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Windows 95 UI Design

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Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#251

Post by soylentgraham »

GeekyBear wrote: post #242
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.

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click. Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#252

Post by nvrspyx »

anderspitman wrote: post #240
TeMPOraL wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An alternative to the Stylus extension that the parent comment mentions is the Stylish extension, which has a "marketplace" almost exactly what you're looking for. You don't even need the Stylish extension as each theme is also offered as a userscript.

https://userstyles.org

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#254

Post by ihuman »

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.

In Microsoft office, I often found it hard to find the button I was looking for because the buttons weren't group with similar buttons in the toolbar, and were distributed randomly. I prefer the tabbed+grouped layout of the ribbon because it fixes that organization problem. All the basics are in "Home", if I need to adjust the layout I go to layout, etc. Then within those tabs, common actions/properties are grouped together. I never want to go back to the old toolbar layout in Office 2003.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#255

Post by kps »

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

Originally, yes, there was one¹. But three were used quite soon after.²

¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...

² https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#256

Post by GeekyBear »

soylentgraham wrote: post #251
GeekyBear wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click. Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Force touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action.

That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#257

Post by 1996 »

PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #148
_trampeltier wrote: post #7

Back then you also could create your own theme. You could set the colors for text, backround, buttons etc. and every App did respect and use it. Today you can choose dark or light mode and almost no App does respect it, instead they bring there own colors and options.

YES. Under Windows I created and used a "dark" theme in 1991, nearly identical to what the canned Mac OS "dark" one is today. Used it well into the 2000s. Microsoft REMOVED that capability in what, Vista? And now that everyone has finally realized how stupid inverse color schemes are, the color-scheme editor is totally gone from Windows. It was in there for a decade and a half or more. They also removed the "blue bac…

what do you dislike about inverted colors?

also white text on blue- ouch.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#258

Post by mavhc »

criddell wrote: post #210
mavhc wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure having every toolbar open at once would use more space. Ribbon is dynamic to your current task, using a table? Table tab is available.

There's no reason toolbars couldn't also be dynamic.

Ribbon is just that.

Do you have examples of other apps with dynamic toolbars that work better?

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#259

Post by daxelrod »

GeekyBear wrote: post #195
redwall_hp wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?

Yes. That was one of the worst parts of Windows 95’s interface because it wasn’t discoverable.

A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#260

Post by benibela »

PunksATawnyFill wrote: post #151
SamReidHughes wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

App developers didn't even have to set colors. You could tell the ones who didn't know what they were doing by the invisible text littering their UIs under some color schemes. This continued into the Web era. There were tons of defective sites that overrode your system background color with a hard-coded white background, but didn't bother setting the text color to black. The result was invisible text on any system wi…

For some reason, the new gimp version has a dark mode layout with an almost black, gray background

But the file dialogs have black text. You can hardly read anything

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