On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you’ll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.
“Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!”
“How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!”
“How very intuitive are these menus!”
“It’s all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It’s all flat and empty and useless now!”
Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be “File” and “Edit”, cannot be done in any way that isn’t arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today’s minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can’t actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an “OK” popup for me to click on?
Nothing about this was “functional” and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.
Fucking brain worms, all of them.
Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today’s minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.
I think the worst era for this stuff wasn’t Windows 95, but the XP / Windows 7 era. The ~2007 era Ribbons from Microsoft were incomprehensible garbage, with icons mixed seemingly randomly into tabs with generic titles.
I’ve got nostalgia for Windows 95, but I definitely prefer user interfaces nowadays. Not because I think they’re much better functionally/visually, but because you’re more likely to encounter a functioning search bar now than in the past. Search bar solves most of my comprehension issues with all computer GUIs.
Search bar is like the modern version of the command line. Thus proving again the superiority of the CLI. I will therefore revise my opinion and declare that UIs have been declining since the 70s.
The ~2007 era Ribbons from Microsoft were incomprehensible garbage, with icons mixed seemingly randomly into tabs with generic titles.
There was an anecdote in a very old article I read about the UX where billy boy said something like “surely you will have an option for legacy mode, right?” after taking one look at the new ‘ribbon’ display
Ok, but rounding all the corners of everything to make sure children can’t cut themselves and making it different colors was not any kind of real improvement, and that’s the vast majority of the changes that have been made to the interface since then.
you used to be able to easily configure every UI element color and font in win 9x/2000/xp and in more recent versions you couldn’t even have dark theme until recently unless you used the shittily made visual impairment accessibility menu
Yeah but I suck at choosing pleasing color combinations, and that also could cause problems in many apps.
round corners look good. I don’t want to be depressed when I look at my computer screen.
If you can’t use your taskbar to file your nails, it’s no good. No, I will not explain further.
agree with everything but the part about C++. And a lot of mobile apps actually have better UI than most desktop apps while having more functionality (look at PDF readers for example).
