Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI, and everything since then has been worse.
Then Microsoft started thinking it was a good idea to make native applications look and work like webpages, which was a huge step backwards. Fortunately, that stupid idea didn't last too long, but it did have some lasting effects like the advent of "flat UI" style, but it was the beginning of the modern era of flailing around trying to improve on something that didn't need improving with one bad idea after another.
These days, I sometimes find that _I_ cannot figure some things out in software like Outlook or Teams that should be obvious because there are so many different styles of UI in these tools, many of which are not very intuitive or discoverable. Mixed metaphors, style over substance, and the idea that "flat" is anything but a way to turn your display into a sludge of rectangles of slightly different shades of grey with little or no differentiation between them, and few or no visual cues as to what elements of windows are clickable.
There are certainly things that are better now, like the popularity of "Dark Mode" which took about 30 years too long to happen, but in general, I don't think UI is better than it was 25 years ago, especially after Microsoft wasted 5 years or more on the absolutely misbegotten idea that computers should look like phones. Of course, the legacy is that Windows still has the remnants of about 5 different styles of UI in different places, and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few Windows 3-era UI pieces still hanging around the Control Panel.
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Yes, and this is still true today. I work for a company with a large very non-technical user base. People absolutely will not explore, click on things outside of what they have memorized, or even try basic troubleshooting steps out of fear of breaking things.
It's actually really frustrating when trying to train to certain software or concepts because you have to lay everything out very explicitly, step by step. You cannot leave anything to the imagination or just assume that because the UI is "intuitive" that they will figure it out, because they won't even try.
I've encountered some form of that attitude and behavior at nearly every job I've had.
I agree with this in general but it can be tough for financial/business/order workflows where an irreversible change may be initiated. From the software perspective an audit log or Git-like history would easily mitigate these concerns but they usually don't exist. And "non-technical" users often just want to "know what buttons to click" to do their job.
To the point of the main article don't think I ever had the opportunity of using Windows 2000. Remember jumping from 98 to XP? Not sure about ME/Millennium either and if it's the same or a variant of 2000.
Yeah, and this is definitely a big reason why people are afraid to click and explore.
I still don't understand why big enterprise software still lacks any kind of version control. AUdit logs, yeah, but most big ERPs and other similar products don't have an easy "roll back this change" feature.
I think users knowing that they could immediately undo whatever they did and get back to a safe and known state would do a lot to encourage exploration and learning.
I don't know if there's ever going to be a suitable environment to have this conversation, but many people in any society are just not smart enough to experiment with things especially if those things are non-physical or abstract.
Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
Yes.
> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.
But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.
Because Microsoft, after spending millions to recognize that labeling the button "Start" was brilliant, removed that label.
There was no justification for abandoning the millions of dollars of research that multiple computer companies produced for good UI design decades ago.
It was all just thrown away because some design asshole somewhere wanted to swing their dick around.
Millions of the same people who had no issue migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000 systems have been fucked over. People who knew how to use computers were given a huge middle finger at everything they learned. They were handed a system that was objectively harder to use than the previous one.
For some "designers" wet dreams.
People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.
Clear buttons with obvious intent have been replaced with a goddamned inscrutable "Hamburger" menu. Decades old metaphors and systems that made sense to people who were born before computers were abandoned. Reliable and predictable functions that you could trust across applications have been eschewed in favor of hacked together javascript trash that screws up basic things like scrolling and copy/paste and drag and drop. Even though such functionality is often provided directly by the browser, they override it and fuck it up.
And people call these idiots "The best of the best"
I've run into a lot of "UI designers" that were just graphic designers that lucked out getting a job in a software company. They design and compose the UI for static screenshots like they would do a 2D graphic composition. Far too often they'd hand off Photoshop PSDs they would expect a developer to turn into an actual UI. They don't follow a HIG document or respond to any pushback with "you have to know when to break the rules" (they do not know when to break the rules). A good UI designer is worth their weight in gold. In my experience most are worth their weight in very low grade playground sand.
Steve Jobs was right. Then when he died (after removing Scott Forstall), Jony Ive got to do his hardware minimalism in software too. And everything Steve Jobs favored was suddenly derided as “skeumorphism”. It’s like what USSR did with Stalin under Khrustchev. I still remember when Chrome app just had a big white area where you’re supposed to enter the url and you had no idea unless you randomly happened to click there. And if the website background was white, too? Oh too bad LMAO. Minimalistic! Chrome had no… chrome.
I was happy to find this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_hair_mustache_puzzle