Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 95 UI Design

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 312 posts

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#71

Post by mixmastamyk »

pvg wrote: post #58
jplayer01 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hi…

I'm mostly pushing back against the idea of some lost golden age of UI design. The file explorer used in this example is almost the same a quarter of a century later. And some of its deficiencies have lasted a long time - it took a couple of decades for explorer to learn to show a unified list of files and directories sorted by modification time. And it still doesn't have an inlined tree view making the basic task of…

The iPad touch screen device was intuitive for a while, until featuritis took over. Explorer too for that matter.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#72

Post by pvg »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #71
pvg wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm mostly pushing back against the idea of some lost golden age of UI design. The file explorer used in this example is almost the same a quarter of a century later. And some of its deficiencies have lasted a long time - it took a couple of decades for explorer to learn to show a unified list of files and directories sorted by modification time. And it still doesn't have an inlined tree view making the basic task of…

The iPad touch screen device was intuitive for a while, until featuritis took over. Explorer too for that matter.

Young children, the elderly, the desktop-bewildered still use iPads and touchscreen phones more readily than they ever used desktop UIs. I think as experienced computer-users we easily miss that this has been a genuine revolution in UI reach.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#74

Post by perl4ever »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #34
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a li…

This made me think, how long did it take for cars to acquire basically their modern standard interface, and have personal computers been around that long?

Apparently, the Austin 7 popularized what are now standard controls for cars in 1922 (although it wasn't the very first example), and the IC auto was patented in 1886, which means it was about 36 years before people mostly settled on one interface.

By comparison, microcomputers have been around longer, but if you consider the GUI personal computer as a separate class, the Apple Lisa came out in 1983, which was...36 years ago! But it doesn't seem like we are converging to one standard.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#76

Post by aspenmayer »

jplayer01 wrote: post #39
pvg wrote: post #12

UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.

The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hi…

I share so your frustration with Windows 10. It’s reaching iOS levels of lack of discoverability of features.

I wrote to tell you that Control Panel itself still exists. You can get to it from using the hidden search in Start Menu. Open Start and begin typing Control Panel and it will show up eventually. Or you can right-click on Start button and select it. Or even type “control panel” in command prompt or powershell, without quotes. Apparently it shows up in File Explorer under Desktop as well, which makes the least sense of all to my intuition. Hope that helps.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#77

Post by terandle »

spectramax wrote: post #66
terandle wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple has killed off 3D Touch first with the XR and now the entire iPhone 11 line

They've still kept the functionality AFAIK - you could just long-touch for force touch menu. Instead of pressing hard, you're now pressing longer to invoke the 3D touch menu. I know why Apple got rid of force touch - BOM cost. Not that I condone the concept of Force Touch, but some wizbang designer pitched to the management that hey "We could solve this using just the UI with long press, and save $$$ in LCD costs to…

The main reason they got rid of it because it was a gimmick that never really panned out and having two different ways of invoking a context menu based on force was a UX disaster for the novice user.

I'm glad Apple was able to swallow their pride and drop their "breakthrough innovative pressure sensitive screen" - reducing BOM costs was the icing on the cake, although it seems like they have just replaced that space with more battery so I wouldn't be surprised if the BOM difference was negligible in the end.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#78

Post by jakelazaroff »

perl4ever wrote: post #74
ordinaryperson wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a li…

This made me think, how long did it take for cars to acquire basically their modern standard interface, and have personal computers been around that long? Apparently, the Austin 7 popularized what are now standard controls for cars in 1922 (although it wasn't the very first example), and the IC auto was patented in 1886, which means it was about 36 years before people mostly settled on one interface. By comparison, m…

I feel like we have converged!

Without exception, laptops are two panels connected by a hinge, with the top containing a screen and the bottom a keyboard and trackpad. The “desktop” metaphor is universal — draggable, tilable windows adorn a hierarchical filesystem.

Basically all modern phones are rectangles dedicated entirely to their screens, with which you interact using your fingers. Turn them on and you get a grid of app icons, each of which takes up the full screen when launched.

Sure, there’s a lot more variation on top of these foundations — but then, computers are way more complex than cars.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#79

Post by mgerdts »

notadoc wrote: post #15

Windows 95 had an obvious UI, but was rather cluttered. The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul. The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a m…

> "The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel."

I first used System 7 after having used DOS, Windows 3.1, and Windows 95 and a bit of SunOS. With that background, I found System 7 and the silly hardware limitations to be anything but intuitive.

To this day I find it annoying to have to go all the way to to top of the monitor to get to a menu. Arguably that was less of a pain on the tiny screen of a Mac SE, but becomes real where than one app is open in a way that the windowed app feature is used in a meaningful way.

An example of silly hardware limitations includes substituting an eject button on the floppy drive for dragging it to the trash. The same action used to delete files or folders is used to regain possession of my precious files.

The single button on a mouse to make it simple sounds nice, but then there are modifiers using command - giving the same functionality a windows user would expect from a right click.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#80

Post by Aeolun »

soheil wrote: post #40
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. until you get a blue screen of death... Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.

The blue screen of death was fairly predictable at some point.
Post reply on HN