Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 95 UI Design

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 312 posts

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#31

Post by jedberg »

notadoc wrote: post #15

Windows 95 had an obvious UI, but was rather cluttered. The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design, the simplicity and obviousness is a marvel. The modern Mac experience is no where near that simple, particularly since the Yosemite UI overhaul. The original iPad had pretty great UI design too, until the iOS 7 redesign. Now I think it's probably the most confusing UI that exists on a m…

> The original Macintosh up through System 7 was perhaps peak of OS UI design

Interestingly, that was right around the time Apple's original interaction designer left the company.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#32

Post by userbinator »

petilon wrote: post #20

The Windows 95 UI was inspired by NextStep. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_... Before Windows 95 was released there was CTL3D.DLL which gave a NextStep-like look & feel to Windows 3.1. See this image for the improvement made by CTL3D.DLL: http://www.win3x.org/screens/15nvtbm.gif

I think it improved on NextStep by adding things like the underlines for keyboard accessibility, but the basic style (i.e. buttons that look like buttons) is very similar.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#33

Post by gitgud »

Windows 95 followed an extremely standardised approach to design. This allowed for incredible ease of use, but people get tired of standards and want to set themselves apart...

This is not always good for UX, but new and different GUI's are an inevitable progression from homogeneous ecosystems like; Windows 95, Bootstrap, Material...

People just want to be different from the standard

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#34

Post by ordinaryperson »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction.

Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a living.

Want to open a new tab in mobile Safari while on a webpage? Oh I must tap the invisible button bar at the bottom. So obvious.

I just wish Apple et al. didn't force these choices on us, that we could disable silliness like force touch and hidden toolbars. But alas one cannot.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#35

Post by erikpukinskis »

ordinaryperson wrote: post #34
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

Compounding this frustration (on iOS at least) is stuff like "force touch" and hidden toolbars. Depending on how hard you press a button you might get a totally different UI interaction. Are others good at knowing exactly how many newtons of force it takes to follow a hyperlink instead of triggering this horrid mini-preview window? Maybe that's why Jonny Ive made millions of dollars while I work like a stiff for a li…

Force touch is the best evidence we have that designers have lost their power at Apple.

The best thing Steve Jobs did was hire serious designers and defend their ideas against the rest of the organization. That’s clearly not happening anymore.

My guess is that “Designer at Apple” became such a desirable title that the design roles have been taken over by wannabees.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#36

Post by slovenlyrobot »

k__ wrote: post #29
est wrote: post #22

I used to play with VB5 and VB6, the RAD process was better than any of today's separated backend/frontend antd CSS-layout scaffolding data binding frameworks bullshit. The best part of the unified UI controls is you can use tools like Spy++ to discover programs on the fly. Today's Internet there are thousands of web frameworks and you need thousands of source mapping or else it's an ocean of minified gibberish.

Serious question: if it was so much better, why is it gone now?

There are more or less 2 major modes of managing a product relative to the current technological zeitgeist:

- expand to consume every new use case and buzzword that comes along. Survive in some form indefinitely, while the product becomes less concrete and meaningful over time. The product continues to succeed not because it is technically best in class any more, but sheer momentum of the large base of existing users it serves adequately

- remain focused to the original mission, delivering iterative improvements over time. Watch waves of loyal users get eaten away one after another by the tide of the current technological buzz

VB was mostly the second case, although it did have many cousins in the form of VBA and ASP. The original tool - VB itself, was only ever relevant to desktop computing. By the time it got merged into Visual Studio, I believe the RAD aspect of the tool had already mostly disappeared (although VS even today still offers some variety of the original experience!)

VB in its prime was a beautiful thing, and the experience AFAIK remains unmatched to this very day. I've pined for a "client/server VB" on many occasions.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#37

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

jedberg wrote: post #27
tus88 wrote: post #23

I still use Win98 daily for gaming and love it, fight me.

The last patch for Win98 was in 2013. I really hope you don't put that thing on the internet.

Who cares? If it is just for gaming, then if it gets infected it isn't going to compromise anything important.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#38

Post by jedberg »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #37
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The last patch for Win98 was in 2013. I really hope you don't put that thing on the internet.

Who cares? If it is just for gaming, then if it gets infected it isn't going to compromise anything important.

The most common infection is the one where they turn your computer into a node of a botnet. From there it can consume your bandwidth, launch attacks on other people, or be used to distribute files, such as child porn.

Do you want to be implicated in a child porn ring, and have the evidence sitting right on your computer?

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#39

Post by jplayer01 »

pvg wrote: post #12

UI is different on the web and mobile devices but if you fire up the Win 10 file explorer, almost all of the items shown are still there or arguably better. Maybe resize (which you can now do from any window edge) is a little more finicky.

The most annoying thing about Windows 10 is how it makes clear improvements in some areas, but then decides to be utterly brain dead in other areas. The task manager is hugely improved. The file explorer is better. The copy/move file dialog is far more useful. But then they abandon the Control Panel and give us this flat UI abomination that doesn’t even support one of the original ideas that made Windows 95 such a hit: Multitasking. You literally can’t have multiple copies of Settings open to modify different parts of the settings at the same time. I can’t quickly open a new window to check something while keeping my focus on one main task ... as in, multitask. I’m forced to break my flow and traverse back/forward through a bunch of nested settings instead of letting me alt-tab between what I’m actually interested in. It’s terrible and infuriating and I have no idea how this got released in this state.

And that’s before even considering how incredibly wasteful it is with space. I hate myself and wonder where my life went wrong every time I have to open a Settings window on a device that doesn’t have full HD or higher, because it usually results in copious amounts of scrolling for information that could be easily displayed in 1/4th of the space. Hell, and you can forget about using it non-maximized, because then the “advanced” links on the right side disappear to wherever, because fuck showing you what you need at a glance.

And they keep changing how you reach the actually sane, usable and functional Control Panel windows (like the sound devices settings) and alternate between making it easier and ridiculously obtuse. It makes me want to bash my head against things really, really hard.

Re: Windows 95 UI Design

#40

Post by soheil »

RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #4

A generation was raised on usable designs which clearly communicated interactability with a consistent visual language. It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices. Machines had always been this way. It was obvious to this new generation that the affordances of youth were purely redundant. Clutter. Overhead. Junk! Widget by widget, pixel by pixel, bevels…

> It is only natural that they would come to think of computers as inherently ordered, understandable devices.

until you get a blue screen of death...

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree that modern UI is complete garbage.

Post reply on HN