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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#71

Post by Klathmon »

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,…

>So, whenever I design UI/UX for an app, I ask my mom to test.

I have an informal rule that I will try to get someone at my job that has never seen or used the application to be the one to test out new features or UI changes. Generally just asking when they have some time, handing them a phone or laptop, and asking them to do a task in the app (with a small amount of background about the task if needed).

There has never been a case where this hasn't monumentally improved the application. Questions like "what do I do here?", "how do I get it to start?", and "did it work?" were extremely common for quite a while before we managed to get the UI in a good state. You just don't see the implicit assumptions you make at so many places.

Sadly it's hard to "formalize" something like this (at least in my experience), because the benefits seem to be greatly reduced if the person testing has seen or used the application before, and I found it works best the "further away" someone is from software development.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#72

Post by herbst »

analogic wrote: post #69
herbst wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldnt say Gnome is by or for mac users. In fact in many ways it is way more similiar to Metro than to OSX. Gnome 3 just broke the common Windows 95 workflow, however many others did before.

ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes

Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive.

You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#73

Post by vilius »

In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin.

As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket.

Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short.

I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that they did tried to stay away from copying as much as possible?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#74

Post by valine »

vilius wrote: post #73

In early UI we can see a Wastebasket, which ended up being changed to the Recycle Bin. As a user I would say that Recycle Bin is a misleading name because it has nothing to do with recycling a file / folder. However it has a more positive sounding than the weird Wastebasket. Meanwhile classic Mac OS already had a Trash. Simple, clear and short. I wonder why Windows could not simply name it Trash? Could it be that the…

That was part of Apple’s GUI lawsuit in 1994 against Microfoft. Apple lost all parts of the suit except for the exclusive rights to the trash icon. Microsoft was forced to replace it with the recycle bin.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#75

Post by morsch »

vadimberman wrote: post #36
russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

Classic Mac OS (System 7 was contemporary to Windows 95) didn't really have any concept of minimisation or even maximization as such.

There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1]

The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.

None of this was particularly strange to me back then.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade apparently a standard feature later on

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#76

Post by usea »

cesarb wrote: post #51
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?

> How do you manage files in windows at all without drag and drop? Most people I've seen use Ctrl-X/Ctrl-V, or right-click-Cut/right-click-Paste. It has the advantage that you don't need both the source and destination visible at the same time.

You can actually drag a file from one window to the other without having both showing (such as between two maximized windows). While dragging a file, you can still manipulate windows around using the keyboard, like with alt-tab.

For example, you can begin dragging a file, then alt-tab to another window or tab or even open a new program or whatever using the keyboard, and then finally release the file into the destination window.

It's not obvious that this would work, but it is convenient if you find yourself wanting to drag something with the mouse for some reason.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#77

Post by NoGravitas »

herbst wrote: post #72
analogic wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ya tbh i never tried using it for more than 10 minutes

Personally i love it but it took me way more than 10 minutes to realize why :) IMO it is highly underestimated, mostly because you need to change your workflow which takes time, but when you did it feels super productive. You wouldnt judge i3 or other completely different approaches after only a few minutes.

I feel absolutely the same about Gnome 3. One of the biggest things, I think, is that it puts workspaces absolutely in your face, so using them is a much more natural part of the workflow than in Gnome 2. It's also more keyboard-friendly than Gnome 2 (though it still could use some work in this area). Despite being rather large (gnome-shell on Wayland is typically the second-biggest RAM user on my laptop), it feels minimalistic, and is almost always fast, and stays out of the way of whatever I'm working on.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#78

Post by rsynnott »

russellbeattie wrote: post #45
vadimberman wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still get frustrated on OSX when I minimize a window and have to hunt around for it Windows user here. Honest curiosity: does anyone know why the minimize / maximize works on the Mac the way it does? I mean, what's the rationale to design it like this?

No idea... And a few versions ago Apple changed the maximize button to go full screen, which made it useless for the 95% of us who don't use one app at a time. Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them. Just one more example of them slowly but surely driving its Mac customers away.

> Minimized windows also used to show up at the bottom of the screen when using "Expose", but then Apple changed the name to "Mission Control" and removed them.

Eh? They still do, as of MacOS 10.13.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#79

Post by chrisper »

williamdclt wrote: post #67
chrisper wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure you are not confusing it with iOS? That's where you always have strictly only one app in fullscreen! (Yes, yes. It is a lame joke. But who uses only one Window at a time? What is the point of that? Though I remember when I used OS X you could swipe left (or right) to switch back to all other apps. So I think that was good enough.)

I use several windows at a time (around 5 in average), but they are all maximized. I just alt-tab and switch workspaces?

But when it is full screen then you can't alt tab, right? You would have to use the shortcut to switch workspaces. Maybe I just remember wrong.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#80

Post by narag »

einr wrote: post #35
russellbeattie wrote: post #26

It's hard to remember, but even though Windows 3.11 was extremely dominant at the time, it was by no means assured that Windows 95 would be the success that it was. The very first version missed wildly in some big ways (MSN was a folder integrated into the desktop, for example, and no TCP/IP support [*Edit: yes there was - I misremembered.]), but the core, underlying redesign of the GUI was so profoundly good it prop…

There absolutely was TCP/IP support in Windows 95 from the very beginning. It was not installed by default but it was trivial to add via the Network applet in Control Panel. SLIP/PPP was also supported and you had basic utilities like Telnet and FTP included so you could connect to the Internet right out of the box. No web browser, though. Internet Explorer 1.0 shipped with the optional Plus! pack.

For some reason we used Trumpet stack. Could it be that OS stack didn't work very well at first?
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