121–130 of 213 posts
win2k is the goat. fast, clear, no bullshit. sadly rdp and cleartype dragged me away and i've regretted it ever since.
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My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs. Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
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We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.
Ok but, were you around during that time? I remember it not helping much at all to tell people what to do. When Windows 95 first came out, they had to have a giant arrow pointing to the Start menu with an explanation of what that would do: https://a.imagem.app/Ge6OCZ.jpeg Then they had a scrolling animation with an arrow and some text ("Click the Start button to begin") that slid in from the right side of the taskbar…
The first computer I used had Windows 3.1, but I never really knew how to use it. I just played some games on it and my dad would have me feed in a stack of floppy disks for him when he had to install something big.
Windows 95 was the first OS I used and explored on my own and made sense to me.
When are we going to start designing UIs based on scientific HCI instead of marketing BS? Or has that gone the way of the dodo?
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Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.
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We do agree. I said the first thing you quoted was the wrong approach, because of the second thing you quoted. Having it say “start”, like it used to, would help solve that.
For people complaining that "Start" isn't a great choice, perhaps there's something better, but I can't think of anything. You need a small word that implies, "Click here to do something or find something." and in that regard, I think "Start" is a good choice. On the other hand, I think there were few ideas worse than "My Computer", etc., not the least of which is the fact that it took Windows application software ab…
The Windows 8 touch-first start menu with a hot corner instead of a button, applied to their Server OS, that I assume most accessed through RDP was pretty horrific.
When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000. I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
Some people like brutalist architecture. I think is so ugly that I'm half tempted to chatgpt fact check this comment. It very well could have been a deliberate conspiracy to lie to the public and say it looks good to make some austerity go down easier.
The only reason brutalist buildings were made in that style is because it's cheap(er), and because some architects started to smell their own farts a bit too much. Win9X/Win2K were made the way they are because it's actually conducive to get shit done.
The article praises the UI, but isn't Windows 2000 using the Windows 95/98 UI with a different kernel?
Hold on, don't give cred it to Windows 95. The beveled 3D look was the invention of NeXT. Windows 95 copied everything from them. https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
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There is a specific UI guideline for something that can be enabled or not: it's called a tick box. The on-off switch thing is a distinctly iOS invention [1]. The funny thing is that OS X (now macOS) mostly held off using those 'switches' too, until fairly recently. [1]: https://freeimage.host/i/CxYBW6G
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…
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.