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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

#181

Post by acephal »

nottorp wrote: post #118
clark_dent wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sad watching Apple design repeat Microsoft’s mistake of trying to push through a single UI paradigm across mobile and desktop (and, especially, VR in Apple’s case)

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#182

Post by Terr_ »

Telaneo wrote: post #119
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…

To offer another possibility, with a cynical motive:

1. We have an established user-base.

2. Our product and our competitors' products have a similar interface, so we might lose our lead if people start switching.

3. If we abruptly change our UI, they will have no choice but to learn the new one, either because they're too-invested or because they aren't the ones making purchasing decisions and it is mandated by an employer.

4. Once accustomed, the difference we created becomes a barrier to keep our customers captive and away from the competition's products.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#183

Post by makeitdouble »

wpm wrote: post #167
makeitdouble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…

It's where you start every activity and process. "Start to shutdown the computer" "start to run a command" "start to run a program" "Start to change some settings". It in the passive voice describes what you are going to be doing in there: Starting some activity, process, program, change, access, whatever. Start > Programs > Maxis > SimCity 2000 is psuedocode for what I just did. I started a program by Maxis called S…

TBH I'm OK with having no labels.

To make a real world comparison, I have a single closet in a my room with a lot of stuff in it. Would sticking a "Start" label to say "Start > first aid > bandaid" help that much ? Someone coming to my home could as well just try to open the closet randomly, the more important thing is it looks like a closet that can be opened.

That's where I prefer the Grid button, as it just looks like a button (and it could still look more like a button TBHO)

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#184

Post by makeitdouble »

ndiddy wrote: post #86
makeitdouble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…

The Windows 95 UI designers wrote a paper going over their design methodology and how they incorporated feedback from real-world users at a variety of levels of computer proficiency into their design. https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611 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 "P…

I understand their research...and at the same time, looking at the Macintosh interface, Apple came up with something often touted as better and more user friendly while offering a different paradigm.

It feels like the Windows UX designers came up with the local optimum for the UI they were willing to try, but didn't go beyond.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#185

Post by steve1977 »

jerf wrote: post #78
makeitdouble wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…

I never liked the word "start" itself, but if you're going to have a GUI, a single central clean place to say "every interaction you may want to do can be found from here" is a good idea. In principle having search there is pretty useful. In practice Microsoft has consistently from the beginning gone out of their way to make the search useless and slow, a policy that is now old enough to vote. How the start menu has…

This reminds me about one of those seemingly small differences between Windows and macOS - on Windows, it's "Search", on macOS, it's "Find".

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#186

Post by steve1977 »

makeitdouble wrote: post #46
al_borland wrote: post #14

> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu: Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population…

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before. The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu. Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to clos…

I do remember that when Windows 95 came out, we used to joke that you need to click "Start" in order to "Shut down".

So yeah, as far as I remember, the terminology was a bit controversial also back then.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#187

Post by seba_dos1 »

nycticorax wrote: post #49

Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI ( https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/ ). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of…

> which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche

KDE has been one of the two big, by far the most popular FLOSS DEs for decades, even predating the other one; how could it be "a niche within a niche"?

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#189

Post by ahartmetz »

SebastianKra wrote: post #166
ConceptJunkie wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've witnessed this so much over the years. Much of the time when someone would ask me for help with something on the computer, I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work. Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI, and everything since then has been worse. Then Microsoft started thinking it was a good idea to make native appli…

> I would have no idea, but I could discover the answer with a little bit of exploration and a good understanding of how UIs are supposed to work. I don't get this. Many things like changing the IP or audio devices were so unintuitive that I just memorized them. They're still burned into my brain. In Win 11, you just search for 'IP', click 'Ethernet-Settings', done. Same for the signifiers: In the Win 11 Settings, gi…

UI at the time was often clunky (the file search dialog in Windows was an infamous example), but the basic UI elements were fine. Today, the basic UI elements are not fine.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#190

Post by mikewarot »

xg15 wrote: post #21

> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen." Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?" I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize. From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of…

> for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

Sounds like you know quite a few packers[1]. I once knew someone at the extreme packing end of the mapper/packer scale. She constantly needed help with her computer, always for seemingly simple things we had already covered. Once I realized she was a pure packer, I changed my approach.

I wrote out a complete, step by step, exact sequence of actions, when to push what, what to expect, etc... and made it as variance free as possible, making zero assumptions, and printed it out on a full page of paper for her.

She was delighted, and never needed help again, for years!

This could not have worked in a modern environment. We used Windows XP, Office 2000 Professional, with Windows 2000 servers, for as long as humanly possible. No training turnover, just things working. Working so well they didn't need me anymore. ;-)

[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers

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