151–160 of 176 posts
I think there is something really interesting about how even back in 1992 people were talking about the need to be more agile.
I would love to see a similar paper by the Windows 11 design team. The 95 group seemed to be very responsive to how users were using or failing to use the OS. I've been on Win11 for a few months, and I'm confused who these changes are for. It could be that the Eternal September means things have to be dumbed down and locked down, catering to the least capable users. Or maybe design decisions are being made at a highe…
> Desktop, Laptop and Tablet users The crazy thing is that Windows touch-screen users are a tiny minority of all Windows users, and will remain so for the foreseeable future (if not forever). Yet a lot of the design compromises since Windows 8 making things worse for non-touch users are made for the single reason of catering to touch screens.
The design compromises have become really hard to justify even when you're coming from the point of view of the minority among us who use hybrid devices. It's difficult to tell who Windows 11 is for. They want to imitate the macOS dock but even macOS has less limitations, you can drag and drop a document onto the dock, you can drag a folder and have a peek in the inside of the folder when you click it, you can't do that with the 11 taskbar, which only accepts software shortcuts. The windows 11 taskbar is an abomination and the worst piece of UI I have ever used in my life.
It was possible to add documents, folders etc to "quick launch" which was introduced to windows 9x along with Internet Explorer's active desktop. It's just amazing how the modern windows UI has become inferior to decades old tools.
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> mouse I was looking at Reddit the other day, on one of those r/flippingamazing type subs, and someone posted a picture of a disassembled mechanical mouse, to show off the wonders of 1900s engineering. I tell you I nearly spat out my false teeth. Had to take a Geritol to calm myself down.
What are we talking about when we say mechanical mouse? One with one of them balls in?
(* They're more correctly called opto-mechanical since the movement sensing is done by way of a slotted disc interrupting light beams.)
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>Microsoft tries to compete with Apple’s integrated hardware-software experience with their Surface line, but in the context of general wide-spread Windows usage, that’s really more like vanity hardware. What I fail to understand is how MS apparently missed the part where Apple has clearly delineated OSes for their different hardware. You have iOS, iPad OS, macOS, tvOS, etc. Even the phone and tablet, which are nomin…
A separate mobile OS with a different UI for apps would mean having to establish an entirely new app ecosystem, which at present is effectively impossible (if it isn’t just another Android clone). It would probably have been possible in the early days of Windows mobile, but they botched that for various reasons. If Microsoft wants to have an OS in the mobile/touch realm (I’m not saying they should), sharing apps with…
No, a better alternative is sharing apps with Android. That's one of the things 11 promised (but still doesn't officially, the amazon app store integration is beta software).
Of course, they get one thing right and 2 things wrong. 11 is dramatically inferior to 10 when it comes to the comfort of tablet use. The window manager doesn't suit touch use the way tablet mode did before. Neither does the start menu.
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Ctrl+S only does that if a document is unsaved, and it still doesn't actually take you to the save dialog. It takes you to what Microsoft calls the "Save As menu", which takes up the whole window, causing the document content to be obscured, and requires a mouse click after that to get to the actual Save As dialog. For mouse users, getting to the Save As dialog is actually three clicks in recent versions of Word. F12…
It's still "File -> Save a Copy" (2 clicks) and I'm on an October build that's as new as it gets externally as far as I know: 2210 Build 16.0.15726.20188. The overlap of "users still using Microsoft Office" and "users using local storage" declines with each passing day. IT admins don't want data outside their retention policy/access logging/subject to user hardware failure, and anyone who thinks cloud storage is a ma…
Too bad they didn't read these notes before gutting the taskbar in Win11. It's so unusable, so slow when you can't "ungroup" stuff. Made me actually reinstall and go back to Win10.
Microsoft might be reimplementing a non-grouping option. It was spotted in a recent development build. https://twitter.com/thebookisclosed/status/15929816173412474... > Windows 11 is going to get a "Never Combine" taskbar item setting after all. It no longer features window titles like in Windows 10 & older releases, but retains the icon per window mechanic which some might still find useful. New in build 25246, hidd…
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…
There’s the obvious dark patterns when you want to nudge users, but what about all the rest where a product is supposed to sell by being more productive for the user?
I was playing with a Win98 computer the other day, and it is amazing how well most of the UX has held up even now. And it's so fast , especially considering the limitations of the hardware it was running on. Really interesting seeing some of the design process that resulted in it.
It was fast on say, 300mhz and faster hardware, but while watching a video where Windows 95 was running on a 486, I remembered how you used to be able to see individual UI elements being drawn on the screen piece by piece.
I think windows 95/98 era was the peak of UI discoverability. As a kid, I and my friends could learn and explore how a program worked just by expanding all the menus and opening the various dialogs. Dialogs which were filled with fields and their descriptions! Before then, it was the world of DOS and you had to know what you were doing ahead of time. And now, UIs are dynamic, initially hiding stuff from the user and…
However, the other thing is that you were kids. If you were a kid with that phone app, fueled by curiosity and with a drive to be the first that discovers a functionality, you would have found that extra screen in 15 mins tops.
It also had a very fluid and gentle gradiant from functionality intended for everyday users to more advanced stuff, without making you feel overwhelmed and without hiding things too much away from you.. Just count how many clicks it takes to install the IPX protocol in Windows 95 vs Windows 10! (Also, good luck with that on 10!)
It's also amazing how well it ran on the hardware at the time, 100 mhz and 16 mb ram was Just Fine. The entire OS could probably fit inside the space taken up by the windows 10 start menu I'm sure.
I wish M$ would start trying to make a good user experience again, instead of trying to sell candy crush..