What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

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Displays & controls are thematically grouped and/or framed, each button/rotary/switch has a color that constrasts from the background, and there are strong 3D clues to see what's a button, and what's a label or the background.

Except that... it's no longer in the bottom left corner! Recently, I had to help a relative with a Windows system, and what passes for the "Start" button has now moved to somewhere more in the center (and, of course, this completely confused my relative, who was used to the old place). I also had to rant about Fitt's law (without mentioning its name) and how things were better the way they were before. And I also had to find out and show them where the shutdown button ended up this time, so they could power off the computer normally (as they were used to) instead of having to use the power strip switch.

And the issue I had to help with? Windows was too slow (to the point of nearly unusable). They don't use the computer often (and obviously always power it down after each use), so it's always running some heavy background update (on a mechanical hard drive) whenever it boots up. My advice was to power it up and let it sit for about an hour before using, then it would be back to normal speed.

For example, the reason for the single "Start" button in the taskbar was that they initially had multiple buttons for different specific purposes, and relied on a "Programs" folder on the desktop for launching programs, but found that this design didn't hold up in testing:

> Users had considerable difficulty deciding what each of the three buttons on the Tray was for and later had trouble remembering where to go for a particular command because their functions overlapped in certain contexts (e.g., to find something in Help, do you go to Find or to Help?).

> Users of every type were confused by the Programs folder. We thought that having a folder on the desktop with other folders and links to programs inside it would be a natural transition for Windows 3.1 users accustomed to Program Manager, while being relatively easy to learn for beginners. We were wrong! Beginners quickly got lost in all of the folders and other users had a lot of trouble deciding whether they were looking at the actual file system and its files or just links to actual files.

> The results from these studies and interviews greatly changed the design of the Windows 95 UI. In the early Windows 95 prototype, we had purposefully changed some things from Windows 3.1 (e.g., the desktop was now a real container) but not others (e.g., File Manager and Program Manager-like icons on desktop) because we were afraid of going too far with the design. We were aware that creating a product which was radically different from Windows 3.1 could confuse and disappoint millions of existing users, which would clearly be unacceptable.

> However, the data we collected with the Windows 95 prototype and with Windows 3.1 showed us that we couldn't continue down the current path. The results with beginning users on basic tasks were unacceptably poor and many intermediate users thought that Windows 95 was just different, not better.

Windows Me was the nearest consumer release (2000 came out in 1999, Me in 2000), and did share most of the same UI, but was based on Windows 98.

Windows XP was the first version of Windows to ship with the same codebase for both consumer and business.