The Windows 95 user interface: A case study in usability engineering (1996) • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by LtWorf » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 2:10 PM UTC

M95D wrote: post #273

LtWorf wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not a great mathematical genius but I suspect that "early 2000s" came several years after 1995. Correct?

I'm sorry I don't have a museum at home to provide relevant demonstrations to random internet persons or bots. Win95 start menu opens instantly on any computer that can run it. You either belive me or not.

Ah, I am a bot because I remember how using windows 95 in 1995 was?

Ok man, sure. Go play with chatgpt and it will always tell you how right you are :)

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

#282

Post by just6979 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 3:19 PM UTC

"From the first lab studies it became clear that we needed a baseline with Windows 3.1, to better understand what problems existed prior to Windows 95 and what problems were unique to the new design."

This could be the biggest takeaway: iterating without a goal is silly. Though, honestly, it should be the default. If you're creating a new paradigm without ever knowing the problems you're supposed to fixing, you're doing it wrong!

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

#283

Post by just6979 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 4:30 PM UTC

imiric wrote: post #31

hnthrowaway0315 wrote: post #4

I think Windows 95/2000 and the contemporary MacOS (including the then future MacOS X) have the best UI in everything I used in my 30+ years of tech life. I sincerely hope that one day we could go back to that road. If you want that achieved, please support me to join Apple/Microsoft to become the UI boss, fire all flat-design people and hire a small team to implement the older UI, then give a few passionate talks on…

After nearly 30 years of tech life myself, I've come to the realization that the best UIs are not graphical. They can have graphical elements mostly for visualization purposes, but all of them should be as minimal and unobtrusive as possible. Any interactivity should be primarily keyboard-driven, and mouse input should be optional. Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitute…

Pointers are still very useful for many paradigms. Think about something like Blender or a game level editor: there can be _a lot_ of controls visible at once, trying to navigate them all with the keyboard is just unfeasible. And doing a fully context sensitive setup to limit visible controls, like the MS Office Ribbon, is also infeasible because the changes would be happening almost continually as different objects are selected and modes are chosen.

Your bad UI example of resizing windows is way less about the round corners or lack of obvious grab area (handle). It's more that the handle is way too small. It's a couple pixels (maybe just one?) wide/tall on screens that are thousands of pixels wide! It's just too easy to overshoot. I'd say it comes from the obsession with minimalism and flat design such that there is almost no visible seperate border to act as a target. Combined with trying to remove ambiguity as to which window the click should go to (if you click two pixels "outside" a window, should the click go to the window beneath or be interpreted as trying to grab the border?), the grab handles are tiny, almost matching the actual (lack of) pixels of the border, instead of being a usable target to click on.

To me it points to a lack of usability testing, or at least lack of generalized usability testing, ie: they tested their own workflows, which seem to be just always leaving windows as the OS creates them initially, or maximizing everything, not much resizing at all. Similarly, generally testing a [mostly] keyboard interface is tough to do thoroughly without providing a thorough cheat sheet. You know the commands because you made them, easy to test how you work, but others need to learn them first.

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

#284

Post by just6979 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 4:41 PM UTC

ginko wrote: post #7

Notice how they moved the ok & cancel buttons to the bottom right since it’s the more logical location to put them. Meanwhile gtk now puts those on opposite sides of the window title bar by default.

How is it more logical? Upper right places them close to the other window controls. Also continues the down-then-right order of most of the other controls.

In fact, putting buttons along either _side_ of the windows would be a better fit on the wider aspect screens we use nowadays.

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

#285

Post by just6979 » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 5:08 PM UTC

pndy wrote: post #52

rr808 wrote: post #37

Wasn't Windows 95 just a copy of Windows NT, which was the real product.

Both OS lines were developed concurrently up until XP release where DOS-based 9x was abandoned and NT became the basis for every subsequent product. Plus of course there's that whole part of the story where MS teamed up with IBM and worked on OS/2. NT got new 9x shell with 4.0 release but a beta package could be installed on 3.51 as well - tho, that could render some compatibility issues.

Actually I'd say Win2K was the merge point: its internal version is NT 5.0, while XP is NT 5.1 & 5.2. The Win2K UI is the first NT truly usable in a home situation, and last and best iteration of the Win95 UI before the plasti-color of XP. (Yes, that UI was last available as XP's "Classic Theme", but I'm giving it to 2K because XP doesn't really change anything.)

However Win2K wasn't really marketed to consumers as there were still some minor compatibility issues: particularly the DOS emulation was not great, so getting things like older games to work often required lots of tweaking to the launch process, and some things still might never work. Those compatibility settings got more options, saner defaults, and more automatic settings, in XP and later to go along with the full commitment of NT for everyone.

So, while DOS-based WinMe was actually released after Win2K, it was just a stop-gap to bring some more internet things, directx, and media player stuff, to home users while NT 5.x got it's compatibility and driver model in order. Except it was notoriously unstable, generally hated, and mostly forgotten.

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

#286

Post by f1shy » Mon, Mar 02, 2026, 5:58 PM UTC

gandalfian wrote: post #268

opan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many generations of that mouse design have there been now? Any changes to it? Wireless charging support could be a nice bandaid on that terrible design.

Modern wireless mice from logitech and microsoft last for a year or two on a pair of aa batteries. There is no point making them rechargeable any more. You can always use rechargeable aa nihms if you really want to, but personally I just have 50p of alkaline aa's and in two years I will have to change them again. Some things do get better :)

The only point IMHO to built in battery, is if it very convenient to recharge, which is not the case. I have an HHKB which uses 2 AAA, with rechargeable Li batteries which I can reload with usb, while still using the keyboard with cable (once every 6 months or so)

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

#287

Post by VerifiedReports » Tue, Mar 03, 2026, 7:24 AM UTC

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #10

VerifiedReports wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I always cite XP as being Windows's peak, but I forgot that it shipped with their insulting Fisher-Price motif enabled by default. Step 1 was to switch the UI to "classic" (essentially Windows 95) mode, and all was well. Windows 95 is a great case study because with that release, Microsoft did more for GUIs than Apple did through the entire decade of the '90s... and beyond. All of it is now out the window (pun i…

I really liked XP (and 7) because for me, having a capable theming engine built in that didn't take a ton of extra resources or cause instability (unlike Stardock's WindowBlinds) was a real value add. There were some absolutely gorgeous third party XP/Vista/7 themes on sites like DeviantArt that worked extremely well within the limits of the engine, had a unique look and feel, and were just as usable as the "classic"…

Absolutely. I always hated the inverse color scheme that Windows defaulted to, but that was OK because Windows had its color-scheme editor that let anyone create a global scheme he liked. I created a charcoal-toned one that was right in line with today's "dark" themes, and used it throughout the '90s.

Then Microsoft buried and ultimately removed the color-scheme editor... just in time for people to realize that inverse schemes suck.

So now Microsoft and Apple have dribbled out hard-coded "dark" themes, which every application developer has had to cobble together support for separately. Windows had this problem solved more than 30 years ago. Think about it. But then they deleted the solution from their product.

At least Apple NEVER had a proper global color palette for its UI. The fact that Microsoft did, but shitcanned it, stands testament to its complete abandonment of anything resembling good design. Hell, you can't even select multiple PNGs in Explorer and say "Open with..." anymore. The option is just totally GONE. Windows is rife with regressions like this. It's unbelievable.

Design is getting shittier and more ignorant daily. It's depressing.

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

#288

Post by hollandheese » Wed, Mar 04, 2026, 4:26 AM UTC

LtWorf wrote: post #193

M95D wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Were you running a 386-16 MHz with 4 MB of memory? And you had hundreds of apps listed on the start menu? Because on anything faster it would absolutely not take that long.

It wasn't always instant on boot on my 486-SLC 33 MHz with 8 MB of memory but at most several to ten seconds for it to appear on first boot after clicking.

And on the Pentium MMX that I'm running now it's always instant on Windows 98 SE.

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

#289

Post by VerifiedReports » Fri, Mar 06, 2026, 8:19 AM UTC

socalgal2 wrote: post #54

VerifiedReports wrote: post #3

Look how crisp, professional, and usable it all is. This is a very good write-up. There's no way this level of testing and dedication could have resulted in the execrable shitshow that is Windows today. Mac OS is going backward with accelerating speed, too. They had just started to recover from Jony Ive when they put a packaging designer in charge of UI... resulting in the "Liquid Glass" debacle, and all the other in…

Ranting on UI, I think I might blame MS for this but I feel like many shortcuts for customization in apps and OS are a net negative. The first example I remember was ~2003ish when MS Office did a big redesign and got much bigger toolbars. That they were big is a matter of taste but that's not where I'm going with this. No, the issue was that they made too easy to ACCIDENTALLY mess up the UI. They added all kinds of c…

Interesting that you bring this up. I'd wonder what you're talking about, since I (while having a huge shitlist of UI complaints for Apple and Microsoft) seldom if ever encounter this...

But I deal with this for my parents ALL THE TIME. They manage to delete core, included iOS apps every month or two; in addition to invoking other bizarre configuration options that I've never seen in my life (and that make no sense and shouldn't exist).

Over and over I have to visit the bizarre app graveyard that exists beyond the last iOS screen... the "app library," and restore something they managed to move there. As far as I can tell, relegating an app there from the home screen is a multi-step, long-press-riddled process. How do they keep doing it accidentally? I have no idea.

And several times my mom has ended up with an idiotic keyboard stretched across the middle of her iPad's screen, with no way to fix or dismiss it. Even typing this out right now, I don't remember WTF causes it or how we fixed it.

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

#290

Post by giantrobot » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 2:50 AM UTC

BrenBarn wrote: post #271

giantrobot wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I do wonder how much of it is personal, in that that UI hit at a certain formative time in my life. But ever since then it's been the benchmark that I evaluate all other UIs by. I know some of my preferences for UIs are informed by what I first really learned how to use. But I also have preferences that are informed by decades of heavy computer use. I despise UI widgets that just look like the window background wit…

Another thing is that part of my liking for the UI of that time is connected with the fact that it was consistent across all apps. Like you could set the font and color for a menu bar and every app would have that. This era of web apps drives me nuts because now it's switched to "this app should look the same for all viewers", when I want it to be "all apps should look the same when I use them".

The lack of consistency in web apps and Electron apps is infuriating. The inconsistency increases my cognitive load switching apps. Then you've got in-browser web apps aliasing system keyboard shortcuts.

Modern software feels so primitive in terms of UI compared to software from twenty and thirty years ago.