure it during installation - less likely to
| select DHCP if you don't have it. And then, in Win311,
| network is started by DOS (NET START in autoexec.bat),
| not by Windows.
| LtWorf wrote:
| Besides the boot (which windows 3 didn't even do so I
| don't see why we are comparing it), from clicking on the
| start menu the 1st time after boot, to the start menu
| actually appearing on screen it would take 1-2 minutes to
| populate on windows 95, while on windows 3 on the same
| machine there would be no such issue.
| M95D wrote:
| This is not true. Win95 start menu appears instantly. I
| dare you to prove me wrong.
|
| You are probably thinking of Win98 menu where they added
| IE.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I am thinking of windows 95 with a computer from 1995, in
| the year 1995. If you use it on a vm today... yeah thanks
| for not proving anything.
| M95D wrote:
| I'm not using a vm. I have an early 2000s computer
| running several old OSs. In Win98 I replaced the shell
| with the one from Win95 because it's faster. See 98lite:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_remastering#98lite
| LtWorf wrote:
| I am not a great mathematical genius but I suspect that
| "early 2000s" came several years after 1995. Correct?
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I have used both Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Windows 95 does
| have some significant benefits (e.g. you can start Windows
| programs from the DOS prompt (I seem to remember that you
| cannot do this in Windows 3.1 and in Windows 95 you can, but
| I am not sure if I remember correctly), and the WIN+R
| shortcut, and some others), but also many problems (although
| some can be avoided by changing stuff in the registry; I had
| done that to force it to display the file name extensions for
| all file names, rather than hiding them even if you tell it
| to display them; I also dislike their decision to use spaces
| in file names).
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| You could change the option to hide file extensions in the
| explorer settings windows; no registry tweak was needed.
|
| Not wanting spaces in file names is certainly a bold
| opinion! I think you'll find yourself in a very small
| minority there.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I don't have strong feelings either way, but I can see
| the perspective that underscores should suffice, and that
| introducing white space into filenames makes certain file
| and data management tasks more difficult and
| unpredictable.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| > You could change the option to hide file extensions in
| the explorer settings windows; no registry tweak was
| needed.
|
| The is a setting in Explorer, but it does not affect all
| file types; some (such as .lnk) are not affected by that
| setting and hide the extension anyways.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some
| absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release
| something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it
| should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on
| the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for
| decades now.
|
| eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night
| due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era
| had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do
| i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design
| was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off
| white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-
| look-at-apples-breathing-li...
|
| Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and
| taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design
| hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme)
| which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're
| hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory
| from their own previous 'amazing designs'.
|
| Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless
| articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when,
| if you think about what they did for even a second you'd
| realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".
| gerdesj wrote:
| I recently had to get printing working for a family member on
| an Apple tablet. I'm not an Apple jockey so it took me a
| while to sort out and I've being using computers since 1980
| and consulting since 1995.
|
| You tap an icon that looks like the outline of a rectangle
| with an arrow pointing up. Then you tap the name of the
| printer. Then you tap another rectangle with an up arrow and
| then tap the word "Print".
|
| I may have got the precise steps wrong but it really is that
| abstruse to print something on a tablet. Never mind that
| mDNS/Bonjour has done its thing - the steps to actually
| indicate that you want to print is frankly weird.
|
| What on earth is that box with an up arrow actually supposed
| to mean? Why does the interface switch from icons to text?
| 1bpp wrote:
| Android uses the 'share' icon to represent the same thing,
| which is maybe a little more legible, but still feels like
| shoving way too many actions under a confusing modal they
| shouldn't be in. Even worse when apps implement a _custom_
| share dialog.
| toast0 wrote:
| I usually see the Android share icon with the word share.
| Apple doesn't often present words with icons, so if you
| don't already know what the icon means, it's difficult to
| find out.
|
| Arguably, it's a bit off that you share a document with a
| printer in order to print it, but I feel like printing is
| no longer so common as to require a dedicated button
| everywhere; and printing from a phone still seems like a
| novelty to me (but I do use it; it feels odd, but useful
| and I know lots of people have no computer to print from)
| crooked-v wrote:
| It's supposed to be the "Share" menu, but that stopped
| meaning anything very fast because they just crammed
| everything into it for lack of other UX for system
| services.
|
| Macs have the problem multiple times over, because now they
| have the normal menu bar and toolbar, _and_ a Share menu
| that just gets arbitrary stuff dumped into by App Store
| apps, _and_ the Services menu that shows up in some
| contexts but not others, _and_ the Quick Actions menu that
| shows up in some contexts but not others, _and_ some
| services can just add things directly to right click menus.
| xattt wrote:
| Apple UI designers wanted to avoid the Android hamburger
| so much that they doubled-down on the share menu to
| duplicate hamburger menu functionality.
|
| I guess printing it to paper is a form of sharing so they
| may have the last laugh.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Windows Explorer supports its own equivalent to the
| "Share" menu, dubbed "Send To". It was there already in
| the original Windows 9x. Printers are generally not
| listed though, there is a separate "Print" option
| instead.
| hakfoo wrote:
| There's a very reasonable argument behind that, though.
|
| "Sending" a file to another disc or on the network is
| non-transformative. At the far end, it's still a _file_.
|
| But "printing" is inherently transformative-- you're
| expecting to get something clearly _not_ a file (print-
| to-file pseudo-printers excepted).
|
| I can see the desire for minimalism-- having seperate
| rows for "share/send" and "print" is, well, two seperate
| rows. But if you offer adaptable and configurable
| interfaces, I could see suppressing one or both depending
| on context or user preferences. (You have no external
| drives or registered share-recipients? No "Send
| To/Share")
| opan wrote:
| Obligatory:
|
| https://retrohacker.substack.com/p/bye-cups-printing-
| with-ne...
| benj111 wrote:
| Maybe I've been in Linux land too long but sending a file
| to a printer seems pretty obvious to me. Yes it's
| transformative in a way, but you could equally argue that
| my word document with A4 layout is a digital version of a
| document, and the print out is equivalent.
|
| To me there seems to be more difference between sending
| and share. One is pushing something somewhere, the other
| implies making it available for someone/thing to pull.
|
| I'm not particularly saying you're wrong btw. We are
| talking metaphors, and there's no 'correct' way to do it.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| Good point. Its a mess. Come on apple get someone to fix
| this
| alexdbird wrote:
| It's called the Action icon, a generalisation of its
| original Share meaning. It's used throughout the Apple
| ecosystem so knowing that's where actions live is not a big
| expectation.
|
| You've mangled the steps. You only press one Action icon in
| this sequence, then you select Print, then you need to
| select the printer and any other options, then you tap
| Print. Which of these steps do you think 'abstruse'?
|
| Are you suggesting they should use a little icon of a
| printer, peripheral that takes many wildly different forms,
| instead of the word Print?
| benj111 wrote:
| There's a printer icon in windows and *nix. Many icons
| represent things that have wildly different forms. People
| and cars look different, but road signs manage to portray
| these things.
| wtetzner wrote:
| We've had clear, legible printer icons for decades.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| I got no problem with that tiny LED or glowing apple logo
| personally
|
| But liquid glass and insane amount of bugs that arrived with
| it is killing me.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| Likely you experienced later gens where they toned it down.
| ~2010 it was one of the brightest LEDs you could purchase.
| As in they literally put a torch LED on the all white Intel
| macbooks of the era and it would shine through the laptop
| bags, pulsating.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| Maybe...
| tomxor wrote:
| Not Maybe, I owned a 2009 MBP. Everyone with a macbook
| from that period that I knew had the same issue, they
| were absurdly bright, you could not keep it anywhere near
| a bedroom without putting very thick tape over the light.
|
| It was a poorly thought out design of aesthetics over
| ergonomics.
| throwaway290 wrote:
| nope. actually I remember I had that model first and yes
| I still don't care. simply the least annoying light
| compared to other bright color leds in a room. doesn't
| stand close to liquid glass chaos.
|
| loved battery level indicators on old macbooks too, they
| kind of brought it back with led on magsafe except this
| new led is more annoying.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| There's people who live their lives with the low battery
| beep on their smoke alarm going off every 5 minutes in
| their home and don't even register it happening.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| I liked the gentle amber sleep mode breathing power button on
| my circa-2000 CRT iMac. It wasn't nearly as bright as that of
| later models and was quite nice.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I had one from 2010 and the bright light wasn't even the
| main problem at night.
|
| The charger emitted an annoying high pitch sound so I'd
| have to unplug it.
|
| And the device turned itself on randomly at night, and the
| CD-ROM reader and fans would spin up and make noise.
|
| I've now used a macbook air for work and I noticed that
| even when in "standby" for a week my router had a DHCP
| lease for it. So they still turn on for no reason, but at
| least the lack of fans and the fact that I can now use a
| decent usbc charger means they don't wake me up any more.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| You can disable it but yes macs will periodically wake up
| to get emails and notifications even while they are
| 'sleeping'
| windowsrookie wrote:
| You can disable "Wake for Network Access" in the battery
| settings if you want. It's a convenience option that lets
| MacOS check for new iMessages and other updates while
| it's asleep. That way all your messages are loaded
| immediately when you wake the device.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I didn't even set it up with an apple account and thus I
| cannot possibly get any messages from iMessages.
| LtWorf wrote:
| I love how when americans wake up simple factual
| statements get downvoted because they are somehow seen as
| personal insults.
|
| Feel free to downvote, this one is meant for it :)
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Status lights can be helpful, although they should be dim,
| and should be red or green (or possibly yellow) rather than
| blue or white (unless you have already used the other colours
| and now you need more colours).
| f1shy wrote:
| Red and green, if the color has some meaning, should be
| avoided. 10% of males have problems with that colors
| (dyschromatopsia) specially with led colors. For indicators
| blue and white are very easy to see, even in not optimal
| lightning. The option to disable them is nice.
|
| > unless you have already used the other colours and now
| you need more colours
|
| In that case you will end up with Christmas decorations.
| Better solution is usually placement and form.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Mixing red and green should be avoided. There's no
| problem using either alone. Human color vision is the
| least sensitive to blue light, so a blue indicator led
| has to be made brighter than an equivalent red or green
| led to be as visible in bright ambient lighting. But that
| makes blue leds disastrous in low light, where the
| opposite is the case (vision is the _most_ sensitive to
| blue). Of course there never was any reason for blue
| standby lights except the fact that blue leds had novelty
| value and looked futuristic compared to boring old red
| and green leds.
| f1shy wrote:
| > release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid
| that it should be embarrassing
|
| I'm still trying to understand who came with the idea of
| charging the mouse from under, instead of from a position
| that would allow to use the mouse while charging...
| Sharlin wrote:
| Textbook case of form over function. Either an engineering
| constraint forced by the design and deemed an acceptable
| trade-off by higher-ups, or maybe more likely, the designer
| just thought a visible charging port would've ruined their
| design.
| tavavex wrote:
| While the exact reason has never been documented, if you
| look at that mouse's design, you'll see that its first
| generation had a regular battery compartment on the
| bottom. When gen 2 arrived, they fully reused the same
| shell and only replaced that bottom part to now be an
| integrated battery with a charging port instead of a
| compartment for AAs. Moving the charging port would've
| required a brand new design, since every edge of the
| mouse tapers way too much for a port to be placed
| anywhere else. They would also probably need to change
| more of the internal structure, as opposed to just
| swapping a battery module and changing the bottom lid. In
| this case the constraint seems to just be about
| functionality and manufacturing. Apple has made many
| controversial design decisions that have no functional
| justifications in the past, yet people keep bringing up
| the mouse.
| throw_away_623 wrote:
| The reason people talk about the mouse is that it's one
| of the worst ideas they ever had.
|
| At the time, I remember someone claimed that the reason
| was that they were afraid people could leave it plugged
| in for convenience. Apple thought that would lead to a
| worse experience because their mouse was designed to be
| used wirelessly. I think it was actually more related to
| aesthetic "icks" by the designers, because people would
| have disconnected the cable if it was in the way.
| alexdbird wrote:
| Honestly, as a user of the mouse, I think the main reason
| people talk about the mouse is bike shedding. Charging
| isn't a problem in actual use, but everyone sure has an
| opinion on it.
|
| There are plenty of contenders for 'worst ideas they ever
| had' and this just isn't up there.
| Oreb wrote:
| I agree, I always found the charging port location to be
| a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is
| fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low
| long before the mouse dies.
| alexdbird wrote:
| In fact, the real crime of the Magic Mouse is how awkward
| it is to switch it between machines.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| "If you see a stylus, they blew it"
|
| That's a quote from Steve Jobs about how basically all of
| their competition (except Google) had made the mistake of
| trying to ship desktop software on phones. The problem
| with the stylus is that it's a hardware workaround for a
| software problem: the sort of cost-reduced engineering
| you get when a company wants to "have a mobile strategy"
| without actually putting in the time and effort to make
| something good.
|
| The Magic Mouse is the exact same kind of "we couldn't
| care less" cost-reduction. The charging port is on the
| bottom because that's the only place you can put a
| charging port with the existing all-glass design. Because
| they re-used an existing design intended for removable
| batteries. This is such an uncharacteristically un-Apple
| move, and one so obviously detrimental to the design of
| the device, that people (including myself) actually
| psyopped themselves into thinking Apple had deliberately
| designed the mouse to enforce wireless usage.
|
| And, to be clear, Apple has never done that.
|
| All their other peripherals with rechargeable batteries
| in them will let you use them fully wired if you plug
| them in. In fact, if you somehow engineered a way to move
| the charging port somewhere less stupid, the Magic Mouse
| probably would work plugged-in, too.
|
| If you see a charging port on the bottom, they blew it.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Yet it is one thing I love very much about my MX anywhere
| 3. The wire connection is simply more performance and I
| get to use it when I did not charge. It is also
| compatible with any non-Bluetooth device.
| specialist wrote:
| > _it 's one of the worst ideas_
|
| It's _still_ one of the worst ideas. Insult to injury.
| leoc wrote:
| > I think it was actually more related to aesthetic
| "icks" by the designers, because people would have
| disconnected the cable if it was in the way.
|
| A lot of people really will just anxiously leave the
| cable in the whole time if given the opportunity. I have
| a wired/wireless Logitech mouse and I confess that I
| hardly ever remove the cable. Between this, and the space
| and connector issues of adding a "normal" cable
| connection as referred to in the grandparent, we have two
| reasons to think that Apple's decision wasn't all that
| clearly bad, let alone one of their worst.
| just6979 wrote:
| Nobody leaves the cables attached. Except wanna be pro
| gamers who think a couple milliseconds will help them
| more than practice to "git gud". Every mouse I have is
| wireless, and I almost never use them plugged in, except
| for the one on the server that get used so rarely it's
| self-discharged should probably be wired but I simply
| don't have any wired ones left. Just plug them in
| overnight every once in a while, golden.
| V99 wrote:
| This is not even close to the worst ideas Apple ever had,
| even if you're only talking about mice.
|
| The original USB mouse (for the first iMac) was round, so
| you couldn't orient it in your hand without looking at it
| constantly.
|
| And it came with a very short cord (because there was a
| port on the right side of the keyboard to plug it into).
| But then the laptops got updated with USB ports and they
| were only on the LEFT side of the case.
|
| For at least a year or two you could not buy an Apple
| mouse for your Apple PowerBook and use it in your right
| hand, because the cord was too short to go around the
| case.
|
| Eventually they shipped a "Pro" mouse with revolutionary
| elongated shape and longer cord. (...and optical
| tracking, and what looked like zero buttons, which were
| pretty neat)
| CableNinja wrote:
| Uhg i totally forgot about their round mouse. Bright
| colored iMac days!
| moron4hire wrote:
| While I get the feeling you appreciate the, erhm,
| efficiency with which Apple modified this product, the
| problem is that Apple is not supposed to be efficient.
| They don't need to save money on the engineering process
| because they are not hurting for money. They sell
| themselves as being a design-forward company that prides
| itself on making bold, not expedient, choices. To take a
| shortcut like that shows a lack of respect for the
| customer to whom they are charging premium prices for
| these items.
| benj111 wrote:
| So if they're reusing the shell, they passed the savings
| on to customers right?
|
| If this were a PS10 mouse then this excuse might be
| valid, but it isn't.
| opan wrote:
| How many generations of that mouse design have there been
| now? Any changes to it? Wireless charging support could be
| a nice bandaid on that terrible design.
| sandermvanvliet wrote:
| Let me introduce you to the world of _devices for keeping
| small kids asleep_.
|
| For whatever reason they won't work when hooked up to a
| charger and of course the moment you need them most the
| batteries have gone dead so you must charge...
|
| At this point I can't help but think that the people who
| design these things really hate parents
| askvictor wrote:
| I believe that was intentional, to prevent people using it
| plugged in, which would mean most people would keep it
| plugged in all the time, so it wouldn't be a wireless mouse
| anymore, but also degrade the battery lifespan.
| fainpul wrote:
| I also believe that was intentional. But the reason was
| the typical Apple / Jobs hubris of knowing better than
| the users. The desktop looks cleaner with fewer cables,
| so they wanted to _enforce_ use without the cable plugged
| in.
|
| I don't have a source for this, but I'm pretty sure I've
| read something like that a long time ago.
| treyd wrote:
| Maybe they should have made the batteries replaceable and
| make it operable without batteries installed.
|
| Or just ship a wired version for the people who want
| that.
| bombcar wrote:
| That wired hockey puck mouse was an abomination
| chocochunks wrote:
| It was intentional to recycle the design of the Magic
| Mouse 1 which used AA batteries. The Magic Touchpad and
| Keyboard came out the exact same day as the Magic Mouse 2
| and they don't share the Magic Mouse 2's stupid design.
| They both have perfectly usable ports on the front and
| even work when wired without pairing.
| benj111 wrote:
| Right.... So.... Add some charging circuitry. Is it a
| problem if people don't use it as a wireless mouse
| anyway.
|
| Yes it's very apple to force users to use devices how
| Apple wants, but that isn't a particularly good reason.
| userbinator wrote:
| Cycling the battery continuously is worse for lifespan.
| userbinator wrote:
| Where should a cord on a mouse be when it's charging? The
| same place as any cord on a mouse should be, i.e. the tail,
| would be the commonsense answer. Indeed this is how all
| other dual-mode mouses do it.
| specialist wrote:
| Their laptop touchpads are the only Apple "pointer" input
| device I've ever liked. (And by extension, the iPhone and
| iPad.)
|
| I hate myself every time I settle for yet another
| disposable Microsoft mouse.
|
| Though, I would have killed for an Apple Pencil, back when
| I was a CAD jockey.
|
| For me, the butterfly keyboard was Apple's mostest worstest
| user interface design decision.
|
| (Doubly so because it persisted for so long. I love that
| Apple (and others) try new things. But I don't understand
| commitment to design failures.)
|
| Source: I've been an Apple partisan since the Apple ][.
| Even stubbornly resisting Amiga's siren call.
| jaffa2 wrote:
| > For me, the butterfly keyboard was Apple's mostest
| worstest user interface design decision.
|
| I really liked the butterfly kb. It was responsive, and
| you could hit the key cap anywhere and it would
| register.*
|
| Subsequent mac book keyboards imo are all terrible and
| suffer from the terrible issue of sponge-ness that means
| i can literally press a key cap in a slightly off centre
| location and it Does Not Register. Its like the key
| movement is separate from the actuation. I have way more
| mis key and missing letter using later post butterfly kbs
| than i ever did. The worst part is this is 'normal' and
| not a fault. You just have to press harder and in the
| centre.
|
| * except when it was in for work i had 3x top case
| replaced on my old mbp
| specialist wrote:
| Ya, you're right. When it worked, it worked well. A point
| worth remembering, thanks. Alas, they just weren't robust
| enough, interferring with my work.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I like the status lights on my old X200 a lot (on/off,
| battery, disk, wlan I believe, and more). It's a shame we
| don't have them like that any longer in Thinkpads. We only
| get one or two LEDs indicating on/off status. But such things
| need to be done right.
| wolvoleo wrote:
| Yes or the sharp edges on MacBooks cutting into your wrist.
| That started with the unibody design, the ones before that
| had a nice soft rounded plastic gasket there
|
| My powerbook was the last apple laptop I really enjoyed.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| They're the flagship "design here, build there," company, so
| they got the Pollock treatment.
|
| I'm glad people are finally saying it. Eat your heart out,
| Nilay.
| Telaneo wrote:
| MS may not have been as tasteful as MacOS, but the
| functionality was at least there and it was easy to find and
| use. That goes a long way to make up for the bland-ish look.
|
| Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality
| and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.
| pcurve wrote:
| What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it
| crashed, it crashed hard without warning
|
| With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save
| and prepare.
|
| I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady
| and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which
| had to many Unix conventions.
| analog31 wrote:
| I once proved to my boss that a font was crashing System 7.
| And we always unplugged the network when we didn't need it
| because a crash on one Mac could bring down every other Mac
| on the network.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| With System 7 or Mac OS 8/8.5/9, if one used it for long
| enough with a stable software setup you'd eventually get a
| gut feel for what programs, extension sets, etc were most
| likely to invite a crash (it wasn't a terrible idea to reboot
| after a long web browsing session with Netscape for
| instance). It wasn't surefire, but one _could_ get it into a
| somewhat stable state. You never stopped hammering [?]S,
| though.
|
| Windows 2000 was incredible. Running it after having wrestled
| with 98SE was like getting teleported from a garbage dump to
| sunny meadow with a fresh ocean breeze. I've never seen
| machines transform quite as radically as they did when
| upgrading from something earlier to 2000.
| giantrobot wrote:
| General protection errors and BSODs say hello, also to hit
| CTRL + ALT + DELETE to restart.
| throwawaytea wrote:
| I have good news for you. Even a Linux Mint Mate would make you
| happy again, let alone some of the windows 95 look alikes.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was
| _functional_ but it wasn 't particularly _elegant._ But the
| part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs
| and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT
| was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at
| Sun) were having the Workstation UX
| argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component
| was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing
| on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste
| of resources." And the counter argument was that different
| people would find the ways that work best for them, and having
| a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a
| probably a way that worked for more people.
|
| The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or
| get things done. For me getting things done won every time.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Jobs did understand that. In the same quote he says Microsoft
| earned their success.
| qalmakka wrote:
| This. Windows 9x-2000 GUIs were probably the pinnacle of OS
| UX, but were utterly ugly and boring as UIs. Their looks were
| unimpressive and boring, but they got the job done and they
| were easy to use and worked well. Windows 95 was like a 90
| cents spoon - not particularly appealing, but extremely
| useful
| jeberle wrote:
| The "no taste" quote makes no sense given that Susan Kare did
| the many of the significant icons in Windows 95. She did the
| same for the Mac.
| jdswain wrote:
| The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user
| interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT
| computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.
| sedatk wrote:
| Exactly. Windows Cairo was planned to be a competitor to
| NeXTSTEP, and later, parts of it made it to Windows 95 and
| NT.
| nextstepfan wrote:
| Windows 95 is a rip-off of NeXTStep
| JustinGoldberg9 wrote:
| There's an entire is that loves 90s msft user interface.
| SerenityOS.
| M95D wrote:
| SerenityOS was born dead. Let me explain why.
|
| No new OS today will ever be used by any significant number
| of people without 1) a working web browser and 2) hardware
| support for laptops, phones, wifi cards... you know... stuff
| people already have.
|
| SerenityOS might get a working browser. Not very likely, but
| it might get it. The #2 condition will only be solved if it
| somehow "imports" Linux drivers or wrap Windows binary
| drivers in a compatibility layer (like Linux used to have for
| wifi).
|
| Their policy to not use any external code or libraries is
| what will finally kill the project. It's simply not possible
| for them to rewrite any significant portion of drivers
| needed. Not even Linux can keep up and they have lots of
| contributors from the hardware industry.
|
| They could probably make SerenityOS a VM-only OS. That could
| work. Run Linux as a HAL and SerenityOS as a UI on top. But
| then, why not write a complete Linux userspace to replace
| Gnu?
| renehsz wrote:
| SerenityOS serves as a cool side project for those who like
| to tinker with OS dev. I don't think it was "born" with any
| other goals in mind. Neither was their browser project, it
| just happened to turn into something a lot more serious.
| opan wrote:
| I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme
| (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but
| due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions
| and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing
| (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings),
| I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the
| oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000
| not very much.
|
| In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very
| attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've
| grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a
| screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used,
| and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real
| nostalgia involved.
|
| I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with
| classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that
| closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.
| kettlecorn wrote:
| Microsoft has for short periods in its history put out good UX
| and design, but fundamentally the company doesn't defend taste
| and design.
|
| The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense
| only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception
| changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great
| design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes
| it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader
| and the culture resets.
|
| That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone,
| Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.
| glenstein wrote:
| Amazing you say that because I almost posted that comment in
| response to that same clip in another HN thread, for the same
| reason. There's a tight integration between style, performance,
| and design on the Windows 95 and 98 that then now feels more
| like "true" Windows than anything since.
|
| I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they
| certainly had taste during their peak.
| reddalo wrote:
| Performance started going downhill with Windows XP, and then
| even more with Windows Vista.
|
| Modern Windows doesn't feel snappy anymore, even thought we
| have the most powerful computers we've ever had.
|
| Sometimes I use some old Win32 apps, and they feel so
| responsive and light...
| bartread wrote:
| I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps
| both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design
| between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at
| their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking
| about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what
| any other company was offering), and have both been on a down
| trend ever since.
|
| Why is that though? Why does that appear to _have_ to be the
| case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get
| worse nowadays? And why hasn't any other player managed to step
| in and fill that void?
|
| Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.
|
| Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-
| hostile, and "micro-tiresome" ways? Is it that they don't
| really have to compete any more, or at least not with
| eachother?
|
| What _is_ going on here? I don't understand. But I wish I did
| because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I
| still don't think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of
| the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer -
| certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and
| scientific niches.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| I think there's something to be said for the loss of
| institutional knowledge, as that was the time when the first
| set of Baby Boomers would have been transitioning out of
| operational roles or the workforce altogether. My experience
| as a Millennial is that they and older Gen-X, as a cohort,
| have been quite jealous of their accumulated expertise and
| generally reticent to pass it along, especially when they'd
| learned to keep every edge possible in the hyper-competitive
| job markets of the 80s and 90s. It's possible that a lot of
| knowledge just disappeared, leaving the younger generations
| to reinvent the wheel at a cuil over the circumstances that
| brought about the UX they'd grown up with.
| baq wrote:
| > Microsoft not having taste
|
| the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and
| design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that
| video
| kmeisthax wrote:
| What's doubly-insulting about Liquid Glass is that Windows
| Vista did the glass thing _better_. Aero rivaled mid-2000s
| Aqua in design chops, and in some ways did a better job of
| showing off what GPU compositing could do. But most
| importantly Microsoft actually understood that text on glass
| needs loads of background protection, damn it.
| frizlab wrote:
| But did you use 95 when you were young? I was using primarily
| MacOS at the time and always found windows particularly bad at
| everything, including UI/UX. I guess we like what we know...
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon
|
| What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's
| still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen
| real estate has become cheaper.
| lstodd wrote:
| I generally agree, only that XP was okay in my opinion after
| one disabled all fluff so that it looked like 98SE.
|
| It's no wonder XFCE and to lesser extent Mate are popular,
| XFCE4 does a nice job of being a handy tool and not in-your-
| face design manifest.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple
| presence.
|
| It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about
| Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly
| any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.
|
| Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7
| as my favourite UI flavour ones.
| panzi wrote:
| 2000 was peak except for them still having those tiny non-
| resizeable dialogs with long lists in them which you have to
| scroll horizontally and vertically. WTF? Your typical Linux DE
| was better at that even back then.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Steven Jobs conveniently ignored the Start menu when discussing
| the competition. He probably secretly admired it, as it was a
| complete success story for Microsoft.
|
| https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en
| khazhoux wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yes and with all these huge and siloed teams you end up with no
| consistency even within a single app
| titzer wrote:
| Microsoft had thousands of people working on Windows. Sun
| Microsystems had thousands of people working on Java.
| zokier wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Wasn't Windows 95 just a copy of Windows NT, which was the real
| product.
| gattilorenz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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=11.
| ..
| pndy wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I think you're going to enjoy my talk!
| gyomu wrote:
| Ok, except operating a commercial airliner literally takes
| thousands of hours of training, requires an extremely detailed
| mental model for how air flight works, and heavily relies on
| external procedures like checklists to ensure safe operation.
|
| And fatal accidents due to poorly thought out control systems
| do occur.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design...
|
| Also fwiw using the word "intuitive" is an instant sign of
| someone not being a great designer.
|
| https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
| WalterBright wrote:
| The 757 cockpit designers did use the word "intuitive" a lot.
|
| The control stick movements, for example, are intuitive.
| (Early aircraft did not have control sticks!)
|
| For a crazy example, airplane jargon has specific meanings.
| "Takeoff Power" officially means full power to take off with.
| Makes intuitive sense, right? Well, one day the pilot needed
| to abort a landing, and yelled "takeoff power". The copilot
| heard "take off power" (note the space), chopped the power,
| and the airliner crashed. The jargon was changed to "full
| power".
|
| The Air Force, however, had their own jargon and stuck with
| "Takeoff Power", until one day they had the same accident and
| changed the jargon.
|
| For another example, the levers for the flaps have a knob on
| them shaped like a flap. This way, the pilot has tactile
| feedback that his hands are on the right lever, and he
| doesn't need to take his eyes off his other tasks.
|
| For a third example, cockpit designers put in a warning horn
| for a stall warning. It worked great, and so they put in
| other warning horns, each with a distinct sound.
| Unfortunately, the pilots would confuse them, and do the
| wrong thing. So the "horn" is now a voice that says "stall"
| (or something like that).
|
| Using words for aural indicators still has not percolated out
| of the aviation industry. You don't have any for your car,
| for example. Just chimes, beeps, buzzes, and other primitive
| and hopeless sounds. Oh, lest I forget to mention, the stupid
| incomprehensible icons.
| user3939382 wrote:
| My design is a cli as API+control plane which allows out of
| order and aliased tokens via intent resolution to IR. The GUI
| and CLI are homoiconic in that one builds the other or vice
| versa. When you layer on a nice UI library with intuitive
| controls, now you're cookin' with gas.
| trympet wrote:
| I tend to agree, but the FMC on Boeing aircraft sure leave
| something to be desired.. I do not find the menu/tab system
| very ergonomic (and the non-QWERTY key layout)
| neucoas wrote:
| Asking for qwerty keyboard in an fmc just screams you have
| never been in a cockpit. You dont type into the fmc with both
| hands.
| catskull wrote:
| 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
|
| I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it:
| https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html
|
| Where do you want to go today?
| userbinator wrote:
| As I've joked about before, their slogan now has turned into
| "where do we want you to go today?"
| bitwize wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > Where do you want to go today?
|
| Not fussed. It's my information that i can't keep close to
| home.
| coldfingerr wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If you want a true lesson on design, check out Ask Tog, starting
| here:
|
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| hakfoo wrote:
| I understand the Fitt's Law concepts behind a top menu bar, but
| I wonder if this is a scenario with moving goalposts.
|
| On a 1984 Mac, you had like 512x384 pixels and a system that
| could barely run one program at a time. There was little to no
| possible uncertainty as to who owned the menu bar. (Could desk
| accessories even take control of the menu bar?)
|
| But once you got larger resolutions and the ability to have
| multiple full-size programs running at once, the menu bar could
| belong to any of them. Now, theoretically, you should notice
| which is the currently active window and assume it owns the
| menu bar, but ISTR scenarios where you'd close the window but
| the program would still be running, owning the menu bar, or the
| "active" window was less visually prominent due to task
| switching, etc.
|
| The Windows design-- placing the menu inside the window it
| controls-- avoids any ambiguity there. Clicking "File-Save" in
| Notepad couldn't possibly be interpreted as trying to do
| anything to the Paintbrush window next to it.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| The problem with the Mac UI is that the app's menubar can
| only be accessed by the mouse (can't remember what
| accessibility-enabled mode would allow).
|
| Under Windows, one can access the app's menubar by pressing
| the ALT key to move focus up to the menubar and use the
| cursor keys to navigate along the menubar. If you know the
| letter associated with the top-level menu (shown as
| underlined), then ALT-[letter] would access that top-level
| menu (typically ALT-F would get you to the File menu). So the
| Windows user wouldn't have to move the mouse at all, Fitt's
| Law to the max (or is it min? whatever, it's instant access).
|
| For the ultrawide monitors these days (width >= 4Kpx), if you
| have an app window maximized (or even spanning more than half
| the screen), accessing the menu via mouse is just terrible
| ergonomics on any major OS.
| jonhohle wrote:
| Since OS X 10.3 (2003) Control+F2 moves focus to the Apple
| menu. The arrow keys can then select any menu item which is
| selected with Return or canceled with Escape. Command+?
| will bring you to a search box in the Help menu. Not only
| that, any menu item in any app can be bound to any keyboard
| shortcut of the user's choosing not just the defaults
| provided by the system or application.
| kryptiskt wrote:
| > So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
|
| "Infinitely worse"? Some people really need to cool off the
| hyperbole.
|
| Having each window be a self-contained unit is the far better
| metaphor than making each window transform a global element
| when it is selected. As well as scaling better for bigger
| screens. An edge case like that may well be unfortunate, but it
| could be the price you pay to make the overall better solution.
| jedberg wrote:
| The infinitely worse part was when you maximized the window
| so the menu bar was at the top, but Windows still had the
| border there, which was unclickable.
|
| So now you broke the infinite click target even though it
| looked like it should have one.
| jonhohle wrote:
| That was the point of Tog's conclusion: edges of the screen
| have infinite target size in one cardinal direction, corners
| have infinite target size in two cardinal directions. Any
| click target that's not infinite in comparison, has
| infinitely smaller area, which I suppose you could conclude
| is infinitely worse if clickable area is your primary metric.
|
| This wasn't just the menu bar either. The first Windows
| 95-style interfaces didn't extend the start menu click box to
| the lower left corner of the screen. Not only did you have to
| get the mouse down there, you had to back off a few pixels in
| either direction to open the menu. Same with the applications
| in the task bar.
|
| The concept was similar to NEXTSTEP's dock (that was even
| licensed by Microsoft for Windows 95), but missed the
| infinite area aspect that putting it on the screen edge
| allowed.
| pixelesque wrote:
| > So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
|
| On single monitor setups maybe: but on early OS X multi-monitor
| setups, you then had the farcical situation where the menu
| would only be shown on the "primary" display, and the secondary
| display didn't have any menu at all, so to use menus for
| windows that were on the secondary display, you had to move the
| cursor onto the other primary display where the menu was for
| all windows (or use keyboard shortcuts).
|
| I think 10.6/7 (not sure exactly) was when they started putting
| the menu bar on both displays rather than just the primary.
| tempodox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| i3 makes a lot more sense they should have just gone with that
| shevy-java wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I was a good step forward. Perhaps with the exception that you
| had to click "Start" in order to shut down the computer.
| fishingisfun wrote:
| the loss of X to close programs is sad. I dont like the new
| design philosophy of clicking out the card to close things
| NooneAtAll3 wrote:
| I can't wait until this win95 nostalgia phase stops and my
| nostalgia for actual good UI begins - WinXP for the win
| abanana wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The current WinUI, WinAppSDK, Windows 11 teams should have a
| weekend retreat going down that article.
| hughw wrote:
| "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.
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