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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#231

Post by flowerlad »

deanCommie wrote: post #224
blattimwind wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.

Thank you. I feel like the world is taking crazy pills. Windows 7 was gorgeous. Windows 8 was a mess but at least the were trying to do something bold with consistency with their Windows Phone Look and Feel. Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated. I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and foun…

Take a look at this iOS critique https://uxcritique.tumblr.com/

To me Windows XP’s look & feel was among the best. Except for the fat Window title bar.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#232

Post by Haga »

blattimwind wrote: post #209
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…

> Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.

Don't provoke the designers.. They have a hostage.. Us

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#233

Post by CmdrKrool »

barrkel wrote: post #216
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.

Ribbons are far harder to scan than menus; text is easier to scan for new semantic associations (actions you've never performed before), and menus have a regular aligned layout, while ribbons inconsistently mix text and icons and use inconsistent action sizing requiring an irregular scan pattern. If you're a repeat user, icons start becoming easier to find than text, and the inconsistent grid starts having a geograph…

> requiring an irregular scan pattern

Yes - you've just made me aware of how and why scanning a ribbon always felt somehow more physically exerting to me, the 'manual work' of dragging my eyeballs around and about, instead of in a straight line.

Plus with buttons of different sizes, you have to 'zoom' your attention in and out to catch them all; while the harder I try to find something, the more I naturally tend to lean forward and crane into the small details, and miss the wood for the trees.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#234

Post by ryanbrunner »

stuartd wrote: post #220
egeozcan wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.

Originally of course there was only one mouse button, and you would ctrl-click for the context menu

Two button mice were for sure the standard on non-Macintosh PCs well before Windows was in popular usage.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#235

Post by mikehollinger »

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…

> Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious.

... I didn’t know there’s a button bar there until just now, and I tend to think that I know what I’m doing. I’ve always scrolled all the way back to the top of the page to get to that bar. I genuinely wonder what else I’ve missed now.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#236

Post by tiffanyh »

csomar wrote: post #177

Here is something else: The interface was "responsive". And I don't mean the responsive designs we have today for HTML but that when you click a button, you get a "response" very fast from the monitor. Now, with these new interfaces and stuff, most of them are so lag-y that you can notice them with your eyes. It's very frustrating. I tried Bisq a couple days ago. The application was apparently made with Electron and…

This isn’t your imagination. It’s been measured that over the years, operating systems have become more laggy.

https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#237

Post by ckosidows »

deanCommie wrote: post #224
blattimwind wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. Is it? Windows 10 looks like installing a custom skin on Windows XP went wrong and now you're stuck with "Windows Classic (Flat)" set up for weird colors.

Thank you. I feel like the world is taking crazy pills. Windows 7 was gorgeous. Windows 8 was a mess but at least the were trying to do something bold with consistency with their Windows Phone Look and Feel. Then Windows 10 shipped and I thought I got some pre alpha developer build accidentally, and it just... Never updated. I've heard iOS be criticized for being overly flat these days but I just got an iPad and foun…

Maybe I just don't remember enough about Windows 8, but how is Windows 10 that much worse, in your opinion? I feel like it's the exact same as 8 sans the Metro Start section and a few minor (in my opinion) UI tweaks.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#238

Post by lyjackal »

redwall_hp wrote: post #83
zapzupnz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Force Touch is on its way out. Has been for about two generations of iPhone. There's now Haptic Touch which is nothing but a long-press with better feedback.

It has the same problem: invisible, undiscoverable UI driven by seemingly random gestures. Who cares if you long press or press harder? You still can't tell it's an option unless you try it on everything.

Sounds a lot like double click on Windows 95 to me.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#239

Post by jstarks »

S_A_P wrote: post #218
TuringTest wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes. I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source . https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1... http…

I just wish that the default was to copy/paste the text and not text, style info, multimedia and who knows what else.

You can change the default.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#240

Post by anderspitman »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #154
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…

FWIW, one redeeming characteristic of SaaS web apps is that most of the time, you can fix up their crap UIs with liberal application of CSS (via e.g. Stylus extension). It's something I find myself doing increasingly often - usually not to make things look different, but to undo some dumb design decisions like low density, whitespace-rich presentation, or hidden video controls. Unfortunately, this does not give the a…

Is there any sort of a "marketplace" where people can upload and vote on alternative CSS themes for any given site? That would be cool.
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