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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

#191

Post by ahartmetz »

anadem wrote: post #151
ahartmetz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

Thanks! Settings > General > Browsing > Always underline links (or in about:config set layout.css.always_underline_links true )

It also works on Firefox for Android through about:config, which is ostensibly unavailable, but not really: chrome://geckoview/content/config.xhtml - from there, you can also re-enable about:config by toggling general.aboutConfig.enable

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#192

Post by ruicraveiro »

bigfatkitten wrote: post #154
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…

I am an enormous fan of the unambiguous UI design adopted in aircraft cockpit displays. Only six colours are used for text: White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values. Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.) Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.) Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem. Red - Things that are an immediate danger to…

And I'd argue that an important colour to make this work is black. By this I mean that only information that needs to be displayed is displayed (in all the colours you listed). Everything else is omitted.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#193

Post by SebastianKra »

ahartmetz wrote: post #189
SebastianKra wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Depends on the app, but mostly they're better than in the past.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#194

Post by seba_dos1 »

Narishma wrote: post #158
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…

Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.

> making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget

That's not true; the corners/edges are only visually detached, they're still active for input.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#195

Post by somat »

EGreg wrote: post #30
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…

It started with iOS 7 and Jony Ive Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless…

I think of skeumorphism as orthogonal to good ui design(it can be a good or bad ui with or without skumorphism) Even in the Steve Jobs era Apple produced some real stinkers of a UI, achingly beautiful but a right pain to use. A specific example was the quicktime player. The bit I hated most was that stupid volume control dial.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#196

Post by kubik369 »

kristianp wrote: post #176
Narishma wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.

My only pain with KDE is trying to resize windows. I have a 1 pixel line a certain distance away from the outside of the window. I'm using an oldish version from kubuntu 22.04 though.

I might be able to help you with that. Whilst holding Meta (Windows key), try left and right-click-dragging on a window. Left-click-drag moves the window, right-click-drag resizes it. Great feature imo, for me, this flow solves any resizing issues.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#197

Post by xg15 »

projektfu wrote: post #159
ndiddy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. TBH, I often have no idea whether anything is really a file/directory or some fake thing in Explorer, and this aspect has gotten worse over the years. Now they make it hard for users to find their home folder and present a bun…

> Home, Gallery, Music, Videos - all virtual apparently.

Huh? I agree with you that in general it's a mess. (found it fascinating that the hierarchy that Explorer shows is technically not the file system - It's its own thing which works more like the unified directory tree in Linux, complete with mount points and different "virtual file systems". The real file system is only a part of it)

But the Gallery, Music, Videos etc subfolders are AFAIK ordinary folders that just have custom icons and localized names. For reasons I don't understand, Microsoft would like users to forget the home folder exists and only work with those preassigned directories. But that's just a convention and a bunch of UI nudges. The home folder is still there and can be used without problems.

At least that was the case before the aggressive push for OneDrive started. They might have changed it since then...

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#198

Post by ConceptJunkie »

nottorp wrote: post #130
zozbot234 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The switch widget is for settings where flipping the switch takes immediate effect, unlike a checkbox where you have to press some "OK", "Submit" or "Apply" button. In Windows 2000/Office UIs, this would've been shown as a button that could visibly switch between "pressed" and "not pressed" states, just like a push-down switch, but that was rarely used. The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than th…

> The modern labeled switch design is a lot more intuitive than that. In a lot of the modern switches I meet with the colour choice makes it totally unclear which is on and which is off. Ok, if it's a cookie acceptance dialog it makes sense to do dark patterns, but I've seen it in legit apps too.

DVD menus is another place where this confusion happens. Of course, any DVDs I buy these days are ripped, converted to H.265 and put on the NAS.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#199

Post by amadeuspagel »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #194
Narishma wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.

> making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget That's not true; the corners/edges are only visually detached, they're still active for input.

You're right to point this out, but it's still more annoying because you now have to remember that consciously, rather then seeing and feeling that you can just move your mouse to the edge.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#200

Post by ndiddy »

makeitdouble wrote: post #184
ndiddy wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Macintosh interface was designed around running a single program at a time, multi-tasking was shoehorned in later on. The Windows 3.1 interface is a lot closer to the Macintosh interface than the Windows 95 interface is, so I think a lot of the Windows 3.1 feedback regarding multitasking and UI navigation applies there too. When Apple had the opportunity to redesign the UI for Mac OS X, they added the Dock, which is functionally similar to the Windows taskbar.

> In Windows 3.1, beginning users took over 9 ½ minutes, on average, to locate and open a program that was not immediately visible. Results were not much better for our Windows 95 prototype. These results were clearly unacceptable, given that our market research data (and common sense) told us that starting a program was users' number one task.

> Beginning users and some intermediates had a lot of trouble using the mouse, especially double-clicking. As a result, they often failed to find things in containers when the only way to open them was double-clicking.

> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training.

> All but the most advanced users did not understand how to manage overlapping windows efficiently. Beginners had the most trouble-when they minimized a window, they considered it "gone" if it was obscured by another window. We heard many stories from educators (and witnessed in the lab) how users caused the computer to run out of RAM by starting multiple copies of a program instead of switching back to the first copy. Intermediate users were more proficient but still had trouble, especially with Multiple-Document-Interface (MDI) applications such as Program Manager and Microsoft Word. Market research data confirmed the problem by revealing that 40% of intermediate Windows users didn't run more than one program at a time because they had some kind of trouble with the process.

> Beginning users were bewildered by the hierarchical file system. Intermediate users could get around in the hierarchy, but often just barely, and usually saved all of their documents in the default directory for the program they were using. This problem (especially the novice case) was also observed with Macintosh users.

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