Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:
- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless
- Good contrast
- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else.
- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus
- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.
The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...
I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!
"Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent."
Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work.
One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.
I feel like older user interfaces treated me like an adult.
Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/
Our overall computing environment acquired a distinct patronizing/infantilizing feel to it in the last decade. I don't think it's only visual -- or even visual at all, not sure.
”felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed”
You got more experienced. When you’re looking at your second, third, etc. system, there always are cases where you think “This is so easy on ‘Foo’, why does ‘Bar’ make it so difficult?”, and feel like wasting time, even if it isn’t really difficult on that system, but just different, or if it is difficult because you are working on step A, but the new system has a better workflow that does steps A thorough Z in one go.
If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
Early OS X looked like a weird candyland to me. Not as lurid as XP, sure, but the 3D-like glassy buttons and the sliding animation as you minimised something always struck me as kind of overkill.
I think much is due to the mobile influence. Apples worked in a lot of hidden functionality into iOS. That’s led to things like the applications folder being nearly forgotten about and left out of UI. App switching used to be done by the top right drop down, but would never go now. Etc. I don’t know fully how to explain what’s missing, but something is.
Older interfaces were designed to help users learn. Newer interfaces are designed to let users do fewer things with less learning. GNOME went from underlining shortcuts in menus to eliminating menus.
My first real (i.e. work) usage of a GUI was DECWindows[1] on a VAXStation, which felt like a real GUI for getting work done. I believe it and Solaris GUI share a common heritage. Even now, I miss the utilitarian feel of it. You can install DECWindows/Motif style themes for Linux but it just doesn't feel 'right'...
There’s a port/tribute of the Irix 4dwm available for modern Linux. I don’t get the satisfying clunk when I drop a file in the dumpster, but otherwise it keeps me from wasting money on an Octane and all the gear necessary to output to a digital display.
A: You didnt used to have a "workstation" at your house
B: The machine you had at your house was a completely different platform than say, Solaris machines or terminals/mainframes etc.
C: The UI/UX of the work machine and the home machine are now the same -- so its easy to do the "home stuff" on the work machine now.
D: Fewer people than ever have a dedicated "work machine" and do a lot of personal stuff on that "work laptop" regardless of if they arent supposed to.
FWIW, I switched to MATE[1] instead of GNOME 3 after GNOME 2. It's a fork of GNOME 2 that retains the look and feel of GNOME 2, and thus far, I've been fairly pleased with it.
There’s a fashion maxim that you should look at designer magazines from 15 years ago. 15 years is about half a fashion cycle so you see the goods in their least flattering light.
Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther/Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion.
The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows ‘93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation.
Seeing only the icons is barely half the truth. There should also be a rendering of the noise those boxes made during operation. With every movement of the mouse and each key press the hard disk made a sound as if it were being eaten by the cookie monster. And of course the disk access indicator flashed like mad all the time. Contemporary hardware seldom reaches that level of entertainment.
While I don't agree with the article's notion about icons, I think it's true that 1990s UIs, especially Windows and Mac, were particularly productive OSes because they applied not just common UI idioms but standard interactions: Buttons, menus, windows, drag and drop -- everything was largely consistent between each app.
With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn't allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It's no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do "open in new tab" (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A "native" app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps.
I think we're in a transitional phase where we're halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the "UI" of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what "idiom" is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it's usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle.
One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg's Minority Report. Some of these UIs may need to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers CUA, and how much it really gave us wrt UX consistency.
It's interesting that every time I bring it up, such comments get a lot of upvotes. Clearly there's some demand for this sort of UX, at least in this community.
I love the early Windows design, especially the Windows 2000 look. Other than the well designed icons, I find it to be much more intuitive and consistent than modern Windows GUIs and Metro. Part of the reason why I use the classic style on my Windows 7 machine (the other part is better performance). I like it so much I implemented it in ReactJS https://github.com/Gikoskos/react-win32dialog/
Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
You might want to consider adding "image-rendering: pixelated" to your CSS; on a high-dpi monitor, these render with bilinear interpolation, which I think doesn't do justice to the crispness of these icons.
By the criteria outlined in the article I would have thought the Windows 95 icons would be the ideal - they're essentially the same but without the "flashy" gradients and other depth indications.
Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.
Windows 2000 was just about the peak of desktop interfaces from a usability and efficiency standpoint, its really only missing out on window snapping and workspaces (which is kinda a crutch for bad window management like on OSX)
> Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols.
The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren't for actual work.
And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn't changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1> people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2> it was a "phone", not a "computer". This didn't worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had "professional" devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare.
I think it's gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing "work" apps, and the designers all start mobile -> web -> desktop.
I think nostalgia plays a part for sure, but there's also substance about the old UIs.
Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol' personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences.
On the substance side -- this isn't exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I've tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I've tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There's no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7's KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98/2000 vs Win7/8/10.
I also think the aesthetic of classic Mac OS, like versions 8 and 9, as well as BeOS had great design that made it easy to know what widgets were what and how to interact with them.
Yes! The "Platinum" aesthetic in classic Mac OS was great. Simple aesthetic, easy to follow for custom UI elements.
Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was.
I was so disappointed with Visual Studio 2018 when somebody decided to remove all the colors from the icons. This made users guess the icon only by its outline. The icon color design of windows 98, 2000 and xp were great, i miss it so much.
I was in a senior position at Microsoft back at the time early versions of Office, Windows 95 and 98 were being developed. In fact a number of groups including the Visual Interface Design group reported to me. That's the group that designed the general visual appearance and also icons in the UI for both Office and Windows. (They were not designing the actual user interaction, just the visual appearance.)
At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.
Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.
The "remove color from all the toolbar icons" thing also happened with Firefox Quantum. And you're right, it's so weird. Perhaps it's a side effect of the ongoing transition to ubiquitous "big", touch-friendly buttons, where a combination of large size and full color would be overly distracting.
Yeah, windows phone 7 was iirc Microsoft's first foray into flat/monochrome design, and in some ways it was wonderful... WP7 had a hyper-consistent design language that made normally-confusing flat UIs a dream... But ditching color in icons in favour of simple silhouettes was not one of its better ideas, and MS is still trying to make that a thing sometimes like 8 years later.
I think windows 95/98 interface was great. I don't want ads when I click on the start button. All they needed was to add a search bar and call it a day instead all these ads or apps you don't want.
In analyses like these, one thing often gets lost: interfaces are a product of their specific time, not just of a linear evolutionary process confined to the type of product being discussed. No product exists in a timeless state, yet retrospectives such as this one attempt to judge products as though they are this thing that’s frozen outside of the space-time-culture continuum.
So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.
Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.
Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn.
I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.
Funny how the icon of a floppy disk which was used to represent saving is slowly being phased out because the new generations have never even handled a floppy, so they don't remember how crucial it was to put files on floppy before storing them somewhere safe (or handing them over to a colleague/friend). I even had a floppy organizer in my desk drawer with fresh labels and sharpies, and peeling off old labels was actually satisfying back then.
No accounting for taste, but to me those icons are rather unsightly. From a utilitarian point of view, they might be good, but for art (at the time) I would have looked at NeXT icons.
[+] [-] alxlaz|7 years ago|reply
- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless
- Good contrast
- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it's weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they're important on touch-enabled systems but that's no reason to use them anywhere else.
- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus
- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.
The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...
I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you need to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!
[+] [-] rsync|7 years ago|reply
Agreed. I strongly dislike the Windows operating system but I miss very much the Windows user interface which was very well designed, consistent, and optimized for real work.
One of the things I miss the most are the consistent, universal and wide-ranging keyboard shortcuts. Not just key shortcuts for menu items, but keystrokes that allowed you to move around dialog boxes, resize windows, etc. OSX is largely terrible in this regard with even many common menu items without shortcuts ...
[+] [-] sickcodebruh|7 years ago|reply
When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.
[+] [-] laurentdc|7 years ago|reply
Whatever I did on Solaris [1] or even early OS X [2] felt like I was doing real work, important stuff, even if I was just messing around.
I don't know what changed, I use both Linux (Gnome 3) and macOS Mojave daily but they both lack that polished "workstation" feel. Maybe it's all in my head or I'm just getting old :/
[1] http://agilo.acjs.net/files/screenshot_solaris.png
[2] https://forums.macrumors.com/attachments/picture-2-png.57621...
[+] [-] normalhuman|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Someone|7 years ago|reply
I don't know what changed”
You got more experienced. When you’re looking at your second, third, etc. system, there always are cases where you think “This is so easy on ‘Foo’, why does ‘Bar’ make it so difficult?”, and feel like wasting time, even if it isn’t really difficult on that system, but just different, or if it is difficult because you are working on step A, but the new system has a better workflow that does steps A thorough Z in one go.
If you ask people what’s the most fondly remembered or impressive OS, computer game, word processor, mobile phone, music player, etc., it often is the first one they really used.
[+] [-] untog|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Novashi|7 years ago|reply
They did, because usually only adults used PCs.
Now kids through elders use PCs and there's nothing wrong making the UX more friendly to people unaccustomed to working in tech.
It's in your head because I think you're missing the roles PCs now play for everyone in society.
[+] [-] lallysingh|7 years ago|reply
I stick with KDE and have been happy.
[+] [-] ianai|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InfamousRece|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/LinuxBuild/
[+] [-] pseudalopex|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fermienrico|7 years ago|reply
Solaris [1] UI certainly does though!
[+] [-] Jaruzel|7 years ago|reply
---
[1] http://toastytech.com/guis/DWindows.html
[+] [-] coredog64|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samstave|7 years ago|reply
A: You didnt used to have a "workstation" at your house
B: The machine you had at your house was a completely different platform than say, Solaris machines or terminals/mainframes etc.
C: The UI/UX of the work machine and the home machine are now the same -- so its easy to do the "home stuff" on the work machine now.
D: Fewer people than ever have a dedicated "work machine" and do a lot of personal stuff on that "work laptop" regardless of if they arent supposed to.
[+] [-] walrus01|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] msla|7 years ago|reply
http://www.windowmaker.org/themes/
[+] [-] deathanatos|7 years ago|reply
[1]: https://mate-desktop.org/
[+] [-] devereaux|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulgerhardt|7 years ago|reply
Today that would roughly correspond to looking at Windows Mobile CE interfaces or OSX Panther/Safari 1.0. Anything older and it starts coming back into fashion.
The rise of windows 95 ＡＥＳＴＨＥＴＩＣ a couple of years ago and now this seems to confirm a trend. Certainly so, if you thrown in some art projects like Windows ‘93, recent fashion and music trends around vaporwave and reinterest in PC-9800 emulation.
Love it.
[+] [-] tempodox|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atombender|7 years ago|reply
With the web, we had a lot of consistency for a while simply because browsers didn't allow much customization. Initially, all links were underlined, and form buttons had to look exactly like the browser presented them. But then CSS happened and all bets were off. Underlining is largely gone as a UI idiom. It's no longer evident if something is a link or button, whether you can right click and do "open in new tab" (often not possible if the link is not a URL but a JavaScript function), and so on. A "native" app like Slack is all over the place in terms of UI consistency, compared the strictness of the old IBM CUA standard and others. One may be productive within a single app, but not all of the idioms translate to other apps.
I think we're in a transitional phase where we're halfway between old-style GUIs and something more fluid that approximates real life to a greater degree. Consider the "UI" of a kitchen appliance or the packaging of a new iPhone, or a TV remote control, or just a plain old door. Everyday objects vary wildly in what "idiom" is provided to the user. Some doors have a handle, some have a knob, some have a bar you push. We have the same kind of annoying lack of standards and consistency in the real world, though it's usually evident that you can turn a know and push down on a handle.
One can imagine a future where UIs are gesture-based, for example. Think of the 3D UI from Spielberg's Minority Report. Some of these UIs may need to offer completely new way of interacting with objects (grab and make a fist to copy, open your hand wide to paste, or something) that will be difficult to standardize, much like the real world.
[+] [-] dsego|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|7 years ago|reply
Except MusicMatch Jukebox, Sonique and zillons of "who made this?" shovelware.
[+] [-] int_19h|7 years ago|reply
It's interesting that every time I bring it up, such comments get a lot of upvotes. Clearly there's some demand for this sort of UX, at least in this community.
[+] [-] Gikoskos|7 years ago|reply
Moreover, if you guys haven't read it yet you should definitely check out Raymond Chen's Old New Thing, which talks about the reasoning behind some of the design choices that went down in earlier Windows desktops.
[+] [-] raphlinus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] untog|7 years ago|reply
Side note: gave me some joy to read the comments and find that the ZIP file with the icons in was infected with a virus. Now that's the kind of retro I can associate with Windows 98.
[+] [-] drivers99|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
kinda like NT5 fading.. it added a bit of information but without distraction nor cost (unlike today UX)
[+] [-] amiga-workbench|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alsadi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neotek|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackfraser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|7 years ago|reply
> Rather than some designer’s flashy vision of the future, Windows 98 icons made the operating system feel like a place to get real work done. They had hard edges, soft colors and easy-to-recognize symbols.
The change is deliberate and reflects a social shift. In the W98 days computers were primarily seen as work devices, and in particular Windows wanted to distinguish itself from the more playful feeling Mac (which itself chose a more playful feel to address the fear most people felt about their computers. Apple tried to repeat the Mac playful feeling with the iMac and early OS X feel, and while it helped a bit in the consumer market it reinforced that feeling that they weren't for actual work.
And though it feels like it, this relationship hasn't changed! The (often forced) playful feeling of modern UIs comes from the phone and the phone was able to succeed there -- even need it -- because 1> people were already comfortable with a non-professional connection to the web, mail, messaging et al and 2> it was a "phone", not a "computer". This didn't worry Nokia or Microsoft at first because they had "professional" devices, and probably we forget the days of carrying a work and personal phone for phone calling. But then since the work phones were so crappy they were able to capture the mindshare.
I think it's gone the wrong way: because phones are worth so much, much less effort goes into designing "work" apps, and the designers all start mobile -> web -> desktop.
[+] [-] godot|7 years ago|reply
Looking at Win98 icons reminds me of my days in high school when I would just tinker around Windows for fun, changing icons of shortcuts, make good ol' personal homepages in HTML and Javascript (mostly alert boxes), and play Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2. The icons and the Win98 UI give me pleasant feelings, mostly coming from those experiences.
On the substance side -- this isn't exactly about Windows, but in the last couple of years I've tried a variety of Linux distros and DEs. Specifically, I've tried CentOS 7 KDE, Antergos Gnome 3, and Manjaro 18 KDE, all on laptops. There's no doubt that both Antergos and Manjaro bring with them very modern DEs (regardless of Gnome or KDE). But for some reasons, I felt the most productive on the CentOS 7 KDE, even though it looks the most primitive. Before I had the Manjaro laptop, I thought it was a KDE vs Gnome difference (KDE being more similar to Windows, vs Gnome being more similar to macOS, and I generally prefer Windows), but I think it actually does come down to the UI design. CentOS 7's KDE looks very dated, but everything is very functional and took little customization to feel productive in. The difference is similar to Win98/2000 vs Win7/8/10.
[+] [-] linux2647|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duskwuff|7 years ago|reply
Not all of the interface shown in these screenshots uses Platinum -- in particular, Quicktime Player did its own thing, and a handful of control panels used an older look-and-feel based on Mac OS 7 -- but it should be pretty apparent what the standard was.
https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/macos90
[+] [-] altmind|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gxx|7 years ago|reply
At that time the visual designers were strongly urging that all icons be greyscale because they said color was "distracting". I overruled them and insisted the icons have color because it was better for overall usability.
Now the whole industry seems to have come under the influence of the visual designers favoring visual appearance over usability. Much less attention seems to being given to real overall usability.
[+] [-] lozenge|7 years ago|reply
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudio/archive/2012/02/23/intr... (the hilarious original annoucement)
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ChangeConsideredHarmfulTheNew... (commentary)
https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/121579-visual-stud... (a rollback)
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/extensibility/... (Visual Studio 2017 icon color pallette and guidelines)
[+] [-] zozbot123|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jenscow|7 years ago|reply
(it should be called "moreicons.dll", but this was from when filenames had to be 8 + 3 characters long)
[+] [-] vermaden|7 years ago|reply
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/sl/8/8e/Win2000.png
[+] [-] samfisher83|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexfringes|7 years ago|reply
So, for these “productive interfaces” let’s keep in mind the goal Microsoft had at the time, which was to get people and businesses to buy Windows machines in bulk for serious, office-centric work. The abilities of the new, less complicated graphical UI had to be rendered in a way that made it feel just as serious as the more complicated text-based interfaces ... or paper binders, even.
Moving forward to things like OS X or iOS, the goals of the encompassing products clearly are different. In these cases the interfaces are attempting to permeate the non-work lives of people otherwise not forced to “work” with computers, in ways they would enjoy using outside of a work context. The goal was to NOT feel like work.
Why is this contextual distinction important? Let’s assume people come to HN to learn. I certainly do. It’s a great place to learn about technology, science, and about building products and companies. From that perspective, it’s worthwhile that we develop some rigor in how we reason about designs and the way they were packaged into a sellable entity. When we judge products historically, statements of an absolute qualitative nature like this one are just fine ... but they are often the equivalent of latching on to one article about a single mouse study, never looking at previous work, not checking the references, ignoring available meta-analyses and so on. All the stuff that is rightfully frowned upon when it comes to scientific research. Clearly product quality is tremendously more subjective than science, but throwing all objective perspectives out of the window is a trend that won’t guide our discussions to the kinds of product insights the HN audience would benefit from the most.
[+] [-] orliesaurus|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thothamon|7 years ago|reply