[ary]

The "Fisher-Price'ing" [1] of the user interface isn't necessarily better in my view. It took the already big and colorful user interface elements and essentially made them bigger. When the video finally gets past the installer there isn't much that wasn't already a part of XP beyond the added, slow UI animations (which is definitely not an improvement, just look at most UI research and anecdotal griping on the web for the last 15 years).

Yearning for XP is something I can relate to. It feels like the last good UI version of Windows. The video is only a nostalgia trip though. Actual improvements on XP's UI would be:

- Removing the hierarchy and modes Microsoft kept piling on since 3.1. These are endemic in the shell. Both the Start menu and Windows Explorer are rife with them.

- Organizing the Control Panel such that it's thematically grouped. All settings involving the display (and thus graphics sub-system) are in a single place, all networking is controlled in one place, etc.

- Reducing the number and complexity of mouse interactions. Context menus should only be needed for the most exceptional cases. Right clicking to accomplish a task should be rare.

- Near elimination of dialogs. Users mostly dismiss them without reading anyway.

- Reduce, to the degree possible, the need to understand the file system, and its hierarchy, to find one's data and make basic use of the system. Watching people try to understand files and the file system hierarchy is pretty painful.

- Reduce the need to manage individual windows, and introduce a way to intelligently place windows across programs such that the user can juxtapose the applications they need to copy/paste between to get work done with minimal effort.

These are just what's top of mind, and I don't fault the creator of the video for making a tribute to XP. I'll add that a lot of these complaints apply to macOS, but often to a lesser degree. Perhaps I'm the old man yelling at the cloud here [2], but this stuff has been eating away at me for years and there doesn't seem to exist the will to address any of it.

[1] https://shop.mattel.com/pages/fisher-price [2] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud

[torstenvl]

All of your UI suggestions are bad UI and shockingly similar to all the BS Windows 10-11 force-feed us.

Hierarchy (organization) is better than search. We all know this because whenever hierarchy is replaced with search, search had to reimplement hierarchy to be usable! E.g., grouping and nesting of pinned Win10+ start menu items.

Control Panel did have groups in Win XP. They suck. I always disable it.

Windows 10 removed a ton of context menus. Windows 11 removed more. They both suck. Stop hiding things from me.

[ary]

You'll notice I didn't recommend search, or actually anything, as a solution to the problems I mentioned. I think these issues need more research and experimentation before we can arrive at better long term solutions. Also I didn't advocate for hiding things. Instead I think we agree with the idea that less things should be hidden, and the majority of the issues I have with Windows (and macOS/iOS) user interface elements is that they don't do a good enough job of surfacing the things I'm trying to find.