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The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

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Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#101

Post by cosmic_cheese »

tombert wrote: post #74
okanat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly. I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully ma…

The thing that bothers me more than ribbon itself is how much the performance started degrading once they introduced it. I got MS Office 97 working in Wine recently, and it's still shockingly capable. There are lots of formatting options, it can read my system TTF fonts, and it's since it's nearly thirty-year-old software, it runs ridiculously fast on modern computers. I don't feel like MS has added many more feature…

I’ve said before that I don’t think there’s anything missing in Office 2000 for upwards of 90% of users’ word processor/spreadsheet/etc needs, and this is supported by the popularity of the somewhat spartan GSuite apps (Docs is basically WordPad with realtime collab tacked on, not even a full Word 2000 equivalent for example).

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#102

Post by bigstrat2003 »

titzer wrote: post #28
VerifiedReports wrote: post #3

Look how crisp, professional, and usable it all is. This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today. Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other in…

To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working , resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.

Apple has long been a "style over substance" company, unfortunately. Not always (I mean, you couldn't accuse the Apple II of being stylish for example), but certainly since the year 2000 at least. It has often meant that their products were less pleasant to use because someone refused to add functionality that wasn't as sleek-looking.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#103

Post by cosmic_cheese »

pcurve wrote: post #61
linguae wrote: post #15

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU ). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/…

What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare. I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.

With System 7 or Mac OS 8/8.5/9, if one used it for long enough with a stable software setup you'd eventually get a gut feel for what programs, extension sets, etc were most likely to invite a crash (it wasn't a terrible idea to reboot after a long web browsing session with Netscape for instance). It wasn't surefire, but one could get it into a somewhat stable state. You never stopped hammering ⌘S, though.

Windows 2000 was incredible. Running it after having wrestled with 98SE was like getting teleported from a garbage dump to sunny meadow with a fresh ocean breeze. I've never seen machines transform quite as radically as they did when upgrading from something earlier to 2000.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#104

Post by wtallis »

Telaneo wrote: post #60
socalgal2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative. The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of c…

Apparently, the idea of an edit mode is some foreign concept for a lot of people.

There are a lot of UI concepts that are foreign to younger developers, simply because they grew up using web apps and smartphones. I think computer science departments need to make a class on human-computer interaction a mandatory part of the curriculum, and those classes need to require students to sit down with and actually use a variety of UIs from two, three, four decades ago. There's a ton of value in being conversant in the basic building blocks and paradigms of multiple UI systems, and in knowing what problems have been solved in the past so we don't keep badly reinventing the same features or failing to learn from the mistakes of the past.

There are a lot of things in older UIs that I think every developer should have hands-on experience with, eg. using nested menus in classic Mac OS; using an MDI application on Windows 9x; using the file browser and dock on NeXTSTEP; using X11 with focus follows mouse; anything with pie menus. Not because those things are necessarily the right choices for today's GUIs, but because there are valuable lessons to be learned from them, and reading an article like this or studying an old HIG document doesn't have the same impact.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#105

Post by cosmic_cheese »

imiric wrote: post #31
hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #4

I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life. I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on…

After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and mouse input should be optional. Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitute…

The issue with this type of design is that it completely tanks discoverability. Every visual UI element trimmed is another pit of confusion for less-technical computer users.

Modern UIs aren't great with discoverability, either however and are not an example that should be followed.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#106

Post by bitwize »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #102
titzer wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working , resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.

Apple has long been a "style over substance" company, unfortunately. Not always (I mean, you couldn't accuse the Apple II of being stylish for example), but certainly since the year 2000 at least. It has often meant that their products were less pleasant to use because someone refused to add functionality that wasn't as sleek-looking.

The Apple II was more stylish than any other personal computer in 1977.

In the mid-1980s, the Apple IIc and IIGS were built to Apple's "Snow White" design language and looked slicker than most contemporaries.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#107

Post by bitwize »

userbinator wrote: post #90
catskull wrote: post #64

Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question: “Where do you want to go today?” I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later. I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do…

As I've joked about before, their slogan now has turned into "where do we want you to go today?"

That joke's been around since Microsoft tried locking people into Internet Explorer, so ~30 years. Microsoft's been Microsofting for at least that long, Satya hasn't changed that.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#108

Post by bitwize »

catskull wrote: post #64

Microsoft dumped $100 million on this huge marketing campaign with a simple question: “Where do you want to go today?” I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later. I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do…

When Microsoft first established a web presence, 1994 was probably the year if not 1993, www.microsoft.com showed "Welcome to Microsoft's web site. Where do you want to go today?" followed by a list of destinations throughout their site. They promoted the second of those sentences to their official slogan.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#109

Post by jeberle »

linguae wrote: post #15

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU ). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/…

The "no taste" quote makes no sense given that Susan Kare did the many of the significant icons in Windows 95. She did the same for the Mac.

Re: The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996)

#110

Post by jimbokun »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #85
linguae wrote: post #15

Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU ). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/…

I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there…

Jobs did understand that. In the same quote he says Microsoft earned their success.
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