Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"

I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.

From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.

I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.

(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)

Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.

I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?

Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.

Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradually being replaced by art-school types, and now it seems very little consideration is given to actual UI functionality, and the driver is entirely some bizarre sense of style from people who don't know anything about Human Computer Interaction, but seem to think no more deeply than "less is more".

These UI elements had reasons to look and act the way they did. This communicated information to the user (even if the user didn't realize it), and made software much more predictable and discoverable, and ultimately, more intuitive.

But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.

But even then I thought it looked like shit.

The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.

But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.

I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).

What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).

Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.

I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.

Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.

And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.

The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.

The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.

I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.

This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!

It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.

Heh, gotta reference https://jmmv.dev/2023/06/fast-machines-slow-machines.html (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43972004) from a few years ago. There is a video in there of Windows 2000 running on a K7-600 from 1999 and it indeed flies.

One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse?

What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?

Buttons looked like buttons.

Windows (which have frames), looked like windows.

And there was no distracting design elements.

> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:

feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.

So true! Does anyone know why this happened?

Clean, concise, no surprises, dependable.

Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...

I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?