Steve Jobs is famous for his 1996 quote about Microsoft not having taste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiOzGI4MqSU). I disagree; as much as I love the classic Mac OS and Jobs-era Mac OS X, and despite my feelings about Microsoft's monopolistic behavior, 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful, in my opinion, and this was Microsoft's most tasteful period. I have fond memories of Windows 95/NT 4/98/2000, Office 97, and Visual Basic 6. I even liked Internet Explorer 5. These were well-made products when it came to the user interface. Yes, Windows 95 crashed a lot, but so did Macintosh System 7.
Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.
I'll also give the opinion that Apple consistently creates some absolutely crap designs and when they do this, release something really really mind mindbogglingly stupid that it should be embarrassing they are instead met with applause on the "amazing design". It's a tiresome pattern repeated for decades now.
eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-li...
Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme) which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory from their own previous 'amazing designs'.
Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when, if you think about what they did for even a second you'd realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".
Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.
I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either. Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the workflow of power users.
Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.
I think the interesting larger observation here is the perhaps both Microsoft and Apple peaked in their usability design between the mid-90s and late-aughts (I think Apple stayed at their peak for longer, particularly when you start thinking about the iPhone which, at the time, was streets ahead of what any other company was offering), and have both been on a down trend ever since.
Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void?
Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.
Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother?
What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.
People need to go back and use Win 3.1 or MacOS 7.x to realize what a leap forward Win95 was. MacOS 7.x didn't even have preemptive multitasking! The start menu and task bar made their debut and immediately anchored the whole UI. Since then, Windows has made incremental advances (with the occasional step backwards), but no change has been nearly so radical. OS X would not have been possible without the influence of win95. We're still living in the Win95 age.
I think Steve was correct in that Windows 95/98/NT/ME/2000 was functional but it wasn't particularly elegant. But the part I think Steve missed was that elegance may get the "ohhs and ahhs" but functionality gets the customers. Back when NeXT was a thing a friend of mine who worked there and I (working at Sun) were having the Workstation UX argument^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^hdiscussion. At the time, one component was how there was always like 4 or 5 ways to do the same thing on Windows, and that was alleged to be "confusing and a waste of resources." And the counter argument was that different people would find the ways that work best for them, and having a combinatorial way of doing things meant that there was a probably a way that worked for more people.
The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.
> 1995-2000 Microsoft's user interfaces were quite tasteful
Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
Microsoft has for short periods in its history put out good UX and design, but fundamentally the company doesn't defend taste and design.
The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets.
That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.
I have some nostalgia for XP, especially the Zune theme (separate download, black+orange recolor of the default), but due to the Classic theme being available in so many versions and often using it either for more performance or easier ricing (can easily swap the colors and fonts via official settings), I'm also nostalgic for the Win95 or so UI. I think 2000 was the oldest I remember actually using, but I used XP a lot and 2000 not very much.
In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved.
I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.
By your timeline, it means Microsoft only had institutional taste for about 3-4 years. A tiny fraction of the company’s lifetime.
(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)
(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)
Steven Jobs conveniently ignored the Start menu when discussing the competition. He probably secretly admired it, as it was a complete success story for Microsoft.
MS may not have been as tasteful as MacOS, but the functionality was at least there and it was easy to find and use. That goes a long way to make up for the bland-ish look.
Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.
The windows 95 user interface was 'inspired by' the NeXT user interface, and to some degree the Mac UI. Microsoft had a NeXT computer to copy off, even though they wouldn't develop for it.
Agreed, especially since in Europe there was hardly any Apple presence.
It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.
Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.
What made system 7 and 8 worse in some respect was when it crashed, it crashed hard without warning
With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.
I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.
Amazing you say that because I almost posted that comment in response to that same clip in another HN thread, for the same reason. There's a tight integration between style, performance, and design on the Windows 95 and 98 that then now feels more like "true" Windows than anything since.
I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they certainly had taste during their peak.
But did you use 95 when you were young? I was using primarily MacOS at the time and always found windows particularly bad at everything, including UI/UX. I guess we like what we know…
I'm a huge fan of the book "Design for the Real World" by Victor Papanek. One of the things that he talked about is the importance of using materials honestly: not trying to pass plastic off as wood, using the given material to it's best ability (even if itis plastic).
I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
2000 was peak except for them still having those tiny non-resizeable dialogs with long lists in them which you have to scroll horizontally and vertically. WTF?
Your typical Linux DE was better at that even back then.
What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen real estate has become cheaper.
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 incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.
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 customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident.
This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs.
This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative.
To be fair, Apple has always had a penchant for removing important features because they don't like how they look. I cannot count how many times I got a CD/DVD stuck in a Mac, and due to a lack of physical eject button and the software eject button not working, resorted to the emergency eject sequences. Just put a button to eject the disk, ffs.
GUIs used to be designed by power users, who would start with an advanced design and strip it down to a simple version the average user could use. Now GUIs are designed by average users who have no idea what to do with advanced features, because they're stuck thinking about the GUI as an average user does.
Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.
Designers tend to be less open to feedback than developers. That, I think, helps explain why flat UI persists even though it has shown usability drawbacks. It also helps explain why overall usability feels like it's declining ever year — for instance, macOS Tahoe seems noticeably worse in usability compared to macOS Sequoia. Does anyone think Apple is going to rush out a release that fixes the excessive rounding of window corners? Don't hold your breath.
On the topic of flat design specifically, developers are likely just as culpable. Back when it was just starting to catch on, by my observation some of the quickest to adopt it were solo developers because it's way easier to build a passable looking app with flat UI since that doesn't require any design talent.
Once the windows become actually circles, or maybe some point along that path, they'll go back to square corners and congratulate themselves on how much better and innovative they are. It's just a stupid trend to keep rounding things more and more... I hope.
It's all just rearranging deck chairs at this point.
I feel like UX designers don't realize that their job should have a natural tailing off as we discover and lock in the good ideas and discard the bad. Even if the ideas aren't that great, users can at least get good at however it does work, if it stays constant. Instead, we just get more dice rolls, eyecandy, and frustration.
I for one hate the power dynamic that OS and website designers have over me. They can just sneak into my house and rearrange my furniture on a whim. Even if it sucks, I would adapt to it if it stayed constant! Instead I both hate it and can't learn it, because everything is different and keeps changing when I least expect it.
At this point my brain has given into learned helplessness and won't retain much of anything at all, but it's next-level figured out that it's useless.
Designers seem to have a bad track record, and it's getting worse.
I think you might be confusing flat design with UI density. While they emerged as trends during a similar period, they are distinct concepts. You can have small flat elements or large skeuomorphic ones.
I don't think openness to feedback is the main metric, but rather ability to objectively measure outcomes. It's just harder to objectively measure usability than the presence or absence of a bug or performance problem.
Any user interface designer should take a good look at the controls on a commercial airliner. An awful lot of effort goes into making an intuitive, effective user interface. I have disagreements with it, but there's no denying it's very well done.
Designing a programming language is mostly about usability. I'll be giving a talk about that in April at Yale. It's a fun topic!
I feel like there's a taste issue which is similar to tabs vs spaces or other coding styles. Some languages kind of solve this with auto-formatting but just because they choose a standard doesn't mean their standard is as readable as some other.
In languages one taste issue that comes to mind. Many languages have the invisible scope issue
foo = bar
In C++ for example, foo could be a local variable, a member of the enclosing class, a local module static, or a global. Some programmers like this, JBlow for example complained that in C++, switching between standalone function, member function, a lambda required too many changes. (foo = bar) isn't an example but the point is he wants that to be frictionless.
Me though, I want the line to be understandable with as little external context as possible. I don't want to have to dig up 10, 50, 100 lines to see if a local foo has been defined or if it's member. So like python or typescript. I like foo has to be this.foo or self.foo if you want it assign the current object's member. Most programmers seem to agree because they end up using mFoo or foo_ or some naming convention to work around the issue but I think I'd prefer the language to enforce it.
I don't know which if any languages make all the different scopes more explicit.
So far I haven't liked Swift though which seems more explicit. Even though it's more explicit in some areas I feel like the majority of my time is typing boilerplate and fixing trivial syntax errors. I know programming requires syntax and, as an example, I include semicolons everywhere in JavaScript even though they are not required. That said, I would like to get all the time back in my life where I compiled some C++ only to be told "error: missing semicolon at end of class definition" or "error: extra semicolon at end of member function declaration". It feels like a language should fix this stuff for the dumb human rather than make the human do random tedious work. I get there might be times where it's ambiguous but I wonder if it's also a language design issue.
I tend to agree, but the FMC on Boeing aircraft sure leave something to be desired.. I do not find the menu/tab system very ergonomic (and the non-QWERTY key layout)
Ok, except operating a commercial airliner literally takes thousands of hours of training, requires an extremely detailed mental model for how air flight works, and heavily relies on external procedures like checklists to ensure safe operation.
And fatal accidents due to poorly thought out control systems do occur.
My design is a cli as API+control plane which allows out of order and aliased tokens via intent resolution to IR. The GUI and CLI are homoiconic in that one builds the other or vice versa. When you layer on a nice UI library with intuitive controls, now you’re cookin’ with gas.
When Microsoft first established a web presence, 1994 was probably the year if not 1993, www.microsoft.com showed "Welcome to Microsoft's web site. Where do you want to go today?" followed by a list of destinations throughout their site. They promoted the second of those sentences to their official slogan.
Tog was the original design engineer for the Mac, and arguably one of the first true HCI engineers.
Then read the rest of his website. He goes into where Windows tried to copy Mac and got it horribly wrong.
One of my favorite examples is menu placement. The reason the Mac menus are at the top is because the edges of the screen provide an infinite click target in one direction. So you just go to the top to find what you want. With Windows, the menu was at the top of each Window, making a tiny click target. Then when you maximized the window, the menu was at the top, but with a few pixels of unclickable border. So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
If you're making a UI, you should read all of Tog's writings.
I understand the Fitt's Law concepts behind a top menu bar, but I wonder if this is a scenario with moving goalposts.
On a 1984 Mac, you had like 512x384 pixels and a system that could barely run one program at a time. There was little to no possible uncertainty as to who owned the menu bar. (Could desk accessories even take control of the menu bar?)
But once you got larger resolutions and the ability to have multiple full-size programs running at once, the menu bar could belong to any of them. Now, theoretically, you should notice which is the currently active window and assume it owns the menu bar, but ISTR scenarios where you'd close the window but the program would still be running, owning the menu bar, or the "active" window was less visually prominent due to task switching, etc.
The Windows design-- placing the menu inside the window it controls-- avoids any ambiguity there. Clicking "File-Save" in Notepad couldn't possibly be interpreted as trying to do anything to the Paintbrush window next to it.
AFAIK Windows 3.x flipped a bunch of Mac decisions to avoid being sued and then MS felt that they had to keep those choices forever for backwards compatibility.
> So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
On single monitor setups maybe: but on early OS X multi-monitor setups, you then had the farcical situation where the menu would only be shown on the "primary" display, and the secondary display didn't have any menu at all, so to use menus for windows that were on the secondary display, you had to move the cursor onto the other primary display where the menu was for all windows (or use keyboard shortcuts).
I think 10.6/7 (not sure exactly) was when they started putting the menu bar on both displays rather than just the primary.
> So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
"Infinitely worse"? Some people really need to cool off the hyperbole.
Having each window be a self-contained unit is the far better metaphor than making each window transform a global element when it is selected. As well as scaling better for bigger screens. An edge case like that may well be unfortunate, but it could be the price you pay to make the overall better solution.
You can generalize this observation to a lot of Microsoft's decisions: a problem exists, so they solve it in a nifty way, a way that makes everything else harder or more error prone. An example: byte order mark. That sure does solve the problem of UTF-16 and UTF-32 byte order determination. It makes every other use of what should be a stream of bytes or words much harder. Concatenate two files? Gotta check for the BOM on both files. Now every app has to look at the first bytes of every "text" file it opens to decide what to do. Suddenly, "text" files have become interpreted, and thus open to allowing security vulnerabilities.
Comdex 1996 DELL (or some company) exposed Windows 95 pcs for the public to mess with. Having used only 3.11 before, I was fascinated with the desktop and also felt it very strange that the contents of the UI were so minimal.
Of course I didnt discover anything else: I was afraid of clicking "Start", because I dindt know what that was that going to start, and the computer wasnt mine to brick.
Hmm. I like the simplicity compared to Win10 or the abomination that is Win11. But it is hard to compare 1:1 because the modern UI also improved in some ways, and degraded in other ways. Microsoft does not really seem to understand how to design UIs anymore though, or they simply don't care. I am using Linux most of the time so I don't quite depend on Microsoft anymore, but when I use a MS-specific UI I often wonder why some things are simply not thought through at all. The ribbon interface is an example; my brain can not deal with dynamic willy-nilly changes. It just adds cognitive load. Why isn't it easier to modify the classic interface? In modern HTML/CSS we can filter away things we don't need; I do that with ublock origin all of the time.
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 EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies.
> 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.
Agreed. 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. The lack of a "classic" mode in Win10 was one thing that motivated me to switch fully to Linux. To make the switch, I spent a good amount of time trawling the themes to find one that mimicks the look of Win95/95/2000. (The one I use is a KDE theme called "Reactionary".)
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 invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
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 constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.
A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. Since the modern trend is to have rounded corners on everything, it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists anymore. It seems to exist outside of the physical boundary of the window, and the actual activation point is barely a few pixels wide. Apparently this is an issue on macOS as well[1].
Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.).
So, my point is that eschewing graphics as much as possible, and relying on keyboard input to perform operations, gets rid of the graphical ambiguities, minimizes the amount of trend following making the UI feel timeless, and makes the user feel more in command of their experience, making them more efficient and quicker.
This UI doesn't have to be some inaccessible CLI or TUI, although that's certainly an option for power users, but it should generally only serve to enable the user to do their work as easily as possible, and get out of the way the rest of the time. Unfortunately, most modern OSs have teams of designers and developers that need to justify their salary, and a UI that is invisible and rarely changes won't get anyone promoted. But it's certainly possible for power users to build out this UI themselves using some common and popular software. It takes a bit of work, but the benefits far outweigh the time and effort investment.
Seeing “Windows” and “usability” in the same sentence is a surprising combination to me.
> Perhaps the best testament to our belief in iterative design is that literally no detail of the initial UI design for Windows 95 survived unchanged in the final product.
I shudder to imagine the look and feel of that initial UI design.
"Intermediate users could get around in the hierarchy, but often just barely, and usually saved all of their documents in the default directory for the program they were using."
The Windows 3.1 UI example screenshots are a reminder of how primitive 3.1 felt compared to other OSes of the time.
The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective.
When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.
> The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people
I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.
From what I remember, Windows NT kernel 3.1 team had about 50 persons, and when they reached 4.0 it was about 200 persons. And then there are application writers. It was definitely a lot than just a few dozens.
Those numbers are UI only. 12 just to design it, another 12 to build it. That's not counting the vastly larger number of developers who built all the various elements of the underlying codebase.
Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.
Decades ago, MacOS properly had the close box for windows on the opposite side from minimize etc. widgets; now the one destructive window action could be reasonably safe without confirmation. Then Windows started gaining popularity and nobody ever did it the right way by default again. A pity for the sharp minds at Xerox PARC.
Usability is the wrong metric, paint by numbers is more "usable" (sic accessible) than a canvas but you'd be depressed watching your son graduate art school and that's all he can do.
If you do want to optimize for usability you have to make sure you aren't making the system more consumptive at the same time. The prime example from the article is trading a moment where the user must take initiative with a menu. More useable less useful. Lower the floor not the ceiling etc. Windows (and iOS) did make genuine improvements to OSs but because of decisions like these most users are locked out of enjoying them.
No, Windows NT until 4.0 had the same interface design as Windows 3.x (although there existed a semi-official SP/addon to give NT 3.5 the Chicago interface, making it quite similar to 95), and NT 4.0 came later than 95
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.
linguae|22 hours ago
Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.
AnotherGoodName|21 hours ago
eg. The 'breathing status light' that lit up the room at night due to extreme brightness which meant every macbook of the era had stickers or tape over the LED with endless Q&A's of "How do i turn the annoying light off? You can't!". This crap design was met by articles extolling the subtle sign wave and off white hue. I kid you not. https://avital.ca/notes/a-closer-look-at-apples-breathing-li...
Apple today seem to have acknowledged their mistake here and taken away status lights completely (also a crappy design hailed as amazing since they've just gone to the other extreme) which highlights the fact that no matter what they do they're hailed as being amazing at design, even when it's contradictory from their own previous 'amazing designs'.
Apple doesn't just get a pass on crappy design. It gets endless articles praising the virtues of everything they do even when, if you think about what they did for even a second you'd realize, "that's actually just plain crap design".
okanat|22 hours ago
Ribbon also has a similar research behind it, just like Windows 95. For what they designed it, allowing beginners to discover all the functionality that's available, it works perfectly.
I think most of the complaints from the tech circles are completely unfounded in reality. Many non-tech people and younger ones actually prefer using Ribbon. I also like it since it is very tastefully made for Office. 2010 was my favorite Office UI. It actually doesn't get rid of shortcuts either. Most of the Office 2003 ones were preserved to not break the workflow of power users.
Where Ribbon doesn't work is when you take out the contextual activation out of it. Most companies copied it in a very stupid way. They just copied how it looks. The way it is implemented in Sibelius, WinDBG or PDFXChange is very bad.
bartread|11 hours ago
Why is that though? Why does that appear to have to be the case given that neither seems anble to do annything but get worse nowadays? And why hasn’t any other player managed to step in and fill that void?
Clearly there are some broader forces and trends at play here.
Is it pressure to monetize in ever more intrusive, user-hostile, and “micro-tiresome” ways? Is it that they don’t really have to compete any more, or at least not with eachother?
What is going on here? I don’t understand. But I wish I did because then a way out might be easier to discern. Because - I still don’t think - Linux on the desktop (taking one aspect of the problem) is still necessarily ready to be the answer - certainly not outside of the technology, engineering, and scientific niches.
beloch|21 hours ago
ChuckMcM|19 hours ago
The difference for me was "taste" was the goal, look good or get things done. For me getting things done won every time.
lateforwork|22 hours ago
Only because they copied NeXTSTEP. Those 3D beveled controls originated in NeXTSTSP. In Windows, ctl3d.dll added raised and sunken 3D-looking buttons, beveled text boxes, group boxes with depth, a light-source illusion using highlight and shadow, all copied from NeXTSTEP.
kettlecorn|15 hours ago
The company treats good design almost like a marketing expense only worth doing if it creates short term brand perception changes. Throughout its history it's had moments of great design when a particular leader creates a culture that promotes it, but inevitably someone higher up rotates out that leader and the culture resets.
That has been the pattern with Windows, Zune / Windows Phone, Xbox, Surface, and many other consumer facing products.
opan|15 hours ago
In the last decade+ of using GNU/Linux, I've also become very attached to bitmap fonts and simple solid colors, while I've grown to dislike curves and transparency. So sometimes I see a screenshot of some very old Mac OS version I never even used, and it just looks good, sharp, and clean to me, no real nostalgia involved.
I think SerenityOS's vision of a unix-like environment with classic Windows UI is genius. I don't follow the project that closely, but on paper it does seem like a good idea.
PunchyHamster|22 hours ago
They were functionally just fine; good even compared to some modern abominations.
But the look was just plain and ugly, even compared to some alternatives at the time.
> Things started going downhill, in my opinion, with the Windows XP "Fisher-Price" Luna interface and the Microsoft Office 2007 ribbon.
Yeah I just ran it with 2000-compatible look; still ugly but at least not wasting screen space
DaiPlusPlus|22 hours ago
(If it helps, I do agree with you about those years being the most… design-coordinated: when Office felt like part of Windows)
(I like to think that Visual Studio 2026 proves that the company can still do good desktop UI design; but it doesn’t help that every major first-party product is now using their own silo’d UI framework; wither MFC and CommonControls, I guess)
1970-01-01|5 hours ago
https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0717344B1/en
baq|11 hours ago
the liquid glass designers (and probably their managers and design vps) should be repeatedly punched in the face with that video
Telaneo|21 hours ago
Then we lost even more taste, and eventually the functionality and user friendlyness, on both sides of the isle.
jdswain|17 hours ago
jeberle|18 hours ago
pjmlp|8 hours ago
It is no accident that to this day Demoscene is all about Spectrum, C64, CPC, MSX, Atari, Amiga, PC and there is hardly any retrogaming/demoscene focus of Apple hardware.
Regarding Windows, I would place Windows 95, NT 4.0, 2000 and 7 as my favourite UI flavour ones.
pcurve|21 hours ago
With windows the crash was progressive so you have time to save and prepare.
I also have fond memories of windows 2000. It was rock steady and polished. I preferred it over system 8 and even OS X which had to many Unix conventions.
JustinGoldberg9|16 hours ago
glenstein|13 hours ago
I think Jobs was right about Microsoft later on, but they certainly had taste during their peak.
frizlab|8 hours ago
moron4hire|22 hours ago
I've always thought the Windows 3.1 to Win2K era were exactly that. The medium is pixels on a screen, the mouse and keyboard. And there is no artifice, it's just the bare essentials.
panzi|7 hours ago
throwawaytea|20 hours ago
lstodd|8 hours ago
It's no wonder XFCE and to lesser extent Mate are popular, XFCE4 does a nice job of being a handy tool and not in-your-face design manifest.
jgalt212|8 hours ago
What a waste screen real estate, IMO. The only reason it's still around is because screens are now 2X bigger, and screen real estate has become cheaper.
nextstepfan|17 hours ago
assaddayinh|8 hours ago
[deleted]
VerifiedReports|23 hours ago
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 incompetent UI changes that accompanied Tahoe's rollout.
socalgal2|21 hours ago
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 customization (which is fine) but then made it so just dragging a little too long an a button would let you move the button somewhere else. So, grandpa drags the button, possible off the bar, deleting it, and now for all intents and purposes the app is unusable to him. IMO, the customization options should be buried deeper where they can't happen by accident.
This "ACCIDENTAL" modification is all the rage now. On iPhone, holding on the lock screen puts the phone in "edit the lock screen mode". Several family members have asked why the image they put on the lock screen was gone. It was because they "butt edited the screen". Put the phone in their pocket and it felt a press and went into edit mode and edited the lock screen. AFAIK, almost no one needs this shortcut. It would be fine to just go into Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen or something like that. But, I'm just guessing (1) some UX designer needed something todo (2) someone working on lockscreen options got tired of doing the Settings->Wallpaper->Lockscreen dance and put in a shortcut that no-one but them needs.
This same issue is all over the place. The iPhone's lockscreen while charging mode has the same issue. The user (me) picks the clock face I want. And, one of 10 times I reach for the phone from the charging stand I accidently touch the screen which changes the face. I NEVER NEED THIS. Again, this should be buried in Settings->Lockscreen->Clock Face. The shortcut a net negative.
There are many more.
titzer|22 hours ago
virtue3|23 hours ago
gedy|22 hours ago
phendrenad2|13 hours ago
Power users understand many different levels. Beginner/average -> professional -> advanced -> power user. But the average designers nowadays only understand two things: average, and everything beyond that. This is why professional, advanced, and obscure features are all just one long-press away - they literally have no idea which category each feature falls into, so they're all equally valid.
lateforwork|23 hours ago
cosmic_cheese|23 hours ago
userbinator|21 hours ago
titzer|22 hours ago
I feel like UX designers don't realize that their job should have a natural tailing off as we discover and lock in the good ideas and discard the bad. Even if the ideas aren't that great, users can at least get good at however it does work, if it stays constant. Instead, we just get more dice rolls, eyecandy, and frustration.
I for one hate the power dynamic that OS and website designers have over me. They can just sneak into my house and rearrange my furniture on a whim. Even if it sucks, I would adapt to it if it stayed constant! Instead I both hate it and can't learn it, because everything is different and keeps changing when I least expect it.
At this point my brain has given into learned helplessness and won't retain much of anything at all, but it's next-level figured out that it's useless.
Designers seem to have a bad track record, and it's getting worse.
Sorry, designers.
maxloh|21 hours ago
delecti|22 hours ago
WalterBright|21 hours ago
Designing a programming language is mostly about usability. I'll be giving a talk about that in April at Yale. It's a fun topic!
socalgal2|21 hours ago
I feel like there's a taste issue which is similar to tabs vs spaces or other coding styles. Some languages kind of solve this with auto-formatting but just because they choose a standard doesn't mean their standard is as readable as some other.
In languages one taste issue that comes to mind. Many languages have the invisible scope issue
In C++ for example, foo could be a local variable, a member of the enclosing class, a local module static, or a global. Some programmers like this, JBlow for example complained that in C++, switching between standalone function, member function, a lambda required too many changes. (foo = bar) isn't an example but the point is he wants that to be frictionless.Me though, I want the line to be understandable with as little external context as possible. I don't want to have to dig up 10, 50, 100 lines to see if a local foo has been defined or if it's member. So like python or typescript. I like foo has to be this.foo or self.foo if you want it assign the current object's member. Most programmers seem to agree because they end up using mFoo or foo_ or some naming convention to work around the issue but I think I'd prefer the language to enforce it.
I don't know which if any languages make all the different scopes more explicit.
So far I haven't liked Swift though which seems more explicit. Even though it's more explicit in some areas I feel like the majority of my time is typing boilerplate and fixing trivial syntax errors. I know programming requires syntax and, as an example, I include semicolons everywhere in JavaScript even though they are not required. That said, I would like to get all the time back in my life where I compiled some C++ only to be told "error: missing semicolon at end of class definition" or "error: extra semicolon at end of member function declaration". It feels like a language should fix this stuff for the dumb human rather than make the human do random tedious work. I get there might be times where it's ambiguous but I wonder if it's also a language design issue.
trympet|12 hours ago
gyomu|21 hours ago
And fatal accidents due to poorly thought out control systems do occur.
https://www.fastcompany.com/1669720/how-lousy-cockpit-design...
Also fwiw using the word "intuitive" is an instant sign of someone not being a great designer.
https://www.asktog.com/papers/raskinintuit.html
user3939382|19 hours ago
catskull|21 hours ago
I love it. It really captures the seemingly endless new digital world that was emerging in the 90’s and in many ways is still evolving 30 years later.
I love the promo video they made too: https://youtu.be/KNLDLVJZx0o
I love it so much I wrote a blog post inspired by it: https://catskull.net/where-do-you-want-to-go-today.html
Where do you want to go today?
userbinator|19 hours ago
bitwize|18 hours ago
Ylpertnodi|14 hours ago
Not fussed. It's my information that i can't keep close to home.
jedberg|19 hours ago
https://asktog.com/atc/principles-of-interaction-design/
Tog was the original design engineer for the Mac, and arguably one of the first true HCI engineers.
Then read the rest of his website. He goes into where Windows tried to copy Mac and got it horribly wrong.
One of my favorite examples is menu placement. The reason the Mac menus are at the top is because the edges of the screen provide an infinite click target in one direction. So you just go to the top to find what you want. With Windows, the menu was at the top of each Window, making a tiny click target. Then when you maximized the window, the menu was at the top, but with a few pixels of unclickable border. So it looked like the Mac but was infinitely worse.
If you're making a UI, you should read all of Tog's writings.
hakfoo|15 hours ago
On a 1984 Mac, you had like 512x384 pixels and a system that could barely run one program at a time. There was little to no possible uncertainty as to who owned the menu bar. (Could desk accessories even take control of the menu bar?)
But once you got larger resolutions and the ability to have multiple full-size programs running at once, the menu bar could belong to any of them. Now, theoretically, you should notice which is the currently active window and assume it owns the menu bar, but ISTR scenarios where you'd close the window but the program would still be running, owning the menu bar, or the "active" window was less visually prominent due to task switching, etc.
The Windows design-- placing the menu inside the window it controls-- avoids any ambiguity there. Clicking "File-Save" in Notepad couldn't possibly be interpreted as trying to do anything to the Paintbrush window next to it.
wmf|16 hours ago
pixelesque|11 hours ago
On single monitor setups maybe: but on early OS X multi-monitor setups, you then had the farcical situation where the menu would only be shown on the "primary" display, and the secondary display didn't have any menu at all, so to use menus for windows that were on the secondary display, you had to move the cursor onto the other primary display where the menu was for all windows (or use keyboard shortcuts).
I think 10.6/7 (not sure exactly) was when they started putting the menu bar on both displays rather than just the primary.
kryptiskt|13 hours ago
"Infinitely worse"? Some people really need to cool off the hyperbole.
Having each window be a self-contained unit is the far better metaphor than making each window transform a global element when it is selected. As well as scaling better for bigger screens. An edge case like that may well be unfortunate, but it could be the price you pay to make the overall better solution.
bediger4000|18 hours ago
coldfingerr|20 hours ago
Of course I didnt discover anything else: I was afraid of clicking "Start", because I dindt know what that was that going to start, and the computer wasnt mine to brick.
shevy-java|14 hours ago
hnthrowaway0315|23 hours ago
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 EDX and conferences so people who supported flat UI magically support the older UI. They always follow whoever the lead is like headless flies.
LOL.
BrenBarn|13 hours ago
Agreed. 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. The lack of a "classic" mode in Win10 was one thing that motivated me to switch fully to Linux. To make the switch, I spent a good amount of time trawling the themes to find one that mimicks the look of Win95/95/2000. (The one I use is a KDE theme called "Reactionary".)
VerifiedReports|23 hours ago
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 invited). It's a race to the bottom between Microsoft and Apple, with Microsoft having a HUGE head-start. But Apple has really stepped up to the plate with Tahoe, crippling it with big enough UI blunders to keep them in the enshittification game.
imiric|22 hours ago
Forcing users to click on graphical elements presents many challenges: what constitutes an "element"; what are its boundaries; when is it active, inactive, disabled, etc.; if it has icons, what do they mean; are interactive elements visually distinguishable from non-interactive elements; and so on.
A good example of bad UI that drives me mad today on Windows 11 is something as simple as resizing windows. Since the modern trend is to have rounded corners on everything, it's not clear where the "grab" area for resizing a window exists anymore. It seems to exist outside of the physical boundary of the window, and the actual activation point is barely a few pixels wide. Apparently this is an issue on macOS as well[1].
Like you, I do have a soft spot for the Windows 2000 GUI in particular, and consider it the pinnacle of Microsoft's designs, but it still feels outdated and inneficient by modern standards. The reason for this is because it follows the visual trends of the era, and it can't accomodate some of the UX improvements newer GUIs have (universal search, tiled/snappable windows, workspaces, etc.).
So, my point is that eschewing graphics as much as possible, and relying on keyboard input to perform operations, gets rid of the graphical ambiguities, minimizes the amount of trend following making the UI feel timeless, and makes the user feel more in command of their experience, making them more efficient and quicker.
This UI doesn't have to be some inaccessible CLI or TUI, although that's certainly an option for power users, but it should generally only serve to enable the user to do their work as easily as possible, and get out of the way the rest of the time. Unfortunately, most modern OSs have teams of designers and developers that need to justify their salary, and a UI that is invisible and rarely changes won't get anyone promoted. But it's certainly possible for power users to build out this UI themselves using some common and popular software. It takes a bit of work, but the benefits far outweigh the time and effort investment.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46579864
tempodox|16 hours ago
> Perhaps the best testament to our belief in iterative design is that literally no detail of the initial UI design for Windows 95 survived unchanged in the final product.
I shudder to imagine the look and feel of that initial UI design.
hughw|7 hours ago
You should see my Documents folder.
abanana|10 hours ago
The need for instructions in that Search dialog is appalling from a usability perspective.
When Win95 was released, it was widely seen as Microsoft finally catching up with its rivals. They had at last added features that Mac, NeXTSTEP, Amiga, etc had had for years.
leonidasv|23 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899
tomhow|23 hours ago
The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899 - Aug 2016 (72 comments)
khazhoux|22 hours ago
> The Windows 95 user interface design team was formed in October, 1992... The number of people oscillated during the project but was approximately twelve. The software developers dedicated to implementing the user interface accounted for another twelve or so people
I still don't understand what happened starting around 2010-ish (from my observations at the time) that we went from being able to handle a company's worth of software with 30 people, to needing 30 people for every individual project. Startups with minor products had team-pages with 15 people.
markus_zhang|20 hours ago
abanana|10 hours ago
Team bloat is a real issue but I don't think this case is relevant.
titzer|22 hours ago
tbossanova|22 hours ago
pjmlp|8 hours ago
NooneAtAll3|10 hours ago
askvictor|13 hours ago
kgwxd|22 hours ago
ginko|23 hours ago
Meanwhile gtk now puts those on opposite sides of the window title bar by default.
zahlman|21 hours ago
Decades ago, MacOS properly had the close box for windows on the opposite side from minimize etc. widgets; now the one destructive window action could be reasonably safe without confirmation. Then Windows started gaining popularity and nobody ever did it the right way by default again. A pity for the sharp minds at Xerox PARC.
fishingisfun|12 hours ago
ilovefrog|16 hours ago
abhitriloki|15 hours ago
[deleted]
unit149|10 hours ago
[deleted]
casey2|23 hours ago
If you do want to optimize for usability you have to make sure you aren't making the system more consumptive at the same time. The prime example from the article is trading a moment where the user must take initiative with a menu. More useable less useful. Lower the floor not the ceiling etc. Windows (and iOS) did make genuine improvements to OSs but because of decisions like these most users are locked out of enjoying them.
rr808|21 hours ago
gattilorenz|21 hours ago
pndy|21 hours ago
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.