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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#11

Post by yread »

michaelmrose wrote: post #6
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

right click cut and paste, keyboard shortcuts?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#12

Post by [deleted] »

michaelmrose wrote: post #6
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

[deleted]

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#13

Post by currysausage »

michaelmrose wrote: post #6
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

Ribbons, context menus, keyboard shortcuts. For elderly users, I usually recommend the context menu because it is most universally available.

And indeed, most of the "gosh I broke the computer, all my files are deleted" calls from my grandma are caused by accidental drag-and-drop.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#14

Post by netsharc »

wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#15

Post by amiga-workbench »

ogdoad wrote: post #8
amiga-workbench wrote: post #2

When actual thought and reasoning went into UI design. Nice to see the methodology.

Have we actually reached the point where we idolize something that was equally mainstream to bash when it came out? Remember "Winblows" &c? Suddenly, faced with hyper-spy mega-corps, the dumb simplicity of the evil-yet-cute Windows 95 is desirable. Like the lesser of two evils, or the evil you know. Any day now, a post will come up extolling the illumined joys of mainframe COBOL programming.

I'm no luddite but several areas of computing have had serious regressions. I still have Windows 95 machines kicking around and I know how fickle they are, but you will never hear me saying a bad word about the UI.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#17

Post by xab9 »

chkuendig wrote: post #10
michaelmrose wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Do you just never reorganize anything? Further what is the chance that anyone who can't drag and drop would be able to find the setting to turn off drag and drop?

Cut & Paste for when you really need to reorganize? But usually it would probably be enough to just list the most recent files somewhere and provide full text search for everything else.

Seeing how my elderly parents use the computer: you don't manage files. At all.

Right click is evil, keyboard shortcuts are evil, drag and drop never occurs to them. Mom usually just reads her emails (and attachements open in the browser nowdays), so it's not a problem, but father saves files.

If he finds something important then he saves it multiple times, so in the file list view there will be multiple similar items, that's how he knows it's important (visually it's very distinctive). When he has to copy a file somewhere else he usually fires up his CAD software, opens the file and then saves it elsewhere.

I just gave up "educating" them (after countless attempts). It's pointless. I remove file duplicates half a year, copy stuff to an usb key when he asks me (I visit them once a month) and avoid the machines like the plague, unless they explicitly ask me to do something (I installed ubuntu for mom, which works wonderfully for her, one less problem to worry about).

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#18

Post by krapp »

netsharc wrote: post #14
wiradikusuma wrote: post #4

"not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders" -- My mom is 70 years old now, and I easily get frustrated whenever she's stuck with seemingly simple tasks with her computer. I usually scold her and yell at her, "This is so obvious, how come you don't know?" -- I always regret doing that afterwards. After I'm calm, I ask her why, trying to understand it from her perspective. Every time I do this,…

The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...

> The term "folder" already annoys me. It's a (filesystem) directory...

You don't like the metaphor of a folder, but you'll accept the metaphor of what goes into a folder?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#20

Post by thanatropism »

Paianni wrote: post #16

I have a feeling that Windows 95's window minimisation was at heart a workaround for the fact that the architecture couldn't support workspaces and therefore they had to find a way to 'hack' Windows to hide windows at will.

Windows 3.1 had window minimization. Confusingly, programs became icons in your "desktop" (which you could only see when minimizing everything).
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