I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and at worst provide zero indication of what functionality is available. I once used a phone app for months not knowing there was an extra screen you could open by sliding right on the main UI page. I only found it by accident one day, because there were no hints in the UI..
Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech people.
Look at the atrocious consumer abusive workflow to trap a person into signing up for a microsoft cloud-everything account in the new installation workflow for a brand new Windows 10 or 11 install. Or the out-of-box first user experience upon opening and using a new windows 11 laptop.
You literally cannot even complete a fresh windows 11 install without a live internet connection now, if you're an ordinary non technical end user. It demands to be connected to some form of wired network or wireless with internet access to report home to microsoft and make a cloud based account.
They clearly decided that getting people to sign up for a forever-recurring monthly paid cloud service plan in perpetuity was the best way to go for revenue. Or at least bait them into it by methods like "oh, here's your free 5GB onedrive account, you can totally back up your whole system and use onedrive for everything. What's that, you're out of storage space on your free account? Sign up now for this $12/month account for (some_large_number_of_GB)!"
I'm just amazed at how much crap is crammed onto the title bars and everything these days. Look at the clean interface of Outlook 97-2003 compared to now. They have undo/redo, "customize quick access toolbar", "ribbon display options", your Office Online account, and other crap on the toolbars that used to have the close/minimize/maximize buttons.
I like to think that some PM at Microsoft got promoted and brags about how one of those is 'their' button.
I verbally exclaimed WTF the first time I saw that. How did anyone think that ridiculous distraction is an improvement? Doubly so when the name of the file you want to open next is in the current one --- and helpfully covered up by that abomination.
It's hostile to users like us that can deal with a lot of data at the same time. But many people when they see "old style" UIs get overwhelmed by the mass of information and data, and having that information subdivided helps people. Sadly, they are the majority and we are the minority, so UIs get designed for them and not for us. Nowadays computing systems are being used by the 99% so they are also designed for the 99%.
Honestly, I consider myself quite tech savvy (programmer right?) but I cannot for the life of me figure out all the different locations you can store files any more. Especially my iPhone is a horror in this regard, but over the years I’ve used so many different forms of cloud storage everything is just spread around everywhere.
I think I copied everything to my local disk as well, but it’s 20 years of my life, so I’m disinclined from finally trashing all those various services.
Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
I haven't used it in a while but I've got to admit that I've missed a lot of extremely obviously placed buttons in the Microsoft office suite.
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.
The ribbon interface suffers from poor scan-ability. The problem is actually a common one with MS products since they introduced Metro: they use too much vertical space with irregular layouts. Your eyes just scan more quickly if there’s regularity in the layout and grouping along a single axis.
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
Ctrl+S only does that if a document is unsaved, and it still doesn't actually take you to the save dialog. It takes you to what Microsoft calls the "Save As menu", which takes up the whole window, causing the document content to be obscured, and requires a mouse click after that to get to the actual Save As dialog.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
It's still "File -> Save a Copy" (2 clicks) and I'm on an October build that's as new as it gets externally as far as I know: 2210 Build 16.0.15726.20188.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
Even so, using OneDrive as a backing store for user documents has been integrated into Windows for a while now, and every app that uses standard file save dialogs etc ends up automatically and transparently doing that, so why should Office be special?
I don't think everyone using office in the workd is "under" an IT Admin supervision, many home users and small businesses still use Word and Excel (and local storage), I believe.
Your statement means nothing when Microsoft is using dark patterns to funnel users onto the cloud. Of course the numbers are going up, that in itself does make it a good thing for users.
What I want to do: I created a new file that I want to save in a new folder on shareddrive.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.
I think it should be mentioned that during this era, the whole idea of a GUI was still a relatively new concept to most people. It had been less than a decade since the Mac popularized the idea. It's akin to how long it took for cars to standardize on the accelerator, brake and clutch configuration. It didn't happen overnight. When I went to college in the early 90s, most of my fellow students had dedicated word processors or, less commonly, DOS PCs (and one Amiga), as an example of what was the norm. The only reason I used a Mac was that I was in the design program, where Desktop Publishing was experiencing its heyday. But I could never have afforded one.
In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success.
Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.
Hah! This reminds me of an old adage when teaching people how to use the mouse. Don't ever mention the right mouse button until the absolute last moment, if ever. Because from the second you mention it, every time you say, "OK, now click the [window, button, menu, etc.]" they will instantly ask, "Right or left button?".
Snapchat ushered in the era of undiscoverable UIs. There were other apps that did that, but Snapchat was the most prominent.
Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable.
Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.
To be fair to Snapchat, their camera interface does also have a button to switch cameras. The double tab is just a shortcut. Other apps that have aped this interface also have a button to switch cameras (e.g. Instagram).
You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things.
Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa.
There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.
My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily.
I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneNote or Outlook web apps is less than the Office 98 versions. Google Docs compares poorly feature-wise to WordPerfect versions from the 1990s. It’s quite remarkable how bad this software is compared to how big development teams are now. I don’t know if any other industry that’s ever regressed in this way.
So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
> So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker.
Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both?
> Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59.
> And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be.
I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing."
To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.
How is condensing with menus worse than undiscoverable gestures and button rituals?
IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.
It's definitely a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around - here we're nostalgic for rows and rows of menus and buttons; but Microsoft famously tried to "fix" the menu-and-toolbar "bloat" with the Ribbon, after all, since tons of people had NO IDEA how to deal with all those menus and buttons. "Go through every menu and click every button" was never super discoverable if you're in a hurry. And hell, there are still people who will tell you you're doing it wrong if you're using the UI instead of using Vim/Emacs and a million keyboard shortcuts and plugins... ;)
I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).
I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.
Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about.
They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus.
But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
> As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about.
More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread.
Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.
Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
> there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them.
And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.
The best DOS TUIs were generally those that adopted CUA (e.g. Borland's IDEs and other software written in Turbo Vision). Windows UX also built heavily on it, and it is the source of most of its core keyboard shortcuts to this day.
I still believe that the file manager XTree for MS-DOS had the best user interface of any file manager that I have ever used, in Windows, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or MacOS, allowing one to perform any task with a minimum of key presses. It already had separate histories for each text field of the user interface, in which items could be made persistent. Even today, most programs with GUIs have much more poorly implemented histories, if they have them.
Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring.
Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS.
Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
Those "three books" help apps were so good. It is infuriating nowadays to be forwarded to some unsearchable web mess somewhere that might or might not exist.
this era had one massive flaw: huge amount of side effects, you would have to guess what would be the impact of checking a radio button in some deep settings without any way to test most of the time.
the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).
On one hand, this is true, phone UIs are a bit harder to discover.
However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.
Curious how we got here, given that so much effort is being made in UI research, product management, etc.
There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural.
I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.
Some of the stuff's purely a step back. The "flat" craze was and remains obviously a bad over-correction (it's not clear to me that any correction was called for at all, really) and UIs auto-updating out from under people then constantly splashing "helpful" modals and such over the UI to tell you a bunch of stuff you don't want or need to know is all straight-up UI poison.
[EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
But I don't touch Windows, I use a mouse & keyboard and a 38 inch/3840x1600 monitor. Why is MS designing Windows based on how some kid is using his thumbs on an iPhone/iPad?
I'm half-joking. I know what you mean, but I think a larger picture is that touch-interfaces have their own problems/solutions that the traditional Desktop doesn't have, and vice versa. I think that the desire to have One-Interface-To-Rule-Them-All leaves a lot of people (and possibilities) behind.
It would be a lot of work, but I think Microsoft needs two entirely separate Desktop Environments. One for touch-based devices, one for Desktop. I'm not holding my breath, we've been debating this since Windows 8. And I'm fully aware that as a middle-aged Windows Application developer that my opinion matters less with every year that passes... but I can't help but feel that maybe we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Very true - I'm a little bit older, so I view the Amiga user interface as superior (at least in some ways - I describe it as "the feeling that you have the computer's full attention". Windows doesn't give me that even today.) - and also recognise how much Windows 95 borrowed from other systems. (RiscOS in particular)
It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
Yes indeed* - I still use and prefer those to this day: I like the extra weight and slight inertia that comes from the rolling ball. (It's OK, I know I'm a dinosaur!)
(* They're more correctly called opto-mechanical since the movement sensing is done by way of a slotted disc interrupting light beams.)
I used Win3.1 and DOS before that for a long time - i was already comfortable programming my PC before i first used Win95. If it was a case of "As a kid", i'd consider Win3.1 as the actual good GUI but actually i consider Win95 to be the the good one despite being introduced to it after i already was comfortable with PCs and had technical knowledge about them.
While some people might see Win95 as a good GUI because that is what they first learned, that doesn't mean that applies to everyone. And if nothing else it also works the other way around - "kids these days" may not mind navigating around flat touch-based interfaces because they've spent the time to learn them, not because of any inherent superiority of said interfaces.
This is why IMO using how easy kids can use/learn something (in computers at least), be it UIs, languages or whatever isn't very helpful - kids have a ton of time and if they like something they can spend ages on it regardless of any inherent properties of that something. I mean, consider the downright atrocious UX the overwhelming majority of games had in home computers from the 80s and PCs until early 90s - and yet kids at the time spent hours deciphering and playing them. That didn't mean the games actually had good UIs, it meant kids had enough time and motivation to work around these UIs so they can enjoy the games.
I would love to see a similar paper by the Windows 11 design team. The 95 group seemed to be very responsive to how users were using or failing to use the OS. I've been on Win11 for a few months, and I'm confused who these changes are for. It could be that the Eternal September means things have to be dumbed down and locked down, catering to the least capable users. Or maybe design decisions are being made at a higher level for inscrutable business reasons. Either way, I'm feeling left behind.
I think there's a tension between Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users that the Windows Team has decided to just ignore. Or they have decided that Desktop users are not important. I spent extra for a widescreen monitor that would give me more vertical pixels. What does Windows think I want to do with these pixels? Use them to display a big, honkin' new Taskbar, apparently. Why did they take away the option to make it thinner? Why is "Every user must have a Big Fat Taskbar" the hill they want to die on? And the modern-ish design language feels like it was designed to waste space and hide information. I have a huge screen, I don't want a 3+ click minimum to get to any setting.
Third-party bloatware, permanent rounded corners for some reason, the take-it-or-I-dare-you-to-switch-to-Linux attitude does not give me warm fuzzy fealings. I would switch to linux, but I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.
For now, I'm still able to cobble together the tools that make Windows a mostly-pleasant Desktop experience. I use Directory Opus, Open Shell (with ExplorerPatcher for Win11), Everything Search, and some registry edits to do things like bring the normal Context Menu back.
The crazy thing is that Windows touch-screen users are a tiny minority of all Windows users, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Yet a lot of the design compromises since Windows 8 making things worse for non-touch users are made for the single reason of catering to touch screens.
As a surface user, I must say windows 11 definitely has gotten -worse- for tablet usage too. 10 had a special "tablet mode" that did things like automatically keeping all app windows fullscreen, like a tiling window manager, and giving you a friendlier to touch start menu but 11 dropped the tablet mode.
I ended up installing linux with Gnome and a tiler extension once I read that my particular tablet was compatible and I'm much happier for it.
The design compromises have become really hard to justify even when you're coming from the point of view of the minority among us who use hybrid devices. It's difficult to tell who Windows 11 is for. They want to imitate the macOS dock but even macOS has less limitations, you can drag and drop a document onto the dock, you can drag a folder and have a peek in the inside of the folder when you click it, you can't do that with the 11 taskbar, which only accepts software shortcuts. The windows 11 taskbar is an abomination and the worst piece of UI I have ever used in my life.
It was possible to add documents, folders etc to "quick launch" which was introduced to windows 9x along with Internet Explorer's active desktop. It's just amazing how the modern windows UI has become inferior to decades old tools.
Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. As long as Microsoft hardware, along with the marketing, remains touch-focused, they can hardly change their UI design trajectory. Yet the vision of Windows as a touch-heavy user interface remains a wishful-thinking fantasy, and works against what used to make Windows a productive UI. It’s really a tragedy.
>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware.
What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nominally the same man-machine interface, are somewhat differentiated.
Why is MS so hellbent on making Windows a jack of all trades?
A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.
IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.
>If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.
No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).
Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.
This is not exactly the document you’re asking for, but I think the clearest explanation of the origin of modern Microsoft flatness back in the Windows Phone 7 days is “How print design is the future of interaction” (2011) [1], by the late Mike Kruzeniski.
The argument seems to be about visual design, which is just one facet of UI design. And one thing the argument is missing is that a clear distinction between content and UI controls is critical for usability.
> I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.
I'm in the same boat. Do you get to design your WPF UIs, or are they dictated to you by a UX designer? I hate the UIs I have to develop. I would never use them, but some PM insists they are good design, citing metrics from a broken feedback system that's been gamed to give PMs promotions over honest feedback. The designers don't use the software they are designing, but insist it is good design. Heck they are designing Windows software, using a Mac. Most users are held hostage. I'm convinced if there were actual competition these products would all fail.
We get to design the UI ourselves, but we use MahApps[1] to make WPF look Metro-ish (which sort of pushes you into a certain direction). Our product is for engineers and scientists who tend to be very opinionated. We do our best, but we end up redesigning based on feedback now and then. We don't have many users, so we don't mind bending over backwards for them.
I will say that the constant feedback is how that they love how "modern" our application looks compared to our main competitor. So I try to never ignore the power of that perception, even if it is just a bias.
That's not crazy. It's because UI improvement is no more than an excuse. The telemetry is really just for targeted marketing. Click fast, click slow, show us who you are, we'll sell you a car.
Why the taskbar groups same programs (you can still turn it off) but then does not allow you to have them ungrouped completely - and shown in the order you opened them.
They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?
They know better. They really like to rearange windows in the win 10 taskbar.
My thoughts always get to their mothers. Having to use this (insert profanity here) 8 hours a day is too much.
Some changes are really cool, but then marred by bizarre UX decisions that make absolutely zero sense to me and make things everything more tedious and difficult and I'm wondering how they're making these decisions. It's not being made by somebody who actually cares about Windows users.
There have been several times when windows made changes to accommodate hardware that didn't catch up as fast as expected. With windows 11 it feels like they're trying to design an os for the hardware of yesteryear instead.
If win11 were running on a surface duo or similar device it might make sense but on the desktop they should be embarrassed by the amount of software and tweaks people use just to make their software usable.
Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is.
Now, users come already with certain habits and expectations developed by years of of computer use.
This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different.
Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
> Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is.
This is a really great point. Like many others on this thread I miss "old" UI design, and like many posters can explain why. There's been a large transition to hiding UI, not marking interactable UI, and not spacially locating related UI elements.
Recently I watched one of my nieces use her phone. She was trying to do something, frustrated and telling me, but had not yet asked me to help. (I offer to help, but not to do something for them - to guide but let them achieve their goal.) I realised she was essentially tapping the screen looking for something that responded to taps. She didn't know what would react. Now, she knows lists can be scrolled, buttons etc can be clicked... but does she? Because there are no buttons, often, today and the button she needed, which I could see onscreen, was just text, no border indicating clickability.
I've heard anecdotally that the big UI designers in companies like Apple don't mind this because 'everyone already knows how to use their phones' and Macs / Windows. This ignores the young -- but we often ignore the young and expect them to learn -- and it ignores the elderly, those with bad eyesight, those who have not before now had the financial opportunity to own something, and so forth. There are lots, and always will be lots, of new people.
And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure. Not just because there are always those who don't know, but because designing such that it can be used by anyone is more optimal. And finally, that designing such that it can be be used by _anyone_ means _everyone_ can use it. Phrased another way, another golden quote I cannot attribute is, 'accessibility is for everyone.' Which is a way of saying, designing for the non-average user who may have difficulties makes usage much easier for the average user too.
I had trouble with Microsoft parental setting website the other day -- I could not find the option I was looking for. Eventually I found some documentation and that's when it hit me: the completely unstyled plain text at the top of a section was actually a "tab bar" which you click on to get pages of more options!
This sort of minimalism in design is completely frustrating. Being familiar with common UI paradigms only works if the UI designers actually use them.
> And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure.
Why? Cars aren't a failure because they need to be learnt, neither is reading, 10-finger typing, math, ...
We teach these things because they make other tasks more efficient. Similarly, interfaces are converging to a somewhat complex, but actually quite consistent, set of conventions that allows you to accomplish an infinite set of tasks.
You might argue that we could achieve the same thing with less complex conventions, but I disagree. According to the article, subjects struggled with nested folders, yet now, hierarchies are a hugely important concept.
On a general purpose device, I really am a believer that software should teach the user how to use it, or document how to use it. How else would you do it? A manual? Which is done in software these days, anyway. Making as much as possible discoverable in the interface is good design. The more of that which can be done, the less that needs to be learnt explicitly. Maybe not everything can be, but 40 years ago the Mac applied this principle consistently to its interface and it introduced tens of millions of people to computing who were otherwise put off by having to read a manual first.
Randomly tapping elements on the screen and seeing what happens is a perfectly acceptable learning strategy for a child.
From there, you might learn that an accent color can represent links; That a row of buttons, where one is emphasised, might be a tab-bar; That holding on an element will open a secondary menu; That little arrows represent folded content; that a list on the left might change content on the right; That certain icons always lead to similar functionality;
Side note: OP's neice was wildly tapping the screen, because she likely learned that nowadays nearly everything is interactive (Go on YouTube and find me one element that can't be tapped).
>Randomly tapping elements on the screen and seeing what happens is a perfectly acceptable learning strategy for a child.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that a UI that requires the user to randomly tap everywhere to see which spots will do something is as well designed as one which indicates what parts do what.
> This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different.
Isn't this a good thing, though? Creating software that most current users out there can be easily onboarded with and be productive and familiar with quickly, without too much work put into it.
Sure, things were occasionally broken for technical reasons, but at least the UX itself wasn't what was causing problems or friction. It's very much like using something like LibreOffice (with the default dropdown interface, or the optional ribbon one) after other office packages - it feels close enough to what you're used to not to be completely jarring, even if there might be other issues with it.
> Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
In my eyes, not challenging the status quo and making incremental improvements is a good idea for the majority of developers out there (even in web development, where you have your navbars and your sidebars and so on), let the trendsetters take the big risks and take what is proven to work in the long run from them, without being impacted negatively by their failures.
I do, however, support the idea of usability studies and looking for what might be better than what we currently have, but redesigns for the sake of being "modern" or "trendy" just seems like designers going for the fun low hanging fruit, like large companies just changing around all of their product icons, instead of working on, say, accessibility, text contrast and so on.
The problems with using Linux generally aren't desktop environment issues but more the diskljpinted nature of Linux. XCFE is my preferred Linux desktop though, flexible without a lot of baggage.
I was playing with a Win98 computer the other day, and it is amazing how well most of the UX has held up even now. And it's so fast, especially considering the limitations of the hardware it was running on.
Really interesting seeing some of the design process that resulted in it.
It was fast on say, 300mhz and faster hardware, but while watching a video where Windows 95 was running on a 486, I remembered how you used to be able to see individual UI elements being drawn on the screen piece by piece.
> while watching a video where Windows 95 was running on a 486, I remembered how you used to be able to see individual UI elements being drawn on the screen piece by piece.
This is pretty much the modern experience with web SPAs, except the hardware can hardly be blamed anymore.
Waiting for things to happen on a 486 sure, but not seeing things draw piece by piece. CPU wasnt the problem in that case, but VGA with no acceleration.
Didn't putting so much rendering code in kernel-space also produce a lot of security bugs in NT? Would be nice to run trustable code in a trusted context if one wants to do so.
The “close window” (“×”) button is identical, and Windows 95 re-purposed NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button into a “maximize” button. But you can still see why NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button looks that way; it resembles a NeXTSTEP application icon, seen at the bottom on the above screenshot.
I've long suspected the start menu was intended to be on the top of the screen.
In all other applications when you want to shut it down, it's the last option on the list. If you move the start menu to the top, then shutdown does indeed become the last on the list and the most common option, "Programs" becomes the closest by Fitts Law standards.
Even in the Program Manager in Windows 3.1, the Run and Shutdown options were the same place but the menu was at the top. From the beginning (of public releases) in Windows 95 you could in fact move the start bar to the top.
Reminds me of McDonaldland vs Sid & Marty Krofft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Marty_Krofft_Televisio....), and I quote: "We do not believe that the ordinary reasonable person, let alone a child, viewing these works will even notice that Pufnstuf is wearing a cummerbund while Mayor McCheese is wearing a diplomat’s sash."
Hi Daniel, the interview you linked should be a HN submission in its own right. It's a shame to have it lost in a comment two levels deep in a long thread.
I am sure there are a lot of people interested in the history of computing and user interfaces that would really appreciate this interview and seeing the original prototypes and sketches.
My whole speculative checklist on the matter is now
confirmed about as accurately as I could ever hope for. What a lovely feeling of satisfaction that is
The next build after 90c had the task bar at the bottom. The start menu was redesigned a few times after that build (which is from early 1994). Why would Microsoft leave shut down in the wrong position? Why did it take them until XP to put the programs option closer to the bottom?
I have no idea. It just seems unusual that the closest mouse distance is shut down.
Fitt's Law, GOMS analysis and the human processor model were all the rage in the mid-90s.
The ordering is pretty unusual but when you push the start menu to the top, all the rules are followed again.
Again, pure speculation. I wasn't in the room and I've never been able to directly ask someone who was (although I'd go out of my way for the opportunity).
As far as how it took them so long, I'd imagine moving things around on the start menu would require the signoff of an annoyingly large number of people. This is before the modern era of Unilateral UI Designer Autocrat who's given questionably broad authority over everything.
Reading this, I wonder about all the UIs that I come across today and feel like they're usually on a scale from flawed to awful (see also: store reviews of software, especially after an update). Not being from the software development world, can anyone who is confirm whether this type of user testing still takes place at all? Or is it perhaps confined to big redesigns, specific user groups (like beginning computer users, even for developer tools like vmware), or other such constraints?
Edit: reading further, this is a great example: "Separate UI for Beginners [...] [various problems mentioned] [...] For these reasons and others, we abandoned the idea". These reasons translate directly, one-to-one, to Android's simple homescreen variant that my grandma kept finding somehow, clicking on, and then not being able to use various things on her phone anymore. Nor getting more comfortable with the proper UI. Nor was it consistent with other apps. Android added this feature when, a decade earlier, it was already spotted (long before release, I should note) that such a variant wouldn't help people at all. This doesn't appear to have been thought about or tested in the real world, and I think Android is the most-used OS on the planet. (Not sure if all vendor's shells have this feature as well, but I'm fairly sure it was stock android or at least commonly implemented a few versions ago.)
Generally big companies hire UX Researchers, whose job is specifically to conduct these types of tests.
To address your second question, it depends on the test. For example, during a recent test where I work (fairly large tech company), we used user logs to identify a set of "power users", since that's who we were interested in learning more about.
On Windows 11, the System Classic skin is a very light gray and uses Segoe UI. 95/98 uses a darker gray and Microsoft Sans Serif. 2000 uses a slightly lighter gray and Tahoma. ME uses the 2000 gray and Tahoma.
On Windows XP, the 95/98 theme was "Windows Classic", and the 2000 theme was "Windows Standard".
In fairness, Mac users were already doing that in 1991 with System 7's Apple Menu Items folder.
You could put anything you wanted in that folder, and it would show up in the Apple Menu. It was a good idea to put aliases to your most commonly-used apps in it. I remember doing that all the way up through Mac OS 9.
I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement.
Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.
I suspect a lot of that is because designers aren't often technology lifers, rather seemingly entering this field smelling profit and riding the wave as it were. I don't know what the solution is here other than firing them all and replacing them with engineers and passionate tech nerds who remember their history. Which won't ever happen, and the situation is hopeless.
Nonsense; plenty of people in UX, myself included, have tech backgrounds. Software engineers aren't immune from the "higher metrics == uSeRs lOvE iT" trap.
Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.
I wouldn't call those metrics arbitrary, they're just trying to measure something different. It's no longer measuring user productivity, it's measuring user engagement. It's no longer how quickly a user familiarizes and gets something done with the software, it's how often and how long the user uses the software.
I keep wondering, if flat is the new hot thing, why don't people just use libXaw to build their modern, cutting-edge UIs and not hobble my computer's performance in the process?
libXaw is difficult to use and there aren't really suitable widgets for many purposes-- it only really has buttons and textboxes. It doesn't support sophisticated layouts either, it just stretches the controls rather than letting you define any sort of anchors/margins.
Too bad they didn't read these notes before gutting the taskbar in Win11. It's so unusable, so slow when you can't "ungroup" stuff. Made me actually reinstall and go back to Win10.
Or the task bar grouping in Windows 7 that I've found most people actually don't prefer when you reveal that it's optional. A lot of people also like it, maybe as much as 40% or so, but when I look over someone's shoulder (who had been using 7 for ages already) and I wondered out loud how they manage to work with that task bar, they were usually happy to learn of a way to just see open programs instead of having this submenu structure plus a lot of unused task bar space, even if that meant getting used to a new way of working again.
Or the joke of a start menu from Windows 8 that presumably Ballmer liked a lot. You even had to make some hidden gesture (swish and flick, professor flitwick would say) to get to the settings only to find the 'shut down' option.
Windows 9x was a bit gray but otherwise mostly made sense.
Windows 10 seems to have gone back to the state of things at 7, except now the settings are at 200% zoom/whitespace and all over the place and I've heard everyone from beginner to guru wonder where the heck they hid xyz.
Windows 11 you've already covered.
Precisely this sort of thing is why I wondered in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33776750) whether this type of testing happens anymore at all, or whether it is constrained in some way.
On Windows 11, it's very rare to have to use the old Control Panel. It still exists for some uncommon settings, but nearly everything has been moved to the new settings. And everything is actually intelligently grouped. I only wish you could have multiple Settings windows open at once.
That's not really been my experience. I do agree about needing multiple settings windows opened at once, especially when one is already open and you need to open a seemingly unrelated screen and lose your place.
They seem to be good at undoing mistakes in the next version five years later. The newly introduced issue in 11 was said to be taskbar grouping, idk I haven't used it myself (yet :( ).
> Windows 11 is going to get a "Never Combine" taskbar item setting after all. It no longer features window titles like in Windows 10 & older releases, but retains the icon per window mechanic which some might still find useful. New in build 25246, hidden behind feature 29785186
> This feature is forcibly disabled and even if you do manage to enable it (regular ViVe commands won't do) its code is partially broken. You can notice WinDbg running as a few small patches were needed. No UI for enabling this exists in Settings yet.
Thanks. Looks to me like that while it's ungrouping, it still doesn't display the labels for each window? So you get like 5 similar icons there with no way to discern between them?
I still think the biggest user interface (UI) change from Microsoft was the change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were so many features and improvements e.g. the re-designed Open/Save dialog (not much changed since then). Later versions of Windows have never made the same leap between new versions of Windows. Sure, there are refined or tweaked features (or regressed!), but each new version of Windows felt like an incremental update from the previous version.
I think the next leap in UI and visual design from Microsoft was...Windows Phone 8 (2012). It was a refreshing and different approach to mobile design. The visual language 'Metro' worked well on mobile touch screens. But Microsoft took the bad decision to transplant 'Metro' (flat design) to the desktop. The result is a clumsy, jumble of inconsistent screens. It simply doesn't work.
Windows 95/98/2k were the peak of "Open" and "Save As" dialogs. Some linux DE's managed parity in the mid-2000s but then removed features and introduced bugs again as mobile/convergence motivations took over in 2010+. Nowdays you can't even paste into a File->Open dialog in a gtk3 based desktop environment without triggering an error.
Indeed. Some of those dialogs are still present in 10 depending on the application, but even the default dialog is pretty good. I like that it's basically just a "lite" Explorer window so I can copy/paste/rename/move/whatever all from within the dialog.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I first installed Win95, once I got some help, it was like a whole new world. Multimedia was finally a real possibility. Seeing Weezer in their "Buddy Holly" music video on the disc was pretty wild, and the "Start Me Up" spoof song about win95 "this windows ninety fiiiiiive, it's suckin' up my driiiive". Good times.
This was such an interesting article.. Of course I was biased by growing up on C64, DOS and Win95.. But, it was really the case for me, I was able to learn all about the OS from just clicking around, and things seemed so strongly to be "in their place", much more so than Win 3.11 which I never liked.
It also had a very fluid and gentle gradiant from functionality intended for everyday users to more advanced stuff, without making you feel overwhelmed and without hiding things too much away from you..
Just count how many clicks it takes to install the IPX protocol in Windows 95 vs Windows 10! (Also, good luck with that on 10!)
It's also amazing how well it ran on the hardware at the time, 100 mhz and 16 mb ram was Just Fine. The entire OS could probably fit inside the space taken up by the windows 10 start menu I'm sure.
I wish M$ would start trying to make a good user experience again, instead of trying to sell candy crush..
The modern paradigm seems to be "if we can't see it there is no problem". Just hide everything behind a hamburger menu, disclosure triangle, dropdown, or delete the feature entirely! Then the user won't be confused, they'll just assume the things we hid are impossible and thus not complain or ask questions.
> Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
I think there is something really interesting about how even back in 1992 people were talking about the need to be more agile.
Wow! Imagine designing a user interface via careful, evidence- and feedback-driven development, as opposed to just doing what subjectively "looks good" to a sheltered SV """designer""" and shuffling it all every 6 months.
It is sad, that nowadays they are just slapping everything on existing UI without much of a thought. And yet, even under several layers of "improvements" one still can find UIs from Windows 95 days, hardly changed.
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and at worst provide zero indication of what functionality is available. I once used a phone app for months not knowing there was an extra screen you could open by sliding right on the main UI page. I only found it by accident one day, because there were no hints in the UI..
Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech people.
Look at the atrocious consumer abusive workflow to trap a person into signing up for a microsoft cloud-everything account in the new installation workflow for a brand new Windows 10 or 11 install. Or the out-of-box first user experience upon opening and using a new windows 11 laptop.
You literally cannot even complete a fresh windows 11 install without a live internet connection now, if you're an ordinary non technical end user. It demands to be connected to some form of wired network or wireless with internet access to report home to microsoft and make a cloud based account.
They clearly decided that getting people to sign up for a forever-recurring monthly paid cloud service plan in perpetuity was the best way to go for revenue. Or at least bait them into it by methods like "oh, here's your free 5GB onedrive account, you can totally back up your whole system and use onedrive for everything. What's that, you're out of storage space on your free account? Sign up now for this $12/month account for (some_large_number_of_GB)!"
I'm just amazed at how much crap is crammed onto the title bars and everything these days. Look at the clean interface of Outlook 97-2003 compared to now. They have undo/redo, "customize quick access toolbar", "ribbon display options", your Office Online account, and other crap on the toolbars that used to have the close/minimize/maximize buttons.
I like to think that some PM at Microsoft got promoted and brags about how one of those is 'their' button.
Turning a drop down menu list for saving into a full screen pop up is just so bizarrely user-hostile.
I verbally exclaimed WTF the first time I saw that. How did anyone think that ridiculous distraction is an improvement? Doubly so when the name of the file you want to open next is in the current one --- and helpfully covered up by that abomination.
It's hostile to users like us that can deal with a lot of data at the same time. But many people when they see "old style" UIs get overwhelmed by the mass of information and data, and having that information subdivided helps people. Sadly, they are the majority and we are the minority, so UIs get designed for them and not for us. Nowadays computing systems are being used by the 99% so they are also designed for the 99%.
Has anyone tested this?
Is Office(CurrentYear) easier to use than 1997?
Current office is mess. To "Save As..." you need 4 clicks just to open the god damn save dialogue.
Not in front of a computer rn, but f12 should bring up the save as dialogue box (unless hijacked by another program).
Honestly, I consider myself quite tech savvy (programmer right?) but I cannot for the life of me figure out all the different locations you can store files any more. Especially my iPhone is a horror in this regard, but over the years I’ve used so many different forms of cloud storage everything is just spread around everywhere.
I think I copied everything to my local disk as well, but it’s 20 years of my life, so I’m disinclined from finally trashing all those various services.
Bucket list: 1. Move everything to one cloud or local storage, make it searchable and organized.
Nah, won't even happen when I'm dead or about dead, or by the time I'm dead.
Same here. The punishment for overriding the default file dialog should be public caning Singapore style. Start with the Acrobat team at Adobe.
I still dont know how to easily save files on local computer in MS Office without pressing F12.
I don't understand.
Ctrl+S gives you a document where the biggest UI element is a box labelled "Choose a location". Clicking on it shows a bunch of locations on my PC (such as my local documents folder) and has a button that says "More Locations".
This "More Locations" button takes you to the same Save As dialog that you would get to from clicking on File -> Save As, same as in every program of the last 30 years. In its left menu it has two giant buttons for "This PC" and "Browse".
What part wasn't obvious to you?
If you're talking about the web apps (who aren't designed for editing local files), File -> Save As has a button called "Save a Copy" that explicitly says right below that "Download a copy to your computer"
I haven't used it in a while but I've got to admit that I've missed a lot of extremely obviously placed buttons in the Microsoft office suite.
They've designed it in a way that makes my brain go into advert-mode, which basically filters half of the interface until I'm really paying attention and go through it several times.
What part of this triggers "advert mode"?
https://i.imgur.com/AIPcXVd.png
The ribbon interface suffers from poor scan-ability. The problem is actually a common one with MS products since they introduced Metro: they use too much vertical space with irregular layouts. Your eyes just scan more quickly if there’s regularity in the layout and grouping along a single axis.
The trick I’ve found with the ribbon is to anchor against the labels at the bottoms of each grouping. Why they’re at the bottom and not the top, I can’t say, but those labels help me scan if I start from them.
Ctrl+S only does that if a document is unsaved, and it still doesn't actually take you to the save dialog. It takes you to what Microsoft calls the "Save As menu", which takes up the whole window, causing the document content to be obscured, and requires a mouse click after that to get to the actual Save As dialog.
For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12 is just so much more convenient.
It's still "File -> Save a Copy" (2 clicks) and I'm on an October build that's as new as it gets externally as far as I know: 2210 Build 16.0.15726.20188.
The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a malicious big tech plot left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago.
By "thinks", do you mean "knows"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prism_slide_5.jpg
Even so, using OneDrive as a backing store for user documents has been integrated into Windows for a while now, and every app that uses standard file save dialogs etc ends up automatically and transparently doing that, so why should Office be special?
I don't think everyone using office in the workd is "under" an IT Admin supervision, many home users and small businesses still use Word and Excel (and local storage), I believe.
Your statement means nothing when Microsoft is using dark patterns to funnel users onto the cloud. Of course the numbers are going up, that in itself does make it a good thing for users.
You mean you have to click through 3 buttons now for what was previously just ‘Save As’?
Oh wow, I just tried this and it bring up the Save As.. dialog! I have been so frustrated that MS Office apps don's have a Ctrl+Shift+S Save As.
Pressing one button seems pretty easy to me. You used to have to press the ctrl+shift+S chord.
Alternatively, you could mouse over and click file -> save as or press Alt -> f -> a.
Wow, I didn’t know about F12! Maybe they could remap that to something that doesn’t require reaching for the function row. Maybe CTRL-S.
What I want to do: I created a new file that I want to save in a new folder on shareddrive.
Using your method:
1. Make a new spreadhseet, press CTRL+S
2. Get some super limited menu with few last locations -> doesnt include any of the locations I need
3. Click on random location, ten you have to go down and choose "more locations" -> again doesnt have any of the locations I need, neither on shared drive or local computer; at least there is a shortcut to desktop (in the past it wasnt there since they were pushing cloud even more)
4. The next menu shows you more locations - but still not the new location that you want, so you have to find "browse" button.
Why not press F12 and get a browse button?
Maybe at your work you have one spreadsheet or one PDF, but I often have few open. I also dont even mention the problem of interlinked files (especially Excel files) and Sharepoint, where the folder address become impossible to work with.
I think it should be mentioned that during this era, the whole idea of a GUI was still a relatively new concept to most people. It had been less than a decade since the Mac popularized the idea. It's akin to how long it took for cars to standardize on the accelerator, brake and clutch configuration. It didn't happen overnight. When I went to college in the early 90s, most of my fellow students had dedicated word processors or, less commonly, DOS PCs (and one Amiga), as an example of what was the norm. The only reason I used a Mac was that I was in the design program, where Desktop Publishing was experiencing its heyday. But I could never have afforded one.
In 2022, the idea of an average person not understanding what a mouse is for is almost inconceivable. But in 1992-1994 when "Chicago" was being developed? The majority of the planet still hadn't seen one, let alone used one. Discoverability wasn't a nice-to-have, it was paramount to Windows 95's success.
Amazingly, Gates and company realized this and put a ton of effort into UX research as a result. They could have easily dropped the ball transitioning from 3.1's GUI (think Windows 8 as a counter example), so they deserve a lot of credit for getting it right.
Interestingly, Windows 3.1 came with a 7-minute tutorial activated from the installer, about half of which is on using the mouse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXKEnYQu-oM
If I remember correctly, this part wasn't there in Windows 95, so presumably they decided that users mostly don't need it anymore.
Hah! This reminds me of an old adage when teaching people how to use the mouse. Don't ever mention the right mouse button until the absolute last moment, if ever. Because from the second you mention it, every time you say, "OK, now click the [window, button, menu, etc.]" they will instantly ask, "Right or left button?".
Every. Single. Time.
Apple discovered this problem and preemptively fixed it in 1984.
And solved it later with the Cmd-Alt-Shift-Right-Double-Click to select text in Terminal.
Snapchat ushered in the era of undiscoverable UIs. There were other apps that did that, but Snapchat was the most prominent.
Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable.
Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.
To be fair to Snapchat, their camera interface does also have a button to switch cameras. The double tab is just a shortcut. Other apps that have aped this interface also have a button to switch cameras (e.g. Instagram).
There is a simple explanation: mobile.
You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things.
Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa.
There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.
My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily.
I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneNote or Outlook web apps is less than the Office 98 versions. Google Docs compares poorly feature-wise to WordPerfect versions from the 1990s. It’s quite remarkable how bad this software is compared to how big development teams are now. I don’t know if any other industry that’s ever regressed in this way.
This is extremely uncharitable.
So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.
> So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker.
Except Google Docs probably has ten times the resources compared to the Word Perfect team back in the day. Why can't they do both?
> Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?
I suspect it's more that consumers are cheap and building ad-supported crapware is more profitable than building real software. It's the same as how inkjet printers are total garbage today, but you can get one for $59.
> And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be.
I'm not talking about "less computer literate" in the sense of "not knowing what an IRQ is or does." I mean it in the sense of "not knowing what computers are capable of doing."
To use a car analogy--people know less about cars than 30 years ago, because cars are more automated, need less maintenance, etc. But in another sense, people know just as much about what cars can do for them because cars today can do all the same things and more. Modern software, by contrast, is like replacing cars with golf carts. They're simpler, sure, but because they can't do as much, and they narrow younger people's horizons of what's possible with computers.
How is condensing with menus worse than undiscoverable gestures and button rituals?
IMO it's far worse when the cow paths are so heavily paved you have to pay tolls to access anything else. Or even explicitly hidden capabilities requiring Konami-code-esque incantations in some misguided effort to give the kids something to brag about to their friends.
It's definitely a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around - here we're nostalgic for rows and rows of menus and buttons; but Microsoft famously tried to "fix" the menu-and-toolbar "bloat" with the Ribbon, after all, since tons of people had NO IDEA how to deal with all those menus and buttons. "Go through every menu and click every button" was never super discoverable if you're in a hurry. And hell, there are still people who will tell you you're doing it wrong if you're using the UI instead of using Vim/Emacs and a million keyboard shortcuts and plugins... ;)
I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).
> seem to be able to pick up quite easily
I mean, I can figure it out too, but I have to agree that it’s a bit silly to get a new phone, and then immediately have to swipe up/down/left/right on every screen, starting from the extreme, starting from the center etc, to figure out what kind of hidden functionality this will reveal.
Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about.
They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.
There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus.
But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?
FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.
Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.
> As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about.
More importantly, they're in a school system - meeting with other kids their age 5+ days a week, and sharing their discoveries with each other. It takes one kid to figure a new interaction out for the knowledge to quickly spread.
Adults tend to have a slower-working gossip network, plus there's more of an associated stigma (or at least the fear of it) of being seen as the dummy who can't figure things out.
Fair point, that said, a swipe-era UI is still a wider surface to explore than old era, since anything is actionable and has more inputs than the usual 2 buttons * { click, dblclick } but I guess it doesn't make a difference for a kid.
> there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...
Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them.
And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.
Many dos programs with a gui had all the same menus and fields before Windows. They just ran one at a time.
The best DOS TUIs were generally those that adopted CUA (e.g. Borland's IDEs and other software written in Turbo Vision). Windows UX also built heavily on it, and it is the source of most of its core keyboard shortcuts to this day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
I still believe that the file manager XTree for MS-DOS had the best user interface of any file manager that I have ever used, in Windows, OS/2, Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux or MacOS, allowing one to perform any task with a minimum of key presses. It already had separate histories for each text field of the user interface, in which items could be made persistent. Even today, most programs with GUIs have much more poorly implemented histories, if they have them.
Also for MS-DOS, the BRIEF editor for programmers used tiling windows and (optionally) a menu-driven interface that was better designed than that of most later text editors. It also allowed the redefinition of what happens when any key on the keyboard is pressed. The default action of inserting in the text the associated character could be replaced by an arbitrary script, which made easy the implementation of things like auto-completion or syntax coloring.
Nevertheless, even if some important applications in Windows 95 were still regressions from the point of the user interface in comparison with what was available for MS-DOS, Windows 95 looked much nicer than anything using the standard VGA text modes and it was the version to which I have switched from MS-DOS.
Even if I had previously tried Windows 3.0, 3.1 and 3.11, those had felt too much like useless toys, in comparison with the professional programs that I was using under MS-DOS. The Windows 95 taskbar was definitely a very important improvement over Windows 3.x.
Oh dear lord, Xtree? That's a name I've not heard in some time..
I might try unixtree.org..
Not to mention all "online" help included in help file and even context sensitive help available from "question mark" icon in title bar.
Those "three books" help apps were so good. It is infuriating nowadays to be forwarded to some unsearchable web mess somewhere that might or might not exist.
this era had one massive flaw: huge amount of side effects, you would have to guess what would be the impact of checking a radio button in some deep settings without any way to test most of the time.
the best UIs were reactive lazily rendered node-based UIs over non destructive operations, but mostly relegated to pro content creation (movies, music).
On one hand, this is true, phone UIs are a bit harder to discover.
However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.
There's a reason I still primarily use Word 2003 instead of the newer versions.
Having normal toolbars instead of dealing with the takes-twice-as-many-clicks Ribbon is another benefit.
I somewhere heard/read someone say that gesture based interfaces are the new CLI (in terms of discoverability).
I'd wish. What's the gesture for "apropos"?
Curious how we got here, given that so much effort is being made in UI research, product management, etc.
There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
I think the big key in your comment is "As a kid,..". Maybe you think this is the easiest to learn/discover UI because it is the UI that you used to learn and discover. I see "kids these days" navigating around flat, touch-based interfaces with ease, in the same way that I found the desktop paradigm of the late-90s to be incredibly natural.
I think a lot of us came of age during that time, and as such see it as the ultimate UI.
Some of the stuff's purely a step back. The "flat" craze was and remains obviously a bad over-correction (it's not clear to me that any correction was called for at all, really) and UIs auto-updating out from under people then constantly splashing "helpful" modals and such over the UI to tell you a bunch of stuff you don't want or need to know is all straight-up UI poison.
[EDIT] The move away from native toolkits and to very-custom UI for everything is also plainly bad. Java and Flash got the ball rolling on that (and both rightly caught shit for it) but Webtech junk is what really made that awful pattern take off. "Corporate really wants to make sure our checkbox elements are on-brand" OH MY GOD what an incredible waste of money, when you consider the total cost to the industry as a whole, in order to make UIs worse.
But I don't touch Windows, I use a mouse & keyboard and a 38 inch/3840x1600 monitor. Why is MS designing Windows based on how some kid is using his thumbs on an iPhone/iPad?
I'm half-joking. I know what you mean, but I think a larger picture is that touch-interfaces have their own problems/solutions that the traditional Desktop doesn't have, and vice versa. I think that the desire to have One-Interface-To-Rule-Them-All leaves a lot of people (and possibilities) behind.
It would be a lot of work, but I think Microsoft needs two entirely separate Desktop Environments. One for touch-based devices, one for Desktop. I'm not holding my breath, we've been debating this since Windows 8. And I'm fully aware that as a middle-aged Windows Application developer that my opinion matters less with every year that passes... but I can't help but feel that maybe we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
Very true - I'm a little bit older, so I view the Amiga user interface as superior (at least in some ways - I describe it as "the feeling that you have the computer's full attention". Windows doesn't give me that even today.) - and also recognise how much Windows 95 borrowed from other systems. (RiscOS in particular)
It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce view the mouse as an archaic input device.
> mouse
I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
What are we talking about when we say mechanical mouse? One with one of them balls in?
Yes indeed* - I still use and prefer those to this day: I like the extra weight and slight inertia that comes from the rolling ball. (It's OK, I know I'm a dinosaur!)
(* They're more correctly called opto-mechanical since the movement sensing is done by way of a slotted disc interrupting light beams.)
I used Win3.1 and DOS before that for a long time - i was already comfortable programming my PC before i first used Win95. If it was a case of "As a kid", i'd consider Win3.1 as the actual good GUI but actually i consider Win95 to be the the good one despite being introduced to it after i already was comfortable with PCs and had technical knowledge about them.
While some people might see Win95 as a good GUI because that is what they first learned, that doesn't mean that applies to everyone. And if nothing else it also works the other way around - "kids these days" may not mind navigating around flat touch-based interfaces because they've spent the time to learn them, not because of any inherent superiority of said interfaces.
This is why IMO using how easy kids can use/learn something (in computers at least), be it UIs, languages or whatever isn't very helpful - kids have a ton of time and if they like something they can spend ages on it regardless of any inherent properties of that something. I mean, consider the downright atrocious UX the overwhelming majority of games had in home computers from the 80s and PCs until early 90s - and yet kids at the time spent hours deciphering and playing them. That didn't mean the games actually had good UIs, it meant kids had enough time and motivation to work around these UIs so they can enjoy the games.
That mobile app you mentioned was Snapchat right? Worst discoverability of any mobile app I’ve ever used.
I would love to see a similar paper by the Windows 11 design team. The 95 group seemed to be very responsive to how users were using or failing to use the OS. I've been on Win11 for a few months, and I'm confused who these changes are for. It could be that the Eternal September means things have to be dumbed down and locked down, catering to the least capable users. Or maybe design decisions are being made at a higher level for inscrutable business reasons. Either way, I'm feeling left behind.
I think there's a tension between Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users that the Windows Team has decided to just ignore. Or they have decided that Desktop users are not important. I spent extra for a widescreen monitor that would give me more vertical pixels. What does Windows think I want to do with these pixels? Use them to display a big, honkin' new Taskbar, apparently. Why did they take away the option to make it thinner? Why is "Every user must have a Big Fat Taskbar" the hill they want to die on? And the modern-ish design language feels like it was designed to waste space and hide information. I have a huge screen, I don't want a 3+ click minimum to get to any setting.
Third-party bloatware, permanent rounded corners for some reason, the take-it-or-I-dare-you-to-switch-to-Linux attitude does not give me warm fuzzy fealings. I would switch to linux, but I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.
For now, I'm still able to cobble together the tools that make Windows a mostly-pleasant Desktop experience. I use Directory Opus, Open Shell (with ExplorerPatcher for Win11), Everything Search, and some registry edits to do things like bring the normal Context Menu back.
> Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users
The crazy thing is that Windows touch-screen users are a tiny minority of all Windows users, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Yet a lot of the design compromises since Windows 8 making things worse for non-touch users are made for the single reason of catering to touch screens.
As a surface user, I must say windows 11 definitely has gotten -worse- for tablet usage too. 10 had a special "tablet mode" that did things like automatically keeping all app windows fullscreen, like a tiling window manager, and giving you a friendlier to touch start menu but 11 dropped the tablet mode. I ended up installing linux with Gnome and a tiler extension once I read that my particular tablet was compatible and I'm much happier for it.
The design compromises have become really hard to justify even when you're coming from the point of view of the minority among us who use hybrid devices. It's difficult to tell who Windows 11 is for. They want to imitate the macOS dock but even macOS has less limitations, you can drag and drop a document onto the dock, you can drag a folder and have a peek in the inside of the folder when you click it, you can't do that with the 11 taskbar, which only accepts software shortcuts. The windows 11 taskbar is an abomination and the worst piece of UI I have ever used in my life.
It was possible to add documents, folders etc to "quick launch" which was introduced to windows 9x along with Internet Explorer's active desktop. It's just amazing how the modern windows UI has become inferior to decades old tools.
One of my theories is that organizationally and culturally they are still mourning the loss of the Windows Phone.
Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. As long as Microsoft hardware, along with the marketing, remains touch-focused, they can hardly change their UI design trajectory. Yet the vision of Windows as a touch-heavy user interface remains a wishful-thinking fantasy, and works against what used to make Windows a productive UI. It’s really a tragedy.
>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware.
What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nominally the same man-machine interface, are somewhat differentiated.
Why is MS so hellbent on making Windows a jack of all trades?
A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.
IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.
>If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.
No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).
Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.
I always remember this post when reading complaints about Windows design https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019307
This is not exactly the document you’re asking for, but I think the clearest explanation of the origin of modern Microsoft flatness back in the Windows Phone 7 days is “How print design is the future of interaction” (2011) [1], by the late Mike Kruzeniski.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120314071640/http://kruzeniski..., seemingly missed by HN at the time in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3301723 (6 points, 0 comments).
The argument seems to be about visual design, which is just one facet of UI design. And one thing the argument is missing is that a clear distinction between content and UI controls is critical for usability.
> I make my living with .Net/C#/WPF, so great job Microsoft, I feel trapped rather than valued.
I'm in the same boat. Do you get to design your WPF UIs, or are they dictated to you by a UX designer? I hate the UIs I have to develop. I would never use them, but some PM insists they are good design, citing metrics from a broken feedback system that's been gamed to give PMs promotions over honest feedback. The designers don't use the software they are designing, but insist it is good design. Heck they are designing Windows software, using a Mac. Most users are held hostage. I'm convinced if there were actual competition these products would all fail.
We get to design the UI ourselves, but we use MahApps[1] to make WPF look Metro-ish (which sort of pushes you into a certain direction). Our product is for engineers and scientists who tend to be very opinionated. We do our best, but we end up redesigning based on feedback now and then. We don't have many users, so we don't mind bending over backwards for them.
I will say that the constant feedback is how that they love how "modern" our application looks compared to our main competitor. So I try to never ignore the power of that perception, even if it is just a bias.
[1]https://github.com/MahApps
It is kind of crazy that Microsoft collects more Telemetry data than ever, yet their software and interfaces are more broken than ever.
That's not crazy. It's because UI improvement is no more than an excuse. The telemetry is really just for targeted marketing. Click fast, click slow, show us who you are, we'll sell you a car.
Why the taskbar groups same programs (you can still turn it off) but then does not allow you to have them ungrouped completely - and shown in the order you opened them.
They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?
Or for that matter, why they removed the option to show the text labels, which is even more important once you have more than a single file open.
They dont understand that someone can have few spreadsheets and few PDFs open?
Treat everyone like an idiot and they'll become idiots.
Idiots are more likely to be persuaded in the "right" direction and milked for profit.
Some of those idiots then get jobs designing UI, and the cycle repeats.
...or at least that's my theory of what's happening.
> and shown in the order you opened them.
They know better. They really like to rearange windows in the win 10 taskbar. My thoughts always get to their mothers. Having to use this (insert profanity here) 8 hours a day is too much.
Some changes are really cool, but then marred by bizarre UX decisions that make absolutely zero sense to me and make things everything more tedious and difficult and I'm wondering how they're making these decisions. It's not being made by somebody who actually cares about Windows users.
There have been several times when windows made changes to accommodate hardware that didn't catch up as fast as expected. With windows 11 it feels like they're trying to design an os for the hardware of yesteryear instead.
If win11 were running on a surface duo or similar device it might make sense but on the desktop they should be embarrassed by the amount of software and tweaks people use just to make their software usable.
> Eternal September
Now there’s a term I haven’t heard in aeons…
Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is.
Now, users come already with certain habits and expectations developed by years of of computer use.
This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different.
Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
> Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is.
This is a really great point. Like many others on this thread I miss "old" UI design, and like many posters can explain why. There's been a large transition to hiding UI, not marking interactable UI, and not spacially locating related UI elements.
Recently I watched one of my nieces use her phone. She was trying to do something, frustrated and telling me, but had not yet asked me to help. (I offer to help, but not to do something for them - to guide but let them achieve their goal.) I realised she was essentially tapping the screen looking for something that responded to taps. She didn't know what would react. Now, she knows lists can be scrolled, buttons etc can be clicked... but does she? Because there are no buttons, often, today and the button she needed, which I could see onscreen, was just text, no border indicating clickability.
I've heard anecdotally that the big UI designers in companies like Apple don't mind this because 'everyone already knows how to use their phones' and Macs / Windows. This ignores the young -- but we often ignore the young and expect them to learn -- and it ignores the elderly, those with bad eyesight, those who have not before now had the financial opportunity to own something, and so forth. There are lots, and always will be lots, of new people.
And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure. Not just because there are always those who don't know, but because designing such that it can be used by anyone is more optimal. And finally, that designing such that it can be be used by _anyone_ means _everyone_ can use it. Phrased another way, another golden quote I cannot attribute is, 'accessibility is for everyone.' Which is a way of saying, designing for the non-average user who may have difficulties makes usage much easier for the average user too.
I had trouble with Microsoft parental setting website the other day -- I could not find the option I was looking for. Eventually I found some documentation and that's when it hit me: the completely unstyled plain text at the top of a section was actually a "tab bar" which you click on to get pages of more options!
This sort of minimalism in design is completely frustrating. Being familiar with common UI paradigms only works if the UI designers actually use them.
> And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure.
Why? Cars aren't a failure because they need to be learnt, neither is reading, 10-finger typing, math, ...
We teach these things because they make other tasks more efficient. Similarly, interfaces are converging to a somewhat complex, but actually quite consistent, set of conventions that allows you to accomplish an infinite set of tasks.
You might argue that we could achieve the same thing with less complex conventions, but I disagree. According to the article, subjects struggled with nested folders, yet now, hierarchies are a hugely important concept.
On a general purpose device, I really am a believer that software should teach the user how to use it, or document how to use it. How else would you do it? A manual? Which is done in software these days, anyway. Making as much as possible discoverable in the interface is good design. The more of that which can be done, the less that needs to be learnt explicitly. Maybe not everything can be, but 40 years ago the Mac applied this principle consistently to its interface and it introduced tens of millions of people to computing who were otherwise put off by having to read a manual first.
> How else would you [learn to use it]?
Randomly tapping elements on the screen and seeing what happens is a perfectly acceptable learning strategy for a child.
From there, you might learn that an accent color can represent links; That a row of buttons, where one is emphasised, might be a tab-bar; That holding on an element will open a secondary menu; That little arrows represent folded content; that a list on the left might change content on the right; That certain icons always lead to similar functionality;
Side note: OP's neice was wildly tapping the screen, because she likely learned that nowadays nearly everything is interactive (Go on YouTube and find me one element that can't be tapped).
>Randomly tapping elements on the screen and seeing what happens is a perfectly acceptable learning strategy for a child.
Sure, but that doesn't mean that a UI that requires the user to randomly tap everywhere to see which spots will do something is as well designed as one which indicates what parts do what.
> This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements to the status quo or else be be rejected for being too different.
Isn't this a good thing, though? Creating software that most current users out there can be easily onboarded with and be productive and familiar with quickly, without too much work put into it.
I recently did an article on using Linux as my daily driver for a week and admittedly picking a really boring desktop environment (XFCE) was a pleasant experience: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/a-week-of-linux-instead-of-...
Sure, things were occasionally broken for technical reasons, but at least the UX itself wasn't what was causing problems or friction. It's very much like using something like LibreOffice (with the default dropdown interface, or the optional ribbon one) after other office packages - it feels close enough to what you're used to not to be completely jarring, even if there might be other issues with it.
> Not that certain standards are not also valuable but it still a sobering thought that we are in a local optimum that we will never be able to escape from. (And I fear most products are not even hitting the local optimum but are getting worse when it comes to UI design but that is besides the point.)
In my eyes, not challenging the status quo and making incremental improvements is a good idea for the majority of developers out there (even in web development, where you have your navbars and your sidebars and so on), let the trendsetters take the big risks and take what is proven to work in the long run from them, without being impacted negatively by their failures.
I do, however, support the idea of usability studies and looking for what might be better than what we currently have, but redesigns for the sake of being "modern" or "trendy" just seems like designers going for the fun low hanging fruit, like large companies just changing around all of their product icons, instead of working on, say, accessibility, text contrast and so on.
The problems with using Linux generally aren't desktop environment issues but more the diskljpinted nature of Linux. XCFE is my preferred Linux desktop though, flexible without a lot of baggage.
The beautiful thing is, you can still just make a UI that mimics Windows 95, and get all of the benefits of that research.
I was playing with a Win98 computer the other day, and it is amazing how well most of the UX has held up even now. And it's so fast, especially considering the limitations of the hardware it was running on.
Really interesting seeing some of the design process that resulted in it.
It was fast on say, 300mhz and faster hardware, but while watching a video where Windows 95 was running on a 486, I remembered how you used to be able to see individual UI elements being drawn on the screen piece by piece.
> while watching a video where Windows 95 was running on a 486, I remembered how you used to be able to see individual UI elements being drawn on the screen piece by piece.
This is pretty much the modern experience with web SPAs, except the hardware can hardly be blamed anymore.
Waiting for things to happen on a 486 sure, but not seeing things draw piece by piece. CPU wasnt the problem in that case, but VGA with no acceleration.
reminds me of a parody of "killing me softly" from the era. "Killing my software with windows": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXYFowc1AlY
"8 megs is recommended but I've got only 5"
It’s amazing how fast everything in the core system runs when it runs trusted.
Didn't putting so much rendering code in kernel-space also produce a lot of security bugs in NT? Would be nice to run trustable code in a trusted context if one wants to do so.
Security isn’t an issue when everything is trusted
Doesn't seem like a wise thing to do.
Note this is still on the internet at https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
The blog post is (2018) and the original article it republishes is (1996) according to Google.
You can also find it on Archive.org at https://web.archive.org/web/20220504061157/https://dl.acm.or...
Again, weirdly, not a single word on how Windows 95 copied the title bar design and buttons from NeXTSTEP.
See, for instance, here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#full
The “close window” (“×”) button is identical, and Windows 95 re-purposed NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button into a “maximize” button. But you can still see why NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button looks that way; it resembles a NeXTSTEP application icon, seen at the bottom on the above screenshot.
Windows 95 did not, sadly, copy the very useful behavior of the “close window” button in NeXTSTEP: It changed shape if the contents of a window was not saved, as seen here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#textedit...
I've long suspected the start menu was intended to be on the top of the screen.
In all other applications when you want to shut it down, it's the last option on the list. If you move the start menu to the top, then shutdown does indeed become the last on the list and the most common option, "Programs" becomes the closest by Fitts Law standards.
Even in the Program Manager in Windows 3.1, the Run and Shutdown options were the same place but the menu was at the top. From the beginning (of public releases) in Windows 95 you could in fact move the start bar to the top.
Having it on bottom was legally much cleaner, especially on the heels of 6-year saga of the classic Apple vs. Microsoft "look and feel" lawsuit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
Anyway, this is 100% speculative - there is a few builds with it on the top, such as Windows 95 build 90c https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_95_build_90c but it starts on the bottom and quickly moves back there: https://betawiki.net/wiki/Category:Windows_95_builds
But really, menu bar on the top, colorful rainbowish icon on the left, clock on the right, it's very System 7.5 (https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/System_7.5)
Reminds me of McDonaldland vs Sid & Marty Krofft (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_%26_Marty_Krofft_Televisio....), and I quote: "We do not believe that the ordinary reasonable person, let alone a child, viewing these works will even notice that Pufnstuf is wearing a cummerbund while Mayor McCheese is wearing a diplomat’s sash."
I created the Start Menu and Taskbar, and I did intend for them to be at the top of the screen.
http://blogs.harvard.edu/danieloran/2022/11/28/qa-about-the-...
Hi Daniel, the interview you linked should be a HN submission in its own right. It's a shame to have it lost in a comment two levels deep in a long thread.
I am sure there are a lot of people interested in the history of computing and user interfaces that would really appreciate this interview and seeing the original prototypes and sketches.
Thanks for the suggestion!
Here it is:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33794018
My whole speculative checklist on the matter is now confirmed about as accurately as I could ever hope for. What a lovely feeling of satisfaction that is
Glad to help!
Interesting Q&A, thanks for sharing!
Oh wow. Thanks for sharing the Q&A.
The next build after 90c had the task bar at the bottom. The start menu was redesigned a few times after that build (which is from early 1994). Why would Microsoft leave shut down in the wrong position? Why did it take them until XP to put the programs option closer to the bottom?
I have no idea. It just seems unusual that the closest mouse distance is shut down.
Fitt's Law, GOMS analysis and the human processor model were all the rage in the mid-90s.
The ordering is pretty unusual but when you push the start menu to the top, all the rules are followed again.
Again, pure speculation. I wasn't in the room and I've never been able to directly ask someone who was (although I'd go out of my way for the opportunity).
As far as how it took them so long, I'd imagine moving things around on the start menu would require the signoff of an annoyingly large number of people. This is before the modern era of Unilateral UI Designer Autocrat who's given questionably broad authority over everything.
I always suspected that the reason why it's on the bottom is so that it doesn't blend into tab headers when a tabbed dialog is maximized.
You can move the taskbar to the top of the screen.
Reading this, I wonder about all the UIs that I come across today and feel like they're usually on a scale from flawed to awful (see also: store reviews of software, especially after an update). Not being from the software development world, can anyone who is confirm whether this type of user testing still takes place at all? Or is it perhaps confined to big redesigns, specific user groups (like beginning computer users, even for developer tools like vmware), or other such constraints?
Edit: reading further, this is a great example: "Separate UI for Beginners [...] [various problems mentioned] [...] For these reasons and others, we abandoned the idea". These reasons translate directly, one-to-one, to Android's simple homescreen variant that my grandma kept finding somehow, clicking on, and then not being able to use various things on her phone anymore. Nor getting more comfortable with the proper UI. Nor was it consistent with other apps. Android added this feature when, a decade earlier, it was already spotted (long before release, I should note) that such a variant wouldn't help people at all. This doesn't appear to have been thought about or tested in the real world, and I think Android is the most-used OS on the planet. (Not sure if all vendor's shells have this feature as well, but I'm fairly sure it was stock android or at least commonly implemented a few versions ago.)
Generally big companies hire UX Researchers, whose job is specifically to conduct these types of tests.
To address your second question, it depends on the test. For example, during a recent test where I work (fairly large tech company), we used user logs to identify a set of "power users", since that's who we were interested in learning more about.
Nowadays I fear many UX researchers are hired to find reasons for whatever silly design decision someone in power wants to do.
Or perhaps all the "easy pickings" have been picked and there's not much left.
Some of the greatest UX of all time. Shame how far we have fallen in the current flat world.
A few people are trying to claim it back! My current favorite - https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar
I wonder what the differences between Classic, 2000, 95/98 themes are when put side by side.
Fonts and colors, matching the original OS.
On Windows 11, the System Classic skin is a very light gray and uses Segoe UI. 95/98 uses a darker gray and Microsoft Sans Serif. 2000 uses a slightly lighter gray and Tahoma. ME uses the 2000 gray and Tahoma.
On Windows XP, the 95/98 theme was "Windows Classic", and the 2000 theme was "Windows Standard".
Or if you want a visual comparison of the original UIs, https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/running#win95
This is amazing. Instant install. I wish there was a way to theme all of the UI to be like 95.
Nice! Does it work with OpenShell?
This is unbelievable. Thanks so much for sharing.
Windows 95 was an unprecedented advance in the human/computer GUI interface, which is still reverberating today.
Even many Mac users copy aspects of it (put your Applications folder in your dock and you have a start menu/programs).
In fairness, Mac users were already doing that in 1991 with System 7's Apple Menu Items folder.
You could put anything you wanted in that folder, and it would show up in the Apple Menu. It was a good idea to put aliases to your most commonly-used apps in it. I remember doing that all the way up through Mac OS 9.
I know, like can the UI/UX people please please PLEASE pay more attention to this stuff!
UX goal is not enhance user experience anymore, it's improve profits by manipulation of the user experience.
You'll find that the vast majority of bad UX decisions aren't coming from designers themselves, but from management.
See also: A/B testing UIs to maximize arbitrary metrics
Designers are the gatekeepers though, maybe they should stand up to these folks more often.
I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement.
Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.
I suspect a lot of that is because designers aren't often technology lifers, rather seemingly entering this field smelling profit and riding the wave as it were. I don't know what the solution is here other than firing them all and replacing them with engineers and passionate tech nerds who remember their history. Which won't ever happen, and the situation is hopeless.
The world we could have had...
Nonsense; plenty of people in UX, myself included, have tech backgrounds. Software engineers aren't immune from the "higher metrics == uSeRs lOvE iT" trap.
Consider early Google, when they infamously A/B tested 50 shades of blue for a button. Did that actually improve anything? Of course not.
I wouldn't call those metrics arbitrary, they're just trying to measure something different. It's no longer measuring user productivity, it's measuring user engagement. It's no longer how quickly a user familiarizes and gets something done with the software, it's how often and how long the user uses the software.
I keep wondering, if flat is the new hot thing, why don't people just use libXaw to build their modern, cutting-edge UIs and not hobble my computer's performance in the process?
Because they cannot draw some rectangles like in the good old days. They have to "compose" a 3D surface of the screen. /s
libXaw is difficult to use and there aren't really suitable widgets for many purposes-- it only really has buttons and textboxes. It doesn't support sophisticated layouts either, it just stretches the controls rather than letting you define any sort of anchors/margins.
Too bad they didn't read these notes before gutting the taskbar in Win11. It's so unusable, so slow when you can't "ungroup" stuff. Made me actually reinstall and go back to Win10.
Or the task bar grouping in Windows 7 that I've found most people actually don't prefer when you reveal that it's optional. A lot of people also like it, maybe as much as 40% or so, but when I look over someone's shoulder (who had been using 7 for ages already) and I wondered out loud how they manage to work with that task bar, they were usually happy to learn of a way to just see open programs instead of having this submenu structure plus a lot of unused task bar space, even if that meant getting used to a new way of working again.
Or the joke of a start menu from Windows 8 that presumably Ballmer liked a lot. You even had to make some hidden gesture (swish and flick, professor flitwick would say) to get to the settings only to find the 'shut down' option.
Windows 9x was a bit gray but otherwise mostly made sense.
Windows 10 seems to have gone back to the state of things at 7, except now the settings are at 200% zoom/whitespace and all over the place and I've heard everyone from beginner to guru wonder where the heck they hid xyz.
Windows 11 you've already covered.
Precisely this sort of thing is why I wondered in another comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33776750) whether this type of testing happens anymore at all, or whether it is constrained in some way.
> except now the settings are all over the place
On Windows 11, it's very rare to have to use the old Control Panel. It still exists for some uncommon settings, but nearly everything has been moved to the new settings. And everything is actually intelligently grouped. I only wish you could have multiple Settings windows open at once.
That's not really been my experience. I do agree about needing multiple settings windows opened at once, especially when one is already open and you need to open a seemingly unrelated screen and lose your place.
They seem to be good at undoing mistakes in the next version five years later. The newly introduced issue in 11 was said to be taskbar grouping, idk I haven't used it myself (yet :( ).
Wi does 8 made sense to me the first time I picked up a surface pro or a windows phone.
I cannot think of anything good to say about it in any other context though.
Sure, I'm not suggesting we install unmodified ubuntu or windows 7 on phones either. Similarly, win8 on a desktop...
Microsoft might be reimplementing a non-grouping option. It was spotted in a recent development build.
https://twitter.com/thebookisclosed/status/15929816173412474...
> Windows 11 is going to get a "Never Combine" taskbar item setting after all. It no longer features window titles like in Windows 10 & older releases, but retains the icon per window mechanic which some might still find useful. New in build 25246, hidden behind feature 29785186
> This feature is forcibly disabled and even if you do manage to enable it (regular ViVe commands won't do) its code is partially broken. You can notice WinDbg running as a few small patches were needed. No UI for enabling this exists in Settings yet.
Thanks. Looks to me like that while it's ungrouping, it still doesn't display the labels for each window? So you get like 5 similar icons there with no way to discern between them?
I still think the biggest user interface (UI) change from Microsoft was the change from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. There were so many features and improvements e.g. the re-designed Open/Save dialog (not much changed since then). Later versions of Windows have never made the same leap between new versions of Windows. Sure, there are refined or tweaked features (or regressed!), but each new version of Windows felt like an incremental update from the previous version.
I think the next leap in UI and visual design from Microsoft was...Windows Phone 8 (2012). It was a refreshing and different approach to mobile design. The visual language 'Metro' worked well on mobile touch screens. But Microsoft took the bad decision to transplant 'Metro' (flat design) to the desktop. The result is a clumsy, jumble of inconsistent screens. It simply doesn't work.
I'm working on an Any Browser framework for making websites, and this means testing with IE 3.0 and up.
After installing Word 97, I have found it such a pleasure to use that I've started doing a lot of my writing in it.
From inside of a VM, it is still more responsive and accessible than most other things I have to use today.
Windows 95/98/2k were the peak of "Open" and "Save As" dialogs. Some linux DE's managed parity in the mid-2000s but then removed features and introduced bugs again as mobile/convergence motivations took over in 2010+. Nowdays you can't even paste into a File->Open dialog in a gtk3 based desktop environment without triggering an error.
Indeed. Some of those dialogs are still present in 10 depending on the application, but even the default dialog is pretty good. I like that it's basically just a "lite" Explorer window so I can copy/paste/rename/move/whatever all from within the dialog.
I think I was 11 or 12 when I first installed Win95, once I got some help, it was like a whole new world. Multimedia was finally a real possibility. Seeing Weezer in their "Buddy Holly" music video on the disc was pretty wild, and the "Start Me Up" spoof song about win95 "this windows ninety fiiiiiive, it's suckin' up my driiiive". Good times.
This was such an interesting article.. Of course I was biased by growing up on C64, DOS and Win95.. But, it was really the case for me, I was able to learn all about the OS from just clicking around, and things seemed so strongly to be "in their place", much more so than Win 3.11 which I never liked.
It also had a very fluid and gentle gradiant from functionality intended for everyday users to more advanced stuff, without making you feel overwhelmed and without hiding things too much away from you.. Just count how many clicks it takes to install the IPX protocol in Windows 95 vs Windows 10! (Also, good luck with that on 10!)
It's also amazing how well it ran on the hardware at the time, 100 mhz and 16 mb ram was Just Fine. The entire OS could probably fit inside the space taken up by the windows 10 start menu I'm sure.
I wish M$ would start trying to make a good user experience again, instead of trying to sell candy crush..
The modern paradigm seems to be "if we can't see it there is no problem". Just hide everything behind a hamburger menu, disclosure triangle, dropdown, or delete the feature entirely! Then the user won't be confused, they'll just assume the things we hid are impossible and thus not complain or ask questions.
Aww..how cute, when user interfaces were still designed for the users!
I loved the windows 95 ui! Wished there was a way to go back to it (not through windowblinds). Pair it with NT and you have a winning combination.
> Our desire to abandon the waterfall model and opt for iterative design fortunately followed similar efforts in other areas of the company, so we had concrete examples of its benefits and feasibility.
I think there is something really interesting about how even back in 1992 people were talking about the need to be more agile.
Wow! Imagine designing a user interface via careful, evidence- and feedback-driven development, as opposed to just doing what subjectively "looks good" to a sheltered SV """designer""" and shuffling it all every 6 months.
It is sad, that nowadays they are just slapping everything on existing UI without much of a thought. And yet, even under several layers of "improvements" one still can find UIs from Windows 95 days, hardly changed.
I miss the Multiple-Document-Interface (MDI) application template. It was better in many respects to the tab based interface which overtook it.
They could give the Kent Sullivan documentation to the WinUI team.