Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

This is unbelievable. Thanks so much for sharing.

I think one of the main problems is that a surface-level argument can easily be made that user engagement represents the quality of the user experience (i.e. "users that spend a lot of time in the app clearly like it"), despite falling apart if you dig deeper than the surface. The allure of short-term profits makes such an argument attractive to upper leadership. It also makes it more difficult for a lower-level employee, like a designer, to convince them against it without direct evidence that optimizing for user productivity is better than optimizing for user engagement.

Combine the ease of making that argument with potential financial incentives to the designers to optimize for that, then you get relatively easy conformity to that goal. I'm sure there's plenty of designers that will happily accept it, so as a company, you can easily replace any designers that push back.

> Back then you could test your UI on people that were a completely blank slate, having possible never used a computer before. You could focus on making the best possible UI there is.

This is a really great point. Like many others on this thread I miss "old" UI design, and like many posters can explain why. There's been a large transition to hiding UI, not marking interactable UI, and not spacially locating related UI elements.

Recently I watched one of my nieces use her phone. She was trying to do something, frustrated and telling me, but had not yet asked me to help. (I offer to help, but not to do something for them - to guide but let them achieve their goal.) I realised she was essentially tapping the screen looking for something that responded to taps. She didn't know what would react. Now, she knows lists can be scrolled, buttons etc can be clicked... but does she? Because there are no buttons, often, today and the button she needed, which I could see onscreen, was just text, no border indicating clickability.

I've heard anecdotally that the big UI designers in companies like Apple don't mind this because 'everyone already knows how to use their phones' and Macs / Windows. This ignores the young -- but we often ignore the young and expect them to learn -- and it ignores the elderly, those with bad eyesight, those who have not before now had the financial opportunity to own something, and so forth. There are lots, and always will be lots, of new people.

And I think that designing such that it can be used only by those who already know how to use it is a failure. Not just because there are always those who don't know, but because designing such that it can be used by anyone is more optimal. And finally, that designing such that it can be be used by _anyone_ means _everyone_ can use it. Phrased another way, another golden quote I cannot attribute is, 'accessibility is for everyone.' Which is a way of saying, designing for the non-average user who may have difficulties makes usage much easier for the average user too.

The beautiful thing is, you can still just make a UI that mimics Windows 95, and get all of the benefits of that research.

Again, weirdly, not a single word on how Windows 95 copied the title bar design and buttons from NeXTSTEP.

See, for instance, here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#full

The “close window” (“×”) button is identical, and Windows 95 re-purposed NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button into a “maximize” button. But you can still see why NeXTSTEP’s “minimize” button looks that way; it resembles a NeXTSTEP application icon, seen at the bottom on the above screenshot.

Windows 95 did not, sadly, copy the very useful behavior of the “close window” button in NeXTSTEP: It changed shape if the contents of a window was not saved, as seen here: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42#textedit...