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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)

#191
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'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for decades now. eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every ma…

Yes or the sharp edges on MacBooks cutting into your wrist. That started with the unibody design, the ones before that had a nice soft rounded plastic gasket there

My powerbook was the last apple laptop I really enjoyed.

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

#192
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/…

> Microsoft not having taste

the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that video

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

#193
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 3.11 loads in less than a blink of an eye on my Pentium MMX, while Windows 98 takes at least a minute to boot. This is with a 8 GB CF card as the HDD too, so the I/O is going as fast as possible.

It's because of drivers and PnP and especially USB. When you load Win3.1, WinNT4 and lower, drivers load without scanning for hardware presence. It's just a disk to memory copy. In Win95, the first PnP OS, it scans for PnP hardware at every boot. That's slow. To prove my point, you could try loading some of the USB drivers for DOS or one of the ISA PnP configuration utilities (such as ICU - Intel Configuration Utilit…

Besides the boot (which windows 3 didn't even do so I don't see why we are comparing it), from clicking on the start menu the 1st time after boot, to the start menu actually appearing on screen it would take 1-2 minutes to populate on windows 95, while on windows 3 on the same machine there would be no such issue.

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

#194
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime. (If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows) (I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is n…

I think there was a period from Windows 3.1 to somewhere during Windows 98 (maybe right up until the release of Office 97?) where both first-party and third-party Windows apps were all expected to be built entirely in terms of the single built-in library of Win32 common controls; and where Windows was expected to supply common controls to suit every need. This was mostly because we were just starting to see computers…

Sometimes the "any clickable area => make it a Windows control/button" works and sometimes it doesn't.

I talked with the programmer for the 16-bit Windows calculator app, calc.exe.

Any naive programmer with a first-reading of Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book would assume each button in the calculator app was an actual Windows button control.

Nope.

All those calculator buttons, back when Windows first shipped, used up too many resources.

So the buttons were drawn and the app did hit-testing to see if a button was mouse-clicked. see https://www.basicinputoutput.com/2017/08/windows-calculator-... for a pic of the 16-bit Windows calculator app.

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

#197
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing I’m still trying to understand who came with the idea of charging the mouse from under, instead of from a position that would allow to use the mouse while charging…

I believe that was intentional, to prevent people using it plugged in, which would mean most people would keep it plugged in all the time, so it wouldn't be a wireless mouse anymore, but also degrade the battery lifespan.

Maybe they should have made the batteries replaceable and make it operable without batteries installed.

Or just ship a wired version for the people who want that.

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

#198

This part stands out to me: > The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being ab…

Those numbers are UI only. 12 just to design it, another 12 to build it. That's not counting the vastly larger number of developers who built all the various elements of the underlying codebase.

Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s an odd way to spell Motif.

Motif was also 3D, but the actual look of Windows 95/NT 4.0 clearly took some inspiration from NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP, for example the window decorations.

I accept that's possible - if not likely (and everyone steals from each other!) - but even-so it only amounts to to the gunmetal-grey default colours and use of a 1px bevel/inset effect; because NS and NT3/NT4's UX/UI design and concepts are just so different otherwise.

...but I'm not personally convinced: instead, consider the demonstrable fact that similar engineering teams, working on similar problems, will independently come to substantially similar solutions; my favourite example to point to is how eerily-similar the Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen, and Dassault Rafale all look - even entirely indistinguishable at an air-show in-person - despite having zero shared pedigree - therefore it's possible that - given the constraints of desktop graphics hardware of the late-1980s/early-1990s - that a user-friendly desktop UI built around the concept of floating application windows - will all be similar in one way or another.

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My pet-theory for why that "Windows 95 1px bevel" look is so prevalent is because it suits working with premade UI graphics rasters/bitmaps using indexed-colors: for example, imagine a Windows-style Property Sheet dialog: prior to Windows 95, software would manually draw all of the elements of that dialog directly to the framebuffer (i.e. using unbuffered graphics) which was slow - ugly - and is the cmputer-equivalent of using a lavatory in a cramped bathroom actively undergoing renovations without any drywall/plastering). Even if there was enough vram for double-buffering it's still going to be slow: painting each and every button, checkbox (with the checkmark!) and tab header. So instead, many individual UI graphics elements could be prerendered (at design-time, hopefully by an actual artist), but not as single bitmaps for the entire dialog - but as an indexed color bitmap for each control type, so no slow/expensive draw/painting is required: only a simple blitbit for each checkbox, for example. Using an indexed-color bitmap based on a 4 or 8 colors palette (face, 3D light, 3D dark, transparent/BG; etc) means a single blob only a few hundred bytes in size can represent a chisel-cut bevelled checkbox - while integrating with whatever the user's preferred color scheme is.

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....of course now we'll just build a UI in Electron, to hell with memory usage or integrating with the user's OS appearance settings. Le sigh.

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

#200
The Windows 3.1 UI example screenshots are a reminder of how primitive 3.1 felt compared to other OSes of the time.

The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective.

When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.

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