I remember booting Windows 95 for the first time when it came out and being completely gobsmacked at how good it looked and felt.<p>I was still a heavy Amiga fan back then, even though I was painfully aware that my favorite computer of all times was slowly falling behind. But it was still able to do preemptive multitasking, something that was still widely unavailable across all OS at the time (except for Windows NT). AmigaOS was still definitely better than Windows 3, of that I was still very convinced (and quite distraught that despite this technical superiority, Windows 3 reigned supreme).<p>All of my convictions got shattered that fatal day I booted Windows 95. The UI was beautiful, preemptive multitasking was working fine despite the memory and CPU conditions at the time. I just couldn't get enough of launching various apps on Windows 95 just to see how they looked.<p>On that very day, I thought "This is it, Amiga is truly dead".<p>I sold my Amiga and bought a Windows box in the weeks that followed, with a heart that was both heavy and excited.
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as "running" has been undone - it's back to icons with only a subtle indicator to distinguish between those that represent shortcuts and those that represent a running program.<p>The Start Menu is now assumed knowledge that the furthest left icon on the taskbar is "special" and does something different to all the other shortcuts. I guess the modern equivalent of "Start" is "Type here to search" in the Cortana bar but that's not a great experience for new users. We all know the propensity for it to decide to search Bing at the slightest provocation but if you try some natural "never used a computer before" things like searching for "power off" or "shut down" you get some quite unhelpful results. (The former wants me to set up a power plan, the latter directs me to Add or Remove Programs)<p>It feels like computer use is assumed knowledge in 2019 - that everyone who buys a computer already knows what the Windows logo represents, how minimising and overlapping works, what the difference between an app icon and a notification tray icon is, and so on. Microsoft no longer feel the need to design so much for people buying their first ever family computer, having never even used one before. Probably true in the first world, but I wonder if this holds out globally?
I love the fact that one of the usability issues identified 25 years ago in windows is <i>still</i> the case today.<p>* If you "cut" a bit of text, it disappears from your document, and unless you later paste that text, it's gone forever.<p>* If you "cut" a file, but never paste it, the file stays in its original location, contrary to the users expectations.<p>This kind of thing is really the implementation details showing through into the UI (the clipboard is not a place on disk, and cannot have files and directories moved into it)
Worth remembering: the original windowed interface on Xerox machines was a <i>view into underlying system objects</i>. It was designed around a unified vocabulary of interactions that allowed user to message those objects and also direct inter-object communication:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q</a><p>Xerox -> Apple -> Microsoft interface transfer preserved nothing of those core concepts. UI became a crutch developers grudgingly added to the system for "those stupid users". Thus, most software engineers today are still convinced that a teletype emulation is the best possible interface to the underlying OS that can possibly exist. Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own systems.
I really like the Windows 95 UI. That's why Windows 2000 was my favorite version of Windows, ever. It was very consistent and functional throughout.
One of the trends that W95 started that I still find objectionable is putting the 'X' close button gadget next to the other window controls, so sloppy mousing can lead to accidental closures when the intent was minimization or maximization.<p>This is one thing that the original Lisa and MacOS got right (and NeXTstep, and GEM and I think AmigaOS) but W95 and its successors did not. The close button was on the far left, and the other actions on the right.<p>(EDIT: my recollection was wrong about the Lisa, I think. Its window controls were not as clear as Mac OS)<p>Unfortunately OS X inexplicably adopted the W95 conventions. And in the first Aqua releases made it even worse by hiding the functionality icons until mouse-over.
I feel like Microsoft... well, basically everyone in tech really, hasn't actually given a damn about the user experience of their products for quite a while now. Personal computing used to be about enabling people to use technology to make their lives better and OSs like Win95 were focused on allowing the user to leverage the power of computing for themselves. Nowadays, computing is apparently about herding users like cattle so you can get them to look at more ads and harvest their sweet sweet data. Developers stopped caring about user experience because thinking of users as people would make their job of treating them like cattle harder.
And they figured this all out without so-called "telemetry" in Win 3.1. Isn't that amazing. Almost as if today's "telemetry is absolutely necessary for improving UX" mantra isn't actually true...
Unstated first step in the design of Windows 95: Copy the window title bar buttons more or less <i>pixel-for-pixel</i> from NeXTSTEP, but change the NeXT “iconify” button to do “maximize” instead. But <i>don’t</i> copy the useful mechanism of having the middle of the “close” button “×” be incomplete and look more like “⸬” if the window can’t be closed, like if the document in that window hasn’t been saved.<p>I can see the reason W95 changed the iconify button; the NeXT iconify button <i>looks</i> like a NeXTSTEP iconified window, so on NeXTSTEP the button is self-explanatory. But Windows 95 does not make windows into icons, W95 minimizes windows to the bottom of the screen into a little line of text. W95 therefore, intuitively enough, made the “minimize” button similar to a minimized window line; the “_” button. The NeXT iconify button, on the other hand, more resembles a W95 window. (W95 was made to run on PCs with low graphical resolutions and memory, both of which made it reasonable to only run and show one program at a time. This made “maximizing” a window a reaonable operation, unlike on a NeXT, where high resolution and multi-tasking was the norm.) Therefore, the change is understandable.<p>It’s just odd that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody mention this.
I hope chunky bevelled edges come back into fashion soon. The UI in these screenshots looks reassuringly solid somehow, like how you'd expect a tool to feel. Not to mention proper scrollbars.
It's very interesting how the hierarchical file system was something that users couldn't understand, and today with mobile and web we see an almost complete rejection of the file system or hierarchies as a principle of user interaction.<p>I always found the hierarchical start menu a pain to use. Every company insisted on creating a submenu for their company, then another submenu for their program. And it's quite unfortunate that Microsoft didn't take charge until Windows 10. They didn't set a much better example with their software, and they let everyone do whatever they wanted in the Start menu, resulting in a poor user experience.<p>What I have been doing since Windows 2000 was to move the shortcuts to the actual programs into the top level start menu folder, and all these useless folders into a top-level folder named Crap. So conceptually the home screen of today's phones. That's what the Start menu should have been about, exclusively: Start programs. Not a help.chm. Not the uninstall.exe. Not a link to the company home page that nobody ever uses. Just the program. And Microsoft should have enforced that from the beginning.<p>Hierarchies are not needed most of the time. To locate an item, a hierarchy of folders where the items are mostly hidden is probably the worst solution. It's easier for me to locate something in a list sorted alphabetically where every item is visible. And the best solution is spatial consistency: Put the items in a fixed place on the screen (or keyboard). That's how it works in the real world, and that's what the brain is optimized for.
> We realized that a truly usable system would scale to the needs of different users: it would be easy to discover and learn yet would provide efficiency (through shortcuts and alternate methods) for more-experienced users.<p>I feel like the UI designers of today need to memorize this principle. Good, versatile software allows users <i>of all skill levels</i> to accomplish their goals through <i>multiple pathways</i> supporting a variety of interaction paradigms. Much of the software I'm forced to use today seems to adhere to the theres-only-one-way-to-do-it school of thought, which is the biggest source of why software sucks so much now.
Worth reading the comments - as the original author of the paper Kent Sullivan chimes in: <a href="https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/#comment-176" rel="nofollow">https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...</a>
It struck me earlier today that while Windows 95 took many big steps forward, iOS was actually inspired a lot more by Windows 3.1.<p>Springboard is very much like Program Manager.. every icon is an app, no documents, plus you can build up single depth 'groups' of other apps. iOS 'Files' is basically the same as 3.1's File Manager, without the desktop/explorer approach to file organization offered by 95 onward.
Sometimes I hold down the Start and R keys and quickly type wordpad or calculator. It works but then I realise I'm basically back to the MS-DOS prompt where I started 20 years ago. But minus the 4dos autocomplete enhancement.
I find this incredibly humbling and inspiring. 18 month is not much to lay down fondations of quite a lot of today’s work, 20 years later.<p>Especially the really simple relational database presented at the end : simple yet super powerful.<p>Each steps seemed relatively simple yet had a tremendous impact on the product development, user experience and on everyone that discovered computers through Win 95 and following versions.<p>It gives me a lot of hope that I could one day work on an impactful and fulfilling project !<p>Thanks for sharing !
Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105</a>
Thanks, very interesting! OT: Great to see FoxPro as an example application. I used to work with it and liked it quite a bit. As far as as I know it isn't really supported anymore. Does any one use it still or know if there are similar environments available today?
How would these engineers approached to same design knowing what we know now? (I mean as in Internet).<p>Every upgrade is a step taken on the same ladder. Maybe sometimes, designing a elevator (read:innovating a new UI) might be the real solution.
Can we talk about the ethics of just reposting, verbatim, a paper written by others, but with an advertisement inserted between every paragraph? How did that become OK?