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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

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Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#91

Post by GuB-42 »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #15

I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…

There is a simple explanation: mobile.

You can put a lot more on a desktop than on a mobile screen. In the Windows 95/98 era, the standard screen size was no less than 14 inches, now it is around 6 inches, and the mouse is a much more precise instrument than your fingers. On mobile, if your app becomes complex and you don't want tiny, hard to see, hard to reach targets, you have to hide things.

Now, modern desktop apps often mirror the mobile app, even though they have a lot more space available. It makes sense, not only developing two entirely different UI is much more expensive, but it also makes harder to transfer your experience from the mobile to desktop and vice versa.

There is no easy solution, and it looks like things are starting to settle a bit, maybe a few years from now, we will see a real common design language. The problem with right slide is not the hidden screen, it is that every app seems to have a different interpretation of what to do for that gesture, if they do anything at all. If every app does the same, it will be as "obvious" as right clicking to open a context menu today.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#93

Post by wvenable »

vintagedave wrote: post #26
cardanome wrote: post #12

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. Now, users come already with certain habits and expectations developed by years of of computer use. This means, even if you really cared about the user experience of your customers you would only be able to make incremental improvements t…

> 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 U…

I had trouble with Microsoft parental setting website the other day -- I could not find the option I was looking for. Eventually I found some documentation and that's when it hit me: the completely unstyled plain text at the top of a section was actually a "tab bar" which you click on to get pages of more options!

This sort of minimalism in design is completely frustrating. Being familiar with common UI paradigms only works if the UI designers actually use them.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#94

Post by secondcoming »

kristopolous wrote: post #66

I've long suspected the start menu was intended to be on the top of the screen. In all other applications when you want to shut it down, it's the last option on the list. If you move the start menu to the top, then shutdown does indeed become the last on the list and the most common option, "Programs" becomes the closest by Fitts Law standards. Even in the Program Manager in Windows 3.1, the Run and Shutdown options…

You can move the taskbar to the top of the screen.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#95

Post by layer8 »

drbawb wrote: post #83
layer8 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. As long as Microsoft hardware, along with the marketing, remains touch-focused, they can hardly change their UI design trajectory. Yet the vision of Windows as a touch-heavy user interface remains a wishful-thinking f…

>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nomin…

A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with regular Windows is their only chance.

IMO, they need to establish a more structured and controlled UI layer/framework that would allow (or rather, enforce) auto-switching between touch and non-touch layouts, with a uniform look&feel across applications, while being as performant/reactive as win32/GDI applications, and then stick to that for the long run, so that it becomes the one Windows UI toolkit (like GDI used to be), similar to what Apple has on their OSs.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#96

Post by int_19h »

Arainach wrote: post #84
AlanYx wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ctrl+S only does that if a document is unsaved, and it still doesn't actually take you to the save dialog. It takes you to what Microsoft calls the "Save As menu", which takes up the whole window, causing the document content to be obscured, and requires a mouse click after that to get to the actual Save As dialog. For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12…

It's still "File -> Save a Copy" (2 clicks) and I'm on an October build that's as new as it gets externally as far as I know: 2210 Build 16.0.15726.20188. The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a ma…

Even so, using OneDrive as a backing store for user documents has been integrated into Windows for a while now, and every app that uses standard file save dialogs etc ends up automatically and transparently doing that, so why should Office be special?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#97

Post by int_19h »

bojan wrote: post #43
Kranar wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My daughter does the same thing with modern UIs and doesn't have much of an issue. I don't think many kids these days are struggling to identify various functionality of the multitude of apps available. Sure UIs are different today and maybe to us older people it's byzantine, but the newer generation of users seem to be able to pick up quite easily. I wouldn't be surprised if when we were kids, there were older peopl…

Precisely. As a kid you have time to go through all the menus, read the hints, and experiment. Kids today have time to try out all the gestures on all the apps they care about. They might end up having issues adapting to desktop enterprise UI when they enter workforce, but that's another story.

There's a difference here in that the menus are structured in a consistent way - you can explore everything easily just by opening submenus.

But you can't really "try out all the gestures", because the gestures themselves are largely ad hoc, and new ones get invented all the time. If you know in advance that e.g. three-finger swipe or swiping from beyond the edge of the screen are valid gestures, you can try them to see what they do; but how do you know that in advance, unless you have used (or at least heard of) a device utilizing some particular gesture?

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#98

Post by kccqzy »

MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #15

I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…

Snapchat ushered in the era of undiscoverable UIs. There were other apps that did that, but Snapchat was the most prominent.

Snapchat introduced the idea that holding down the shutter button in photo capture mode should be capturing a video. Unlike any other camera apps on mobile where video capture is a separate mode readily seen in the UI, Snapchat made it undiscoverable.

Snapchat also pioneered the idea that double tapping the viewfinder should switch cameras at a time when almost all other camera apps had dedicated buttons for doing that. Again that's undiscoverable.

Re: Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

#99

Post by int_19h »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #23
MonkeyMalarky wrote: post #15

I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…

Many dos programs with a gui had all the same menus and fields before Windows. They just ran one at a time.

The best DOS TUIs were generally those that adopted CUA (e.g. Borland's IDEs and other software written in Turbo Vision). Windows UX also built heavily on it, and it is the source of most of its core keyboard shortcuts to this day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

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