Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Not my favorite design and color scheme, but certainly better than what modern Windows looks like.
That has no direction and doesn't even look modern. And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
> Peak usability in my opinion. Space efficient and simple.
Disagree. Aside from nostalgia, there are numerous visual clutter issues that affect the ability to overview. Not to mention the aliased text rendering. Then you have double click to open files/dirs which might feel normal, but both younger and older people struggle with (like long press on iOS) + knowing what can be double clicked. My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That said, the one thing I like compared to modern designs is the very clear layering (with awful fake bevel 3d but nevertheless it does the job). This makes it very clear what toggle state a button has, and also which things are on top of other things.
>My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.
That's honestly just an old person thing to do, usually coupled with a huge helping of learned helplessness "I just don't get these newfangled computers" and refusing to learn anything new. Show them right click one time and they'll forever ask if you if something that they've always double-clicked on requires a right click.
If that were the cause it’d apply universally. But the point is that she can use her phone to a much higher degree of independence, despite fat finger issues, much smaller screen real estate, and lack of hover effects, double clicks and right clicks. I always find new apps and figuring things out, but struggling to explore and learn on the computer.
To add on top of that, the double click navigation isn’t even consistent on the same platform. In the sidebar on desktop you have single click navigation even on the same type of entity (directories). Look at the younger gens who only used phones. They struggle too.
I don't think it is nostalgia since I did grow up with more extroverted designs in my first OS.
I don't really see clutter here, it is as minimal is it can get. Perhaps you would disable some controls on the explorer, but aside from that everything is indeed more minimal than alternatives today.
Meanwhile my modern Windows start menu is more or less unusable. The search is decent and I might miss it. It is the only function the start menu provides for me. The modern explorer is cluttered with senseless shortcuts that tries to force certain behaviors. In this example I can probably disable the tool bar to have even more space.
Double or single clicking is supported either way. This probably provide an alternative with a context menu.
I cannot even begin to explain why the weaknesses of smartphone OS. We have a duopoly with all its negative effects and I am constantly supporting people here, far more than for Desktop PCs. That said, the use case is different.
double click vs single click is interesting, seems nobody knows how to handle an object needing to be interacted with more than a single way.
Maybe the right idea is to just pick one arbitrarily and stick to it consistently.
I’m only mildly joking, UX guidelines are basically just this. There is no way to make people implicitly know how to do things (skeuomorphism was a solid attempt).
In society it’s only things like hammers that have a universal/innate understood use.
It was the Internet Explorer shell integration that brought us this feature. The idea was to blend the desktop and web user interfaces. If you installed IE4 on Windows 95, you'd get that option there too.
> And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, but would note that this isn’t anything new. I can remember seeing messages like this on HP and DELL machines as early as 2007.
Are those the systems you learned as a teenager/young adult?
I felt the same way about XP, despite it being generally regarded as a UI abomination. I think it was just familiar.
Anyway, I eventually shook lose of that nostalgia, and for me the best usability has been more recent. The wmii/i3/sway family of window managers are have been just great: simple, to the point, and automatic.
I dunno. There are pretty clearly some bad trends in computing generally and mainstream UX specifically, but improvements are still bouncing around in the margins.
Snow Leopard is pretty good, but personally I’ve found that Mavericks (10.9) edges it out for the little bits of polish it has that SL doesn’t, as well as its brighter more cheery color scheme. The only big downside of Mavericks for me is that it’s missing Snow Leopard’s 2D grid of virtual desktops and instead only has the linear arrangement found in modern versions. I really miss the 2D grid.
Mavericks is also the last HiDPI release of Mac OS X that used the Leopard-era icon pack. After that, it went to these garish looking flat icons that I couldn't stand to look at.
I was never a fan of the skeuomorphic icons (and design in general), personally. I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons, etc. It is interactive elements that should be the ones to stand out, not everything.
If the homogeny of flat design makes the main interactive elements less salient, then everything designed to look 3D with glossy surfaces and brushed metal outlines does the same, just with noise.
I think there should be a combination of both, which I think is why many find the older interfaces from the 90s and early 2000s much more usable.
That's a long way of saying that I prefer the flat application icons and dock on current macOS. The dock stays in the peripheral and the icons identify the application all while not drawing my attention until I purposefully go to it.
I prefer the older psuedo-photorealistic icon style that macOS used to use because it makes dock icons, sidebar items, etc much easier to quickly distinguish. The icons in modern docks all bearing the same shape and rough set of colors significantly impairs usability.
> I think there's a place for flat design and it isn't all bad, in particular peripheral UI elements, like the top menu bar, dock icons
Funnily enough, these are precisely the elements that are flat in the Windows 9x look. (Windows 9x does not have a "dock" but it does have a quick launch bar and a system tray, and these show flat icons.)
It's funny that you mentioned "Snow Leopard", as Apple moving on from that OS version was my reason for going Linux 100% of the time, and I haven't regretted the switch at all.
The UI was very good. The tiles didn't work on the desktop (Windows 8) but it make a lot of sense on the phone. Every touchable element was large enough that you'd never miss. The UI itself ensured a very consistent experience. I assume that you could do more custom apps, but most apps I used conformed to the general look an feel of the operating system.
One thing I don't think enough people mentions is the messaging app. It integrated with Facebook, before Facebook Messenger. This might not be a big thing today, with people leaving Facebook, but it was absolutely brilliant back then. Basically like iMessage, but with Facebook as the non-SMS protocol. I think it may also have integrated with LinkedIn, I don't recall, but it was suppose to just merge all your contacts into one messaging app.
As much as I dislike Windows on the desktop, Windows Phone made perfect sense. The UI was completely tailored to the touchscreen and was so easy it use and navigate. It's a real shame it didn't take of. In some sense Microsoft should have treated it more like Windows on the desktop and aggressively offered it to OEMs.
The interface was incredibly fast and intuitive. It was slick and easy to understand but felt modern at the same time. The font felt timeless, it had the best camera app for the time, which was a time where amazing mobile phone cameras were just starting to become a thing (Nokia famously made a 42 megapixel camera for their flagship windows phone and the pics were gorgeous)
The first party software was really fast and stable. They were also some of the first phones I ever used with proper OLED screens
If you ever get a chance to use one it’s worth it even if it’s only for a day. Really changes one’s perspective on what’s possible with mobile devices. IMO nothing has captured that magic again
I had the Nokia Lumia 920, which wasn't an OLED screen, but an IPS, if I recall correctly. Even that screen looked beautiful. I think part of it was the font rendering and the UI design just being perfectly suited to the platform. In any case it just looked amazing.
Not OP but I also had a Windows Phone (8). It had a consistent design in every app and it just "felt" good to use. The inboxed apps were great (surprisingly!) and the phones themselves were quite cheap. Windows Phone was optimized for low RAM phones so it ran smooth there. I also miss the keyboard, I rarely mistyped which happens constantly with GBoard. Haven't found a replacement that doesn't suck yet...
It's hard to put into words because you have had to use it to understand!
I despise Windows 10 Mobile though - it killed the whole platform and made the OS unbearably slow. It was full of bugs and it was clear that it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft's mobile amibitions. I use Android now but it's a mess. Google can't decide on a consistent UI + UX and everything is all over the place.
Everything feel smooth, on par with iOS. Unfortunate there no quality apps for it. If you want a detox phone (like light phone) just get an old WP, it's cheaper.
> Current interfaces are generally a lot more simpler than those ones though?
Unless and until you need to do something that isn't one of the three or four basic functions.
> Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?
A perfectly-designed window menu is going to be simpler than a perfectly-designed iPad interface. There's only so much you can really have access to in iPad/Android-land, and any functionality that can't be encompassed with tap/long-tap/tap-and-drag is going to require a drastic break from the ordinary functionality. With window-menus, since you're already using window-menus for lots of stuff, it's not as drastic a break from the routine.
Now, I was careful to say "perfectly-designed" for each, because around the edges it can absolutely be a bit of a pain (my favorite go-to example is finding a "preferences" menu, which in Windows software can be in any of File > Preferences, Edit > Preferences, Tools > Preferences, or Options > Preferences - among many other options; and sometimes there's even a separate "Settings" menu with different options buried somewhere else), but even so, more often than not, window-menus still win by virtue of flexibility.
Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed". The most effective and most easily controlled UX action on a touch-screen is a swipe, so if complex interactions are a priority you should pick something like pie-menus throughout. The basic idea is that what takes multiple clicks on a mouse should ideally take only a single swipe motion (with confirmation for destructive actions) on a touchscreen.
> Touch-screen interfaces today are anything but "perfectly designed".
I don't disagree.
However, a mouse will always be more versatile than a touchscreen. There's a finite theoretical ceiling for touchscreens that's well underneath that of mice. Even looking beyond the completely-obvious fact that there's no real way to distinguish between "point" and "drag" on a touchscreen (other than "did this start on a draggable element", which is far from ideal), two fingers and a thumb can readily control five separate buttons plus a scrollwheel, and I can add even more buttons to a mouse.
> Also, do you realise you attempting an apples to pears comparison?
Compare with current-gen GNOME then.
> "simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"
The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
> The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
Not when the menus were 15-20 entires with occasional icons and the ribbon is 50+ icons of various sizes (and hidden functionalities - the little group corner arrows). "Easier" also implies easy visual parsing.
The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.
The original 1990s version could be scaled by just picking different pixel sizes for the UI elements. And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
> And the tiny 16px icons and labels would actually look quite nice in a basic 640x480 resolution.
For those who didn't live through these days: the physical size of common computer monitors wasn't very different from what we have now (other than being more square, bulky, and really heavy), but the resolution was much lower; 640x480 was not just a "basic resolution", it was the standard display resolution everybody used (a higher 800x600 resolution became common later). Icons, labels, fonts, etc, were designed to be readable and look good on a typical-sized CRT monitor at 640x480 resolution. The whole user interface was designed to work well at 640x480 resolution.
Not my favorite design and color scheme, but certainly better than what modern Windows looks like.
That has no direction and doesn't even look modern. And the line of text with "Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions" is as superfluous as many other controls as well. I mean nice for MS, but it really doesn't belong there.