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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#201

Post by ndespres »

ubermonkey wrote: post #146
ndespres wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The places where the metaphor gets stretched can be frustrating, especially in Windows. You can put Folders on the Desktop, but there's also a "Computer" icon on the desktop which allows you to browse into other folders.. including the desktop? Then there's your Personal folders.. which are in fact collections of other folders themselves, but appear transparently to be folders- but somewhere on the file system they a…

>You can put Folders on the Desktop, but there's also a "Computer" icon on the desktop which allows you to browse into other folders.. including the desktop? That's a specific failing of Windows, not something inherent to the folder metaphor, though. It's one of those absurd things that happen when nobody pays any attention to coherence. That particular thing has driven me BATS for years. I'm encouraged, though, that…

Well, yes. Windows' implementation of the metaphor is my complaint. In its current form, they may have cleaned up the "desktop" but also made it more confusing to tell what is a special folder/collection/Library. The way it appears now, there's a "Library" called Documents, which includes a folder called Documents but may include others as well. Where am I at a given moment, not sure.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#202

Post by ken »

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...

"Folder" makes perfect sense to me. At my first job, we used a paper-based filing system, and we'd sometimes put folders inside of other folders. It's perfectly legit. You wouldn't nest them 5 levels deep, but that's simply a physical limitation: you wouldn't put 100 files in one folder, either.

"Directory" I don't understand at all. The only thing I can think of is the felt letter boards at the entrance to office buildings that say "DR SMITH - OFFICE 555". Not only are those a more obscure metaphor, but I've never seen them nested even one level deep. I don't have any idea how I'm supposed to use that metaphor. "Create directory": am I creating a new building? Is my building going to have two directories in the lobby? How is one 'inside' the other?

I was completely lost on Unix until it was pointed out to me that "directory" was just its weird name for folder.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#203

Post by hungerstrike »

nsriv wrote: post #194

I really just wish Windows had a Miller Columns view in Explorer like OSX. All the apps on Windows that promise this are utter garbage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_columns

Sorry to wish against you but I hope Explorer never gets them, not even as an option, because I think they are a garbage idea for browsing files or anything else since they're too busy and constantly make you change your focus.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#204

Post by cr0sh »

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.

> There absolutely was TCP/IP support in Windows 95 from the very beginning.

I could have sworn that was all in the Plus! package too, but 20+ years of time has eroded my memory on that...

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#205

Post by _jal »

nine_k wrote: post #183
_jal wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All correct. In daily use, I almost never use those buttons - I end up manually sizing/placing windows. The the MacOS scheme of doing this leads a sort of organic, emergent window layout - I always end up with windows staggered to display relevant bits. With Windows (and with most window managers, X), things always end up either strict tiled or stacked. I'm very used to the Mac way and prefer it, but that could just…

The amount of tedious manual work required to resize and arrange several windows on MacOS (6+ to latest OSX) bothered me all the time I had a misfortune to have to use it. It does not even have something like edge snapping. My WM of choice is now Xfwm, which allows to rearrange windows easily without gaps, make windows fill available space (vertical and horizontal separately ), or tile them by dragging to corners. On…

The lack of window and edge snapping are exactly the reason I prefer MacOS behavior. If it did that, partly revealing lower windows would be far more tedious/impossible.

For me, the goal is not to maximize available space to the frontmost windows; it is to maximize the use of the monitor to display what's currently relevant. It allows me to do things like keep a Finder window open with just a bit peeking through to drag things to, keep an eye on a few lines of a terminal tail -f, see the mailbox pane and room pane in Mail/Slack so I can see if anything new happened I should respond to, etc. all while working on whatever I'm working on.

With the Windows-ish "maximize the window", that is replaced, almost invariably, by useless window background.

Again, I expect this is mostly what one is accustomed to, and the Macish approach is more idiosyncratic to the user. Works for me.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#206

Post by zwieback »

smoyer wrote: post #52
einr wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Since a large part of my work involved building networks of pre-DOCSIS cable modems at the time, I can tell you that the first Windows to support TCP/IP was Windows 3.11 (Windows for WorkGroups). This was carried into Windows 95 and by Windows 98 there was even Internet Explorer.

...and it had preemptively multitasking 32 bit drivers, we built a Mac (AppleTalk) server product on top of that with pretty good performance. 3.11 was a huge step forward.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#207

Post by herbst »

unicornporn wrote: post #148
herbst wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure he is referring to the configuration structure. You get this fancy 8.1 sidebar configuration screens that may solve 80% of a average users tasks, but once you start digging you'll find configuration Windows in the style of W7, and if you dig even harder you'll even find stuff that looks straight out of 98. I am a linux users myself, configuration inconsistency gives me nightmares.

> You get this fancy 8.1 sidebar configuration screens that may solve 80% of a average users tasks, but once you start digging you'll find configuration Windows in the style of W7, and if you dig even harder you'll even find stuff that looks straight out of 98. Yes. And another really mind-boggling example is the Control Panel. There's actually two of them (or more, depending on how you see things). We have both the…

To be honest my impression of Mac is not to different. You have Gui only and terminal only config settings and some that mix both concepts in a painfully unobvious way (like xcode license agreements)

However it is still a lot cleaner and more consistent than win 10. Agreed.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#209

Post by Klathmon »

z3t4 wrote: post #195
Klathmon wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ne…

Don't forget about repeated use. Do your users come back, or do they use the app only once !?

This isn't the only thing we do for UI/UX stuff, it's just one that I've found can really help, and most developers should be able to do it in some fashion.

We have plenty of analytics and user testing, but they tend to miss the case of users that are unable or unwilling to learn the application, and end up perpetually confused.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

#210

Post by notriddle »

pavlov wrote: post #168
eadmund wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Compare it to other GUIs at the time, like CDE, IBM's Presentation Manager, or even Mac OS 8 and there's no comparison. Well, I agree that there was no comparison with System 8, but not in the sense you mean. I think that the Mac back then was head-and-shoulders a better system than Windows. It might still be, but they're both so painful to use now that it's very difficult to pick a winner. The Macintosh system was…

I was using Macs back in the late '90s, and none of the things you say ring true. Extensions could easily bring down the entire system because there was no memory protection. Full OS crashes (what modern macOS calls kernel panics) were a daily occurrence for the typical Mac-using professional who ran complex software. The window system was often difficult to understand because apps tended to use a plethora of little…

We were talking about 95, which is a completely different universe from NT (though current versions of NT have a GUI that's based on 95).
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