The History of User Interfaces • Hacker News Board

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#31

Post by scyzoryk_xyz » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:36 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

I feel like what you’re describing boils down to a change in priorities for designs and how the user behavior is measured. Today, it seems to be mostly about recording what users do and then endlessly modifying the UI to extract the desired behaviors. This results in these kinds of layouts where a clean choice takes a back seat and user manipulation takes the front.

This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s used for productivity.

Of course when you look at recordings of user behavior for interfaces you realize how dumb the majority of all users really is. And how without those tiles advertising “Xbox” and “TikTok” those users would probably fail to find those even if they were looking for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#32

Post by sedan_baklazhan » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:39 AM UTC

IYasha wrote: post #19

sedan_baklazhan wrote: post #9

If only this quite interesting work could be read on a normal, no-JS webpage! Scrolling to see more content fading in is such a bad UI practice. Completely negating all the natural reading experience.

At least you're lucky enough to see some content at all :))

I had to enable some JS to see it. Insane.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#33

Post by kevincox » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

> but I don't want recommendations,

You seem to have this assumption that the Windows 11 start bar is made for you. I'm pretty sure the truth is that this menu is intended to drive sales and maximize profits for Microsoft.

Once you have the right set of premises you can see why it behaves this way and the design is actually fairly decent. (Not great, but don't worry, they are improving it every release)

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#34

Post by Cockbrand » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:43 AM UTC

asiachick wrote: post #6

The list is kind of arbitrary. I don't feel the Amiga UI had any influence on anything what so ever. I was a huge Amiga fan and owned an Amiga 1000 the year it launched and then an Amiga 500 later but other than Amiga's unique multi-resolution system, which really was only something that was a product of the limits of old hardware, there was nothing special about its UX. Similarly where's GEM? https://en.wikipedia.or…

I agree - given the Amiga's excellent hardware capabilities for the time, the GUI lacked quite a bit, of course especially compared to the Mac, but even in comparison to GEM.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#35

Post by dkersten » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:48 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

I agree. Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly, but it was consistent and followed a good design language: eg everything that was clickable looked like a button: buttons, table headers, scroll bars etc. Once you learned the basics of the UI, you could mostly figure things out.

Nowadays buttons look like plain text labels half the time and every app has its own inconsistent style and even I, someone who has used computers for a long time and use them daily, sometimes have trouble seeing what’s what on a UI.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#36

Post by ctas » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:52 AM UTC

nathias wrote: post #29

it would be interesting to see an overview of the web UI, going from user-centric to ad-centric in 20 years

Agreed. If anybody knows such a site, I'd like to see it.

I just recently collected old screenshots of Facebook, Twitter, and other popular sites from 2010 and before. Looking back, all of them have a certain charm I would like to bring back in future personal projects.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#37

Post by masswerk » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 10:56 AM UTC

Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) really needs a representation of the brushed metal appearance in the image gallery. (There had been two presentation styles, the general one seen in the images, and a brushed metal one for utilities.)

Edit: Interestingly, there's no representative image of this to be found in image searches, but here's a screenshot of a third party tool: https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fimg.infor...

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#38

Post by dingosity » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:02 AM UTC

meh. dude forgot Engelbart's augment project (from the mother of all demos). the unix shell (which is the exemplar of a class of UIs) and Raskin's Canon Cat keyboard based interface. Or PLATO, which was doing remote graphical rendering before Y or X.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#39

Post by kypro » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:07 AM UTC

hunterb123 wrote: post #23

kypro wrote: post #22

I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs. Opening the start bar on my Windows 11 I literally have no idea what's going on. All the "apps" at the top of my start bar are things I've never used and I don't think I've ever even installed. Stuff like Tiktok and XBox. Then below that I get recommendations, but I don't want recommendations, I just want…

But the start bar is completely customizable... You can turn off recommendations, remove the default apps, add any other app including settings, set the size, etc. Once you spend a couple minutes setting it up, it's less cluttered than any previous Windows OS.

Yeah, I spent some time on my other Windows computer doing just that. It does help, but it's still not as clean as the Windows 98 start bar imo.

It's not just the start bar though. There are similar things all over the OS. For example, if you right click a document in Windows 11 one of the most common things you might want to do, "copy" isn't there. Well it is there, but now it's behind this little anonymous looking rectangle icon at the top* of the context menu and is no longer clearly listed as "copy" in the menu.

Maybe I'm just getting old... But I find UIs are just generally getting more confusing and assume more of the user. For example, back buttons on browsers don't say back anymore, but are just an arrow, because everyone knows what that arrow does, right? And that's probably fair, but even still, I like the explicit text label so I know for sure what I'm clicking is what I'm looking for. The three dots for accessing a menu might be a better example as my parents actually do get confused by that

* The icon can also randomly appear at the bottom of the menu because who cares about predictability when designing UIs anymore.

Re: The History of User Interfaces

#40

Post by wizofaus » Thu, Jul 14, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

kypro wrote: post #39

hunterb123 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the start bar is completely customizable... You can turn off recommendations, remove the default apps, add any other app including settings, set the size, etc. Once you spend a couple minutes setting it up, it's less cluttered than any previous Windows OS.

Yeah, I spent some time on my other Windows computer doing just that. It does help, but it's still not as clean as the Windows 98 start bar imo. It's not just the start bar though. There are similar things all over the OS. For example, if you right click a document in Windows 11 one of the most common things you might want to do, "copy" isn't there. Well it is there, but now it's behind this little anonymous looking…

Not sure what you mean about Copy being behind "this little anonymous looking rectangle" - it's definitely still there in the context menu for me, under Cut (and above Create Shortcut)?