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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

#201

Post by kbelder »

ahartmetz wrote: post #61
exitb wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.

Interesting. Chrome doesn't have this option, but if you have stylebot or other extension it's easy to add a global CSS rule that adds it. I'll try it out for a while and see how it goes.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#202

Post by IIsi50MHz »

al_borland wrote: post #45
Telaneo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistency. Even if you've never held a telephone receiver, if it means 'call' in one place, it's very likely to mean the same thing in another. We could be using random hieroglyphs to the same ends, but people seem to always make their own (barring a few exceptions, like the hamburger menu). It's probably a better idea to use something with some grounding in reality rather than make your own from nothing, since doi…

It also takes a long time for those purely digital ideas to filter out into the mainstream and get a shared name. For many years I would hear people same, “click the thing in the upper left corner”, “click those 3 lines up there”, or something similar. The term hamburger menu is starting to filter out there to the point where I feel comfortable using it. Even the term, hamburger menu, is a skeuomorphic name for a dig…

I resorted to telling people "Click/touch the funny little group of three horizontal lines.", and if they still hesitated, "…Looks like an air vent.".

On occasions where I told them it's really called a hamburger menu, they all either looked like they thought the idea was nonsesical, or said as much.

…Don't get me started on apps that have multiple air vent (or elipsis) menus visible simultaneously.

Or apps that abuse the symbol further by changing the meaning from "menu" to "toggle a sidebar that may or may not have portions that act like a menu."

./table-flip

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#203

Post by Narishma »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #194
Narishma wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget That's not true; the corners/edges are only visually detached, they're still active for input.

That's even worse then, because there's a conflict between what's displayed and how you interact with it.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#204

Post by IIsi50MHz »

petilon wrote: post #9
marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX. The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

Why are designers not understanding this these days? I think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic. Somewhere in between is the right approach. The Ne…

All that dark, dismal grey, though… (-:

For reasons I don't fully understand, it makes me thing of repressive environs along the lines of "This is not for you. Serious business only.".

Although I do find some of the borders much too thick, it would be bit of relief from the modern trend of having enormous padding/margins everywhere.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#205

Post by ranger_danger »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #107
al_borland wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worst UI thing Microsoft ever did was hiding file extensions

Highly disagree... that was not a snap decision and they did a lot of research on it. The vast majority of people were only further confused by extensions, and preferred file names to appear more natural. This was also done before the days of widespread use of the internet, email, or viruses/malware.

What research have you done that might suggest a large number of people would agree that it was a bad decision?

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#206

Post by seba_dos1 »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #199
seba_dos1 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget That's not true; the corners/edges are only visually detached, they're still active for input.

You're right to point this out, but it's still more annoying because you now have to remember that consciously, rather then seeing and feeling that you can just move your mouse to the edge.

Well, I don't particularly like it myself so I don't use it, it takes literally four clicks to disable panel floating.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#207

Post by amadeuspagel »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #206
amadeuspagel wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right to point this out, but it's still more annoying because you now have to remember that consciously, rather then seeing and feeling that you can just move your mouse to the edge.

Well, I don't particularly like it myself so I don't use it, it takes literally four clicks to disable panel floating.

I didn't know that but now I did it.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#208

Post by RAM-bunctious »

hallole wrote: post #163
ConceptJunkie wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fr…

Maybe it's just me, but exploring the settings without a specific aim used to be a pretty fun. It was like seeing a vista of possibilities opening up.

Now I often find it a frustrating experience, because, while I appreciate the attempt at organisation, settings are hidden behind so many sub-menus that it feels like a slog to click to deeper levels to find only a few settings, even if there are a lot of settings in total.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#209

Post by hakfoo »

cubefox wrote: post #147
Telaneo wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate brutalist architecture, but love the Win2K design language, for what should be fairly obvious reasons. I interact with software. I don't interact with architecture beyond the visuals. It can look as shit as it wants, but if it gets out of my way and lets me do what I want to do, then it's great. It'd be nice if it look better, but I'll take function over form 10/10 times. The only reason brutalist buildings we…

Making the UI grey seems just as conducive to productivity as the raw concrete walls on a brutalist office building.

I'd suspect one of the big constraints was that you had to support basic VGA: 640x480 at 16 bold colours on a cheap CRT.

With that palette, using white/black/dark grey/light grey for the UI leaves most of the "saturated" colours for the software's own messaging. If you make the main body of the UI red or yellow, it's going to wash out if software uses those colours for alert indicators. If you make it blue, it's probably going to be a bit subjectively dark, and you'd need to use light characters for contrast. White input fields might have a skeumorphic aspect in that they look like paper you can write on.

An interesting comparison is the colour schemes of CDE. It was usually used on 256+ colour systems, so many of the themes are pastel-centric, but it's aggressively beveled and has similar high legibility.

Re: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

#210

Post by Anamon »

groan wrote: post #29

I liked every version of Windows that I’ve used, back to 3.1 all the way up to 11. Nowadays I mostly use 10/11 at home and at work. A new Windows upgrade was always a magical treat for me, the old slow HDD speeds building up anticipation during the installation phase, making me excited to finally use it. Growing up with computers unfortunately demystifies many things, but such is the price of poignance.

I felt the same way up until around Vista. The launch of Windows 95 was probably the pinnacle for me. XP already started having a sour taste with the whole activatin thing, and Vista and 7 weren't really exciting anymore. My reaction to a new version went from curiosity and excitement about what new things might be in it, to dreading finding out about all the things they removed or made worse this time. I went from wanting to try out the new versions soonish, to trying to stay on the previous one for as long as reasonably possible. And I don't think it's just a nostalgia or age thing, it's about very concrete things for me (dwindling customiation options and growing usage restrictions being the main ones).
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