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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface (2018)

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

#131

Post by rayiner »

_trampeltier wrote: post #25
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…

Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech peopl…

Same here. The punishment for overriding the default file dialog should be public caning Singapore style. Start with the Acrobat team at Adobe.

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

#132

Post by rayiner »

rvba wrote: post #57
_trampeltier wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now every step is full of dark pattern. Just like you wanna save a file in office. If you don't want store it in the cloud, there is always a step more. Also with the free One Drive and store it automaticly somewhere, I helped recently a friend (no computer guy), there are files just everywhere, some in the cloud some there and some somewhere else. Todays Windows is just hostile to non tech people, even to tech peopl…

I still dont know how to easily save files on local computer in MS Office without pressing F12.

Wow, I didn’t know about F12! Maybe they could remap that to something that doesn’t require reaching for the function row. Maybe CTRL-S.

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

#133

Post by rayiner »

Kranar wrote: post #36
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…

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…

So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneNote or Outlook web apps is less than the Office 98 versions. Google Docs compares poorly feature-wise to WordPerfect versions from the 1990s. It’s quite remarkable how bad this software is compared to how big development teams are now. I don’t know if any other industry that’s ever regressed in this way.

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

#134

Post by rayiner »

Baeocystin wrote: post #69
bojan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FWIW, I've started to see this with some of the younger hires, across many different companies. They grew up with iphones and ipads, and their underlying models of how mouse/keyboard-style interactions work are poor. It's a real problem.

Not only that, but they have a dumbed down mental model of what software can do because phone and tablet apps just can’t do very much. My wife blew her zoomer brother’s mind by showing him Google can do terms and connectors searches.

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

#135

Post by dporan »

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…

I created the Start Menu and Taskbar, and I did intend for them to be at the top of the screen.

http://blogs.harvard.edu/danieloran/2022/11/28/qa-about-the-...

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

#136

Post by justsomehnguy »

Kranar wrote: post #36
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…

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…

> there were older people saying just how bloated and inefficient Windows 95's UI was, with all the mouse clicking and things hidden behind menus, etc etc...

Oh, yes there were such people, plenty of them.

And by the way, there are still people who do the same. Except it's not just '95 but any Windows and of course they could do anything in CLI much more effectively. You probably know those under the name 'Linux fanboys'.

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

#137

Post by Aeolun »

13of40 wrote: post #68
robinsonb5 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true - I'm a little bit older, so I view the Amiga user interface as superior (at least in some ways - I describe it as "the feeling that you have the computer's full attention". Windows doesn't give me that even today.) - and also recognise how much Windows 95 borrowed from other systems. (RiscOS in particular) It came as quite an eye-opener to me recently to realise younger people now entering the workforce vi…

> mouse I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.

What are we talking about when we say mechanical mouse? One with one of them balls in?

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

#138

Post by majormajor »

Kranar wrote: post #36
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…

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…

It's definitely a bit of what-goes-around-comes-around - here we're nostalgic for rows and rows of menus and buttons; but Microsoft famously tried to "fix" the menu-and-toolbar "bloat" with the Ribbon, after all, since tons of people had NO IDEA how to deal with all those menus and buttons. "Go through every menu and click every button" was never super discoverable if you're in a hurry. And hell, there are still people who will tell you you're doing it wrong if you're using the UI instead of using Vim/Emacs and a million keyboard shortcuts and plugins... ;)

I've been able to make do with all the current apps I use, but the biggest change for me compared to the 90s is that I don't have the time nor curiousity to figure out what every single option in every single menu is, regardless of how it gets discovered (brute force, or youtube videos, or tutorials, or whatever-reincarnation-of-Clippy some apps use, or whatnot).

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

#139

Post by majormajor »

rayiner wrote: post #133
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…

So my wife’s much younger siblings are zoomers and I’ve noticed they’re far less computer literate than my wife and I were at the same age. Yeah, they’ve learned how to operate modern apps, but only because those apps are completely neutered. These undiscoverable interfaces simply don’t allow convenient access to a large body of functionality, and so modern “apps” just tend to omit them. The functionality of the OneN…

This is extremely uncharitable.

So Google Docs' word processor has fewer text editing features than Word or Office. But it has one huge enormous feature that has become, for many people, a can't-go-back-to-something-without-this dealbreaker. Does the fact that it never added the full encyclopedia of other features from 90s word processors mean that it's lacking and a huge regression, or that those features were not all that useful or appealing to many people but part of bloat resulting from how something had to go on the back of the box for Word 6, Word 95, Word 97, Word 2000, etc?

And I'd suggest kids are less "computer literate" in the sense of "understanding how the machine works" because the machines work better and they don't have to be. I used to disable extensions one by one to try to debug mystery crashes, or see if it would help free up RAM for Photoshop, in old-school Mac OS... so I had to learn some of the underpinnings... but if I don't have to do that anymore, that tells me the industry has progressed, not regressed.

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

#140

Post by BarryMilo »

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…

Your statement means nothing when Microsoft is using dark patterns to funnel users onto the cloud. Of course the numbers are going up, that in itself does make it a good thing for users.
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