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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#121

Post by cjblomqvist »

grawprog wrote: post #106
andrepd wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon is actually a good interface, for me at least, much more pleasant to use than toolbars. The flatness and whitespace everywhere though, that can die in a fire.

But toolbars are essentially the same thing except they don't waste space, are moveable, resizable, typically customizable, and can be hidden.

Should be noted that the ribbon can be customized (in most apps I've seen it anyway) and hidden. Many toolbars are not very resizable (for good reasons).

The big difference is fewer clicks to do what you most often do (with ribbons). The cost is using more space and possibly cluttering the UI. You can also argue easier discoverability, but I'd guess that's up for debate (seems to for my old parents, but that's a quite small sample size).

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#122

Post by steve1977 »

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…

The box! You opened it, we came.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#124

Post by masswerk »

steve1977 wrote: post #120
masswerk wrote: post #117

I think, much of the recent developments in UI design (and its conceptual space) is owed to display technology. Modern displays have different contrast ratios from CRTs. Generally, fine details used to look softer on CRTs. So, when flat displays were introduced, bevels didn't look right, Apple got rid of realistic icons (formerly introduced in OS X), etc. On the other hand, extensive regions of flat color where alway…

Not sure about that. I personally found Windows 95 (or XP/Windows 7 in classic mode) looked great on flat screens - better than on CRTs actually.

This is actually true for Win 95 / classic Win UI. (However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.)

P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can also see, even if I do not appreciate the road taken specifically, why this wasn't sustainable with high resolution displays.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#125

Post by m_mueller »

jclulow wrote: post #114
ta999999171 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's meant to be reserved for advanced features that you only want to offer to users that know how to find them. See: right click.

I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail object settings with minimal mouse travel and clicks.

I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#126

Post by userbinator »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #105
userbinator wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, it's funny when some new app announces "now we have dark mode!" with much fanfare and commotion, when the ability to adjust the colours and appearance of individual UI elements across the whole OS was the norm back in Windows 3. https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/wi...

Windows 3 themes never worked that well though. Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

Dark mode is a single Boolean flag, which is much easier for application developers to follow.

The whole point is that application developers don't even have to care about it if they do things right, by using the OS's UI controls they will automatically be drawn with whatever colour the user has set.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#128

Post by ObsoleteNerd »

HNthrow22 wrote: post #103
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been a theme creator for a few decades now, and modifying how programs looked is what got me into development in the first place 30 years ago. The constant stripping of user definable visuals in modern computing is a legitimately depressing thing for me to see happen. It's just another step along the "you don't own the device or the software, we're just letting you borrow it" path. The constant push with SAAS an…

agreed man, have fond memories of tweaking themes for daily drivers like irc client, winamp foobar2000, compared to like spotify or discord now feels so neutered and limited in terms of customizing appearance.

Yeah and everything now is so disjointed. It shits me. Eg not only can’t you customise Spotify or Discord visually, but they don’t even respect the OS controls. You can’t resize them properly to fit windows 10 tiling, the menus are a broken mess, etc.

They insist on doing everything themselves and ignoring all standards which just ends up looking ugly and broken.

One of my main passions in theming is making your entire system look cohesively styled. Hell, I’d rather have standard Windows look but every program using the system UI so at least it all looks the same. I despise Spotify, Discord, and all Electron apps for this reason. They look so amateurish.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#129

Post by zozbot234 »

masswerk wrote: post #124
steve1977 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure about that. I personally found Windows 95 (or XP/Windows 7 in classic mode) looked great on flat screens - better than on CRTs actually.

This is actually true for Win 95 / classic Win UI. (However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.) P.S.: Many (including them myself) consider Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x) as the epitome of a UI, which matched usability, conceptual space and visual design next to perfection considering the visual and stylistic preferences of the time. That said, I can al…

> However, you may want to reconsider the bevels, since the graphics tend to be a bit too heavy on a flat screen.

They looked "heavy" on pixelated, low-res flat screens (lacking the natural Gaussian blur that a CRT gives you) but it's not like there was an alternative back then. OTOH nowadays, with resolutions, DPIs etc. varying so much, pixel perfect design is not the sensible choice that it was back then.

Flat design is just a bad choice, though. You can have softened bevels/3d effects in a modern design such as Adwaita in GNOME/Linux, and that looks quite good - perhaps the best feasible iteration on a Windows 95-like design, all things considered.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#130

Post by veselin »

Many people probably didn't notice that Microsoft Office at that time used custom controls and was a little off from this design.

The design was very nice, but a bit over complicated. Things looked like a control panel, which maybe makes us feel like pilots, but intimidates most users. The open dialog is a good example. Drop down elements, lists, directory list, label for selected directory. Later iterations fixed this and nowadays apps try to avoid selecting files altogether if possible. Overall, design has improved a lot since then, maybe except for the touch additions.

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