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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

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Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#111

Post by ConceptJunkie »

petilon wrote: post #9
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX. The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

Why are designers not understanding this these days? I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic. Somewhere in between is the right approach. The Ne…

I've been saying for many years that it seems most UI "designers" are just art school dropouts. Art school graduates would have a better sense of style, even if they weren't HCI experts.

Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI. Yeah, it wasn't visually exciting, but it was the peak of functional and discoverable UI. Of course, the Windows 10/11 UI isn't visually exciting either, and in many cases it's more boring looking, and definitely less functional. I would pay money to go back to the Windows 2000 UI, but I guess Microsoft isn't sophisticated enough to do that any more. The current Windows UI is less customizable than Windows 2. Yes, you heard me right. Windows 2.1 was more customizable than Windows 11.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#112

Post by ConceptJunkie »

Lammy wrote: post #83

RE: Start Menu, the article does not mention or show the obnoxious “Personalized Menus” feature which is the one and only ‘must disable’ when I use Win2k. It triggers after some number of days and hides infrequently-used programs from the Programs submenu as a workaround for the menu growing large and unwieldy when many programs are installed, but IMO I think it's even worse than what it claims to fix.

In the 90s and early 2000s, Microsoft had a lot of good UI, but their defaults were always really poorly chosen.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#113

Post by ConceptJunkie »

Telaneo wrote: post #34
usrnm wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember those times and there were a lot if windows that did not look like windows and buttons that did not look like buttons. Not in the apps provided by the OS itself, but in third-party software. It was the time of wild experiments, especially in software created by enthusiasts. We just tend to forget this stuff

It's not like the world was perfect before; it's just that it's gotten even worse . The lack of consistency has spread, to the point there barely is any.

Application developers often had a lot of crazy (and bad) ideas, but at least Windows itself was consistent. But then those crazy, bad ideas started affecting Microsoft, and then you could make the Windows Media Player look like eyeballs.

"Skinning" apps was a good idea in theory, but in practice, it never offered anything better than the default of Windows 2000 and earlier eras. Now you can't change anything in the Windows UI except a few colors.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#114

Post by minkeymaniac »

daveoc64 wrote: post #90
minkeymaniac wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The different kernel for 95/98 was NT 4... Windows 2000 was unified, same UI for Consumer and Server

There is no version of Windows 2000 for consumers. 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.

Windows 2000 Professional was the non server edition no? That's the one I was running AFAIK.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Editions

But you might be right by meaning consumer is non business user.. I also ran ME for about 2 weeks lol

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#115

Post by joombaga »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #104
falcor84 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember when I first encountered it (maybe before ios7), but their cardinal sin for me was my struggling for 10 minutes to make the calculator app go into scientific mode, seeing absolutely no setting for that, before eventually discovering from a friend that you have to physically rotate the phone to landscape orientation to get the additional buttons.

That reminds me of that notorious story of the adventure game from the 90s where you had to make a fake mustache out of cat hairs to solve a puzzle.

Gabriel Knight 3: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned.

I was happy to find this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#116

Post by peanball »

dieselgate wrote: post #106
thewebguyd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. It's actually really frustrating when trying to tra…

> People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't…

Not the same. ME also came out around 2000 but was based on windows 9x, windows 2000 was based on NT. The UI looked somewhat similar with those two.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#117

Post by thewebguyd »

dieselgate wrote: post #106
thewebguyd wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it. Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. It's actually really frustrating when trying to tra…

> People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things. I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't…

> From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist

Yeah, and this is definitely a big reason why people are afraid to click and explore.

I still don't understand why big enterprise software still lacks any kind of version control. AUdit logs, yeah, but most big ERPs and other similar products don't have an easy "roll back this change" feature.

I think users knowing that they could immediately undo whatever they did and get back to a safe and known state would do a lot to encourage exploration and learning.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#118

Post by nottorp »

clark_dent wrote: post #39
the_other wrote: post #19

I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents… But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 an…

Computer UIs needed borders and outlines because there are no brain-intuitive visual cues: no depth parallax, no shading, nothing shifts as you move your head, and until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world. It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky t…

> until relatively recently they had poor contrast and brightness variability compared to the real world

When has that changed?

And even if you mean the displays got better, the new Apple is fighting tooth and nail to erase any form of contrast from their UIs.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#119

Post by Telaneo »

liendolucas wrote: post #80

For me Windows 2000 Professional is the best OS that Microsoft ever released. At the time I used it was really polished, stable and fast. One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse? What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?

> One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse?

So the designers have something to do and so the CEOs have something easy to think of when they need to 'shake things up'.

That's all I can think of. I can't think of any that actually benefit the user (barring your original UI being absolute garbage, to the point anything else is an improvement, but even then, the original UI should still be available in some capacity).

> What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?

They hate having to re-learn UIs every 5-10 years (per OS/application/website!), so I don't think you've got much to lose trying to maintain a single good UI. And in the few cases where the UI basically hasn't changed in a long time (XFCE, VLC, probably more), they fucking love it.

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