Windows 95 UI Design

. . .and then there was the BSODomy. . .

Less cheekily, I recall joy of not needing to look to the bottom for more commands and tabs.

First encounter with that paradigm was iTunes. It took me a week to realize that half the functionality was in the nether reaches of the screen. I felt I was the butt of some joke.

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 were smoothed. Tasteful gradients and transparency replaced harsh outlines. Explanatory text was tucked away. Manuals became brochures, then a lonely slip of paper with a URL. Maybe a QR code.

Now my screen is the very picture of elegance and sophistication. There are no extraneous details. Indeed, there are no details. I caress my phone's surface gently, hoping to see a sliver of its rapturous visage peel back, hinting that I have found the first step in the puzzle box of its interaction model.

Alas, no dice. Maybe I can hunt down a how-to video... to show me how to hunt down a video...

The old desktop approach had some cool things. List views tended to support common operations, e.g. sorting, drag-and-drop, multiselection, common ways to do renames and type-ahead-find. Tree views had some standardization, too. Crowded menus/toolbars could be ugly, but you could discover a lot of functionality going through them. Right-click tended to expose a set of verbs.

These things often exist now or have an analog (e.g. long press is right-click in mobile UI), but not everywhere and not always done the same way. Mobile has some inconsistency; the Web has a good bit.

The modern has plenty of its own UI/UX things--URLs and the Back button for the win, dev tools/view source are awesome, and certain cool things can come from services not living entirely on your device. Something like hiding clutter at the cost of discoverability is a win for many people.

Still think it's interesting to compare and think about what can be usefully brought forward from the past.

Even to this date, there is something oddly satisfying about clicking those buttons. It feels like I'm operating a machine and actually getting things done.

25 years later, we still don't have good, standardized, robust Ui controls for browsers.

Why is there no HTML tag for creating menu bar and nested dropdown menu?

Instead we have to search through thousands of libraries or plugins with mixed bag of accessibility.

Just that control alone will probably save companies globally billions of dollars in wasted labor searching, building, and maintaining.