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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

#161

Post by ahartmetz »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #138
ahartmetz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was youngish at the time and thought Windows XP looked like clown vomit. There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.

Yeah, it was butt-ugly. The default Windows UI didn't actually look better until Windows 7, but I used the "Classic" look as long as it was supported. I skipped Windows 8/8.1 entirely, and while Windows 10 was reasonable in terms of how it worked, it was also butt-ugly, but now you couldn't do much of anything to customize it.

Windows 8 was stupid with the tablet-optimized UI, but I thought it was OK aesthetically, and Windows 10 more so. Even Windows 11 is "pretty" if you don't click the wrong thing and get a legacy dialog from 1...∞ versions back.

I use Linux by the way... but not all Windowses look ugly IMO.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#162

Post by cubefox »

teddyh wrote: post #97
cubefox wrote: post #41

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?

The older UI was also noticably faster. The new UI looked like a daycare: saturated colors and all thick, rounded borders on everything.

Maybe Windows 2000 was faster than XP, but I'm pretty sure the old and new UIs in Windows XP didn't have any speed difference. It was just different cosmetics.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#163

Post by hallole »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #103
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'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 can recall a time when it felt rewarding to explore and poke around in software, clicking through the menus and the icons, seeing what conveniences and neat features might be hiding in there...

Now, that's often not my experience. You can find some of the worst examples in anything made by Microsoft; Teams and Outlook are particularly bad, as you said. I don't poke around out of curiosity, I fumble around out of frustration with their slow, ugly, bloated, unreadable software. Apple sucks too, except, instead of being unbearably slow, they're honing in on making their UIs less readable and less intuitive than anything that came before.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#164

Post by autoexec »

john-aj wrote: post #146
autoexec wrote: post #129

One of the things I miss being able to do in windows is arbitrarily drag around and arrange icons in a folder the same way you can on the desktop. Sorting files into piles of icons before selecting a pile and dragging and dropping it into a folder was a nice way to get them originated. I think windows 7 might have killed that off.

Isn't it still an option that you can enable in the context menu?

Just at the desktop, but not in actual folders. There were registry changes that allowed it in some versions of windows 10

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-aut...

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#165

Post by xg15 »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #94

Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradua…

This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe.

The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI.

So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever.

And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'.

Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company...

Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#166

Post by SebastianKra »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #103
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'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, give me an example of an element that is not obviously clickable. Everything has button shapes, or step-in indicators.

To be clear, I'm neutral towards that settings app. But UI back then was nowhere near as good as claimed here, and flat design (at least the current iteration) isn't to blame for Teams being bad.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#167

Post by wpm »

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…

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 SimCity 2000

Four Squares in a Grid Button > All Apps > EA Games > Sim City 4 describes crap I'm clicking on in the UI, nothing about what I'm doing.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#168

Post by cesarb »

desdenova wrote: post #108
cesarb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does Except that... it's no longer in the bottom left corner! Recently, I had to help a relative with a Windows system, and what passes for the "Start" button has now moved to somewhere more in the center (and, of course, this completely confused my relative, who was used to the old place). I also had to rant about Fitt's law…

You could've changed the setting that puts the button back on the lower left corner and saved your relative the trouble. The new default is truly terrible, though, and this was the first setting I had to change when I was forced to use a windows laptop by the company I work in.

> You could've changed the setting that puts the button back on the lower left corner and saved your relative the trouble.

Nice, I didn't know that was possible; I expected it to be unchangeable, since I heard that the whole taskbar is no longer customizable in newer Windows releases.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#169

Post by wpm »

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.

KDE is chock full of too-flat interfaces and hieroglyphs as icons, all the sins are on fully display there.

Its saving grace is that it is completely customizable for the most part, though any GTK apps will probably ignore everything.

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