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)
Only six colours are used for text:
White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values.
Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.)
Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.)
Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem.
Red - Things that are an immediate danger to your safety.
Magenta - For navigation purposes, where you should be aiming the aircraft.
On touch screen UIs, buttons are bevelled grey and so what you can touch and what you can’t is extremely obvious.
Activated buttons are a distinctive colour. This colour varies between vendors but at least it’s consistent for a particular aircraft type; usually a light blue on Airbus, green on Boeing. The green seems most consistent with the text colour system, the button is green because the crew pressed it.
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.
Now, that's often not my experience. You can find some of the worst examples in anything made by Microsoft; Teams and Outlook are particularly bad, as you said. I don't poke around out of curiosity, I fumble around out of frustration with their slow, ugly, bloated, unreadable software. Apple sucks too, except, instead of being unbearably slow, they're honing in on making their UIs less readable and less intuitive than anything that came before.
It isn't even that any more. Now you have "pills" and "Islands" of random rounded shapes completely disconnected from the context they are supposed to be impacting. things float above or next to things with no connection between them. Content suffers for fobs and exclusive sets (old timers call these radio buttons) or tabs are now just things that happen to be close enough that you should just know they're associated with each other.
I don't get this. Many things like changing the IP or audio devices were so unintuitive that I just memorized them. They're still burned into my brain. In Win 11, you just search for 'IP', click 'Ethernet-Settings', done.
Same for the signifiers: In the Win 11 Settings, give me an example of an element that is not obviously clickable. Everything has button shapes, or step-in indicators.
To be clear, I'm neutral towards that settings app. But UI back then was nowhere near as good as claimed here, and flat design (at least the current iteration) isn't to blame for Teams being bad.
odbc data sources
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.
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.
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"
Sounds like you know quite a few packers[1]. I once knew someone at the extreme packing end of the mapper/packer scale. She constantly needed help with her computer, always for seemingly simple things we had already covered. Once I realized she was a pure packer, I changed my approach.
I wrote out a complete, step by step, exact sequence of actions, when to push what, what to expect, etc... and made it as variance free as possible, making zero assumptions, and printed it out on a full page of paper for her.
She was delighted, and never needed help again, for years!
This could not have worked in a modern environment. We used Windows XP, Office 2000 Professional, with Windows 2000 servers, for as long as humanly possible. No training turnover, just things working. Working so well they didn't need me anymore. ;-)
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.
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.
The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu.
Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to close and shutdown the computer (again, when you see that button the computer and OS will always be already started), get to the control panel or run commands. None of it felt like "start", and the current windows logo only design makes a lot more sense.
To your point, small kids get proficient very fast with smartphones and iPads. I'd call their interface a lot more "intuitive"
For example, the reason for the single "Start" button in the taskbar was that they initially had multiple buttons for different specific purposes, and relied on a "Programs" folder on the desktop for launching programs, but found that this design didn't hold up in testing:
> Users had considerable difficulty deciding what each of the three buttons on the Tray was for and later had trouble remembering where to go for a particular command because their functions overlapped in certain contexts (e.g., to find something in Help, do you go to Find or to Help?).
> Users of every type were confused by the Programs folder. We thought that having a folder on the desktop with other folders and links to programs inside it would be a natural transition for Windows 3.1 users accustomed to Program Manager, while being relatively easy to learn for beginners. We were wrong! Beginners quickly got lost in all of the folders and other users had a lot of trouble deciding whether they were looking at the actual file system and its files or just links to actual files.
> The results from these studies and interviews greatly changed the design of the Windows 95 UI. In the early Windows 95 prototype, we had purposefully changed some things from Windows 3.1 (e.g., the desktop was now a real container) but not others (e.g., File Manager and Program Manager-like icons on desktop) because we were afraid of going too far with the design. We were aware that creating a product which was radically different from Windows 3.1 could confuse and disappoint millions of existing users, which would clearly be unacceptable.
> However, the data we collected with the Windows 95 prototype and with Windows 3.1 showed us that we couldn't continue down the current path. The results with beginning users on basic tasks were unacceptably poor and many intermediate users thought that Windows 95 was just different, not better.
Start > Programs > Maxis > SimCity 2000 is psuedocode for what I just did. I started a program by Maxis called SimCity 2000
Four Squares in a Grid Button > All Apps > EA Games > Sim City 4 describes crap I'm clicking on in the UI, nothing about what I'm doing.
In practice Microsoft has consistently from the beginning gone out of their way to make the search useless and slow, a policy that is now old enough to vote. How the start menu has now gone nearly two decades without you being able to type "note" and see Notepad just pop up as one of the choices instantly beats me on my ever-more-super super computers, but that's an implementation detail that Microsoft has consistently botched. And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants.
Nevertheless, the general idea of that top-level "here's everything" is a good one. The open source desktop environments do a much better job with it, without marketing trying to figure out how to stuff this half-decade's marketing push on to the user or "monetize" it.
So yeah, as far as I remember, the terminology was a bit controversial also back then.
Except that... it's no longer in the bottom left corner! Recently, I had to help a relative with a Windows system, and what passes for the "Start" button has now moved to somewhere more in the center (and, of course, this completely confused my relative, who was used to the old place). I also had to rant about Fitt's law (without mentioning its name) and how things were better the way they were before. And I also had to find out and show them where the shutdown button ended up this time, so they could power off the computer normally (as they were used to) instead of having to use the power strip switch.
And the issue I had to help with? Windows was too slow (to the point of nearly unusable). They don't use the computer often (and obviously always power it down after each use), so it's always running some heavy background update (on a mechanical hard drive) whenever it boots up. My advice was to power it up and let it sit for about an hour before using, then it would be back to normal speed.
The new default is truly terrible, though, and this was the first setting I had to change when I was forced to use a windows laptop by the company I work in.
Strong disagree, because:
> Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time
I can assure you these people have no idea what the start button is or does... it doesn't help that it no longer even says "Start" for the last ~20 years.
https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc...
I remember Steve Jobs saying the last area of complexity they needed to be solved was the filesystem, which is why they made the iPhone the way they did, with apps owning the files, so users didn’t have to deal with it. We’ve seen the Files app introduced and those walls get broken down, so it was clearly the wrong approach, especially when various apps can all perform actions on the same type of files.
Jobs also said death would take care of the problem of people not knowing how to type. I often think he should have taken the similar approach to the filesystem. Required learning for the modern era, not something to hide away so skills never develop.
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 think one reason is that flat UI is super easy. Skeuomorphic is extremely hard to get right, and if you don't get it right it looks super tacky. Most people who have the word "designer" in their job title don't have the artistic skills needed to pull it off. This is why most designers are opposed to skeuomorphic.
Somewhere in between is the right approach. The NeXTSTEP UI from the late 1980s is what we need to return to. It still looks beautiful today: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/openstep42
What I don't understand is why those are treated as the only two choices?
Just adding some shadows, dividers, 3D buttons and real scroll bars again would go a long way to making things more usable without going full on into skeuomorphism to represent elements of the physical world.
A good example of the wrong direction was macOS in the switch to Tahoe. Buttons in modal dialog boxes became flat instead of 3D. They no longer look like buttons, they just look like a web-UI card with a gray background. There is no visual indicator at all that it is a clickable button.
Why? Legitimately, I want to hear from the designer(s) that made that decision and what their reasoning was.
Windows 2000 was peak Windows UI. Yeah, it wasn't visually exciting, but it was the peak of functional and discoverable UI. Of course, the Windows 10/11 UI isn't visually exciting either, and in many cases it's more boring looking, and definitely less functional. I would pay money to go back to the Windows 2000 UI, but I guess Microsoft isn't sophisticated enough to do that any more. The current Windows UI is less customizable than Windows 2. Yes, you heard me right. Windows 2.1 was more customizable than Windows 11.
Even Apple’s initial move to a flat UI in iOS 7 suffered from this. It took a long time to get refined to the point of not feeling like a major step backward. I still preferred the look of iOS 6 to anything that came afterwards. The skeuomorphic designs were warm, inviting, and fun. They served as a nice juxtaposition to the rather austere hardware.
For reasons I don't fully understand, it makes me thing of repressive environs along the lines of "This is not for you. Serious business only.".
Although I do find some of the borders much too thick, it would be bit of relief from the modern trend of having enormous padding/margins everywhere.
Every designer nowadays insists on deviating.
I've seen some B2B apps which used the Windows look-and-feel and looked absolutely awful: Actions wildly scattered through buttons, menus and context menus, panels and tabs nested several layers deep until the UI started to look like a canyon formation - and no icons or color at all, because I suppose those would have been "unprofessional" - so everything was in dull gray.
(I think it's worth realizing how colorful the stock Windows dialogs and applications actually are through the use of icons, even despite all widgets being gray.)
I still believe the Windows 2000-era UI toolkit is one of the best, because at least it gives you straightforward pathways to build a good-looking and usable UI - but you still have to want to do it.
No different than "windows" or "desktops" or "files." When was the last time you actually saw a file folder? Or a document separated by sheets with "tabs."
95% of computer users have never seen an ethernet cable, but they're still the symbol for networking.
99% of car drivers have never seen brake calipers, but they're part of the icon when my car's parking brake is on.
Where it falls down is when designers force too many of the paradigms of the RL original onto a platform that doesn't suit it [0].
[0] See for example the Mac OS X Address Book app https://www.betalogue.com/2012/01/15/abook6-dumb/.
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.
Even so, you could completely ignore it if you wanted to!
I felt the taskbar was the ugliest part of the themes
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?
There is a German saying "Grün und blau schmückt die Sau" ~"green and blue grace the pig" - and XP was green and blue and shiny like hard candy.
I think is so ugly that I'm half tempted to chatgpt fact check this comment. It very well could have been a deliberate conspiracy to lie to the public and say it looks good to make some austerity go down easier.
The only reason brutalist buildings were made in that style is because it's cheap(er), and because some architects started to smell their own farts a bit too much. Win9X/Win2K were made the way they are because it's actually conducive to get shit done.
Its saving grace is that it is completely customizable for the most part, though any GTK apps will probably ignore everything.
That's not true; the corners/edges are only visually detached, they're still active for input.
KDE has been one of the two big, by far the most popular FLOSS DEs for decades, even predating the other one; how could it be "a niche within a niche"?
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).
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/skala_displa...
Displays & controls are thematically grouped and/or framed, each button/rotary/switch has a color that constrasts from the background, and there are strong 3D clues to see what's a button, and what's a label or the background.
It was also a compromise for interface device limitations. We didn't have 4000 DPI mice with scroll wheels and 26 configurable buttons; you were lucky to have a 1024x768 resolution; and 16 bit color was for people shelling out $$$. Obvious borders and some padding between elements were a necessity to click what you intended to click.
That never changed.
When has that changed?
And even if you mean the displays got better, the new Apple is fighting tooth and nail to erase any form of contrast from their UIs.
Windows Me was the nearest consumer release (2000 came out in 1999, Me in 2000), and did share most of the same UI, but was based on Windows 98.
Windows XP was the first version of Windows to ship with the same codebase for both consumer and business.
> 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.
I've been using computers since the early 90s; we got our first home computer when I was four; I've used many different operating systems.
As a professional Web developer, it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what those slider widgets are supposed to mean. It's still very easy to get them wrong/confused (both as a user, and as the designer/dev making the form), e.g. when the affirmative state involves a negative setting, like "Mute" (does "on" mean "muted"; or does "on" refer to the audio, which I can use this to mute?)
Buttons looked like buttons.
Windows (which have frames), looked like windows.
And there was no distracting design elements.
Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.
Yes, I can see where the Windows 2000 "Classic" UI was considered bland, but it was also the functional and consistent UI Microsoft ever made. Most changes since have been a step backwards.
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?
So the designers have something to do and so the CEOs have something easy to think of when they need to 'shake things up'.
That's all I can think of. I can't think of any that actually benefit the user (barring your original UI being absolute garbage, to the point anything else is an improvement, but even then, the original UI should still be available in some capacity).
> What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?
They hate having to re-learn UIs every 5-10 years (per OS/application/website!), so I don't think you've got much to lose trying to maintain a single good UI. And in the few cases where the UI basically hasn't changed in a long time (XFCE, VLC, probably more), they fucking love it.
1. We have an established user-base.
2. Our product and our competitors' products have a similar interface, so we might lose our lead if people start switching.
3. If we abruptly change our UI, they will have no choice but to learn the new one, either because they're too-invested or because they aren't the ones making purchasing decisions and it is mandated by an employer.
4. Once accustomed, the difference we created becomes a barrier to keep our customers captive and away from the competition's products.
https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/14856-enable-disable-aut...
So true! Does anyone know why this happened?
The fact that it continued to be the default past Windows 98/ME/2000, when problems caused by it were widespread, baffles me though.
I can't find a source to find an exact reason though, and given it's been a thing since 95, there might not been one out there.
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.
The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI.
So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever.
And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'.
Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company...
Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...
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.
Edit: Looks like HN removes those directional override characters. When present, the text looks like "puppy.sbv.jpg"
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.
Clean, concise, no surprises, dependable.
Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...
