Designing Windows 95’S User Interface
socket3.wordpress.comI do enjoy these sorts of things. There was a time when it was about "user interface design" instead of "user experience". Back then it was about "human interface guidelines", consistency, efficiency, and minimal use friction.
Nowadays it's all about the prettiest farkle and the most novel interface. Where friction actually means "more time eyeballs spend looking at my design", and consistency has zero value.
Teams, I'm looking at you. Every election app? You suck at usability, and my laptop is too hot. Windows metro? You obviously sucked and no one misses you. Ribbon instead of menus? Thanks for making me move my mouse and eyes ten times as far just so I can enjoy your pretty icons.
Like big revolutions in fine art or music, the UI patterns seem obvious and common to contemporary users, but you have to judge them by the genius it took for MS to arrive there on their own for the first time.
I would argue that a step up the size of what we saw from Windows 3.1 to 95 hasn’t been seen since, certainly not on the desktop.
I'd argue the what we have now is worse than 95/OS9. Affordances, feedback, and system status are gone, UI elements are gone or hidden until hover, error recoverability is an after thought, and consistency is nonexistent. Everything has taken second fiddle to visual aesthetic.
> UI elements are gone or hidden until hover
Discoverability. It seems increasingly hard in modern UI to know what is something I can interact with and what is just a text label.
Also error management is gone. We are back at "General failure reading drive A: " error messages. But the more common error handling is to crash or to spit a cryptic error message.
MS did not arrive there on their own. They had a lawsuit with apple and if you look at graphics toolkits around that time most of them had those features.
Both apple and ms stole most of it from xerox parc (star desktop)
Today Microsoft has the resources and capital to release Windows 95 "remastered edition" - one has to wonder why they haven't.
I've kinda been doing that for over a year: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Add Wine, and you'd have a lot of compatibility with the original!
It's beautiful! Thank you!
> The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.
Windows 95 must also be one of the better marketing campaigns for any software product.
As I was reading this I had flashbacks to their TV commercials showing the start menu and started humming “start me up” to myself :)
I love the early windows interfaces, everything is so clean and easy to find just with a quick glance at a screenshot.