
Designing Windows 95's User Interface (2018) - akling
https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-95s-user-interface/
======
hota_mazi
I remember booting Windows 95 for the first time when it came out and being
completely gobsmacked at how good it looked and felt.

I was still a heavy Amiga fan back then, even though I was painfully aware
that my favorite computer of all times was slowly falling behind. But it was
still able to do preemptive multitasking, something that was still widely
unavailable across all OS at the time (except for Windows NT). AmigaOS was
still definitely better than Windows 3, of that I was still very convinced
(and quite distraught that despite this technical superiority, Windows 3
reigned supreme).

All of my convictions got shattered that fatal day I booted Windows 95. The UI
was beautiful, preemptive multitasking was working fine despite the memory and
CPU conditions at the time. I just couldn't get enough of launching various
apps on Windows 95 just to see how they looked.

On that very day, I thought "This is it, Amiga is truly dead".

I sold my Amiga and bought a Windows box in the weeks that followed, with a
heart that was both heavy and excited.

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
My dad was a huge Amiga fan. I always felt that the Amiga was a bit ahead of
its time. It was doing SNES graphics and sound in the NES era.

It's a shame it never caught on beyond the Video Toaster being used in
TV/movie studios.

~~~
ido
You're right but to be a nitpicker a more appropriate comparison would be the
sega megadrive/genesis - it had very similar hardware and capabilities to the
original amiga (1000/500/early 2000s).

------
Timberwolf
I'm fascinated by how many of the things they identified as helpful to new
users were later reverted. Looking at my Windows 10 desktop all of the work
they did to find a solution where all users identified a program as "running"
has been undone - it's back to icons with only a subtle indicator to
distinguish between those that represent shortcuts and those that represent a
running program.

The Start Menu is now assumed knowledge that the furthest left icon on the
taskbar is "special" and does something different to all the other shortcuts.
I guess the modern equivalent of "Start" is "Type here to search" in the
Cortana bar but that's not a great experience for new users. We all know the
propensity for it to decide to search Bing at the slightest provocation but if
you try some natural "never used a computer before" things like searching for
"power off" or "shut down" you get some quite unhelpful results. (The former
wants me to set up a power plan, the latter directs me to Add or Remove
Programs)

It feels like computer use is assumed knowledge in 2019 - that everyone who
buys a computer already knows what the Windows logo represents, how minimising
and overlapping works, what the difference between an app icon and a
notification tray icon is, and so on. Microsoft no longer feel the need to
design so much for people buying their first ever family computer, having
never even used one before. Probably true in the first world, but I wonder if
this holds out globally?

~~~
dmos62
As much as I dislike the general Windows UX, which is largely because I can't
run a custom window-manager, I feel like I'm the only person that thinks
Windows 10 is a big improvement. Maybe we don't have to look at it as a
subjective like/dislike type of thing and just say that for me it's an
improvement.

I use the classic non-contracted-to-an-icon task-bar, in the small variant.
That's just to say that my task-bar looks and feels the same as it would on
Windows 95.

The big improvement for me is the start screen. I use the fullscreen start-
menu (I call it screen since it's fullscreen), where I put the shortcuts I
want easy access to. It was introduced in Windows 8, but later the defaults
were reverted to a 95-style mini-menu.

I have desktop disabled (desktop icons, more specifically), because I find
that a desktop has a negative effect on organization, so all my icons are in
the fullscreen start.

When I need a shortcut that's not pinned to my start, Win-S pops up the search
dialog.

Apart from bloat, I'm pretty content with this UI.

~~~
enriquto
you could certainly run a custom window manager in win95. That's what I did
during the best years of my life. No idea if with the windowses of today is
still possible.

~~~
deaddodo
Sure, people still do it:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/desktops/comments/52402v/windows_10...](https://www.reddit.com/r/desktops/comments/52402v/windows_10_x64_with_bbzero/)

It's just less common.

~~~
dmos62
I tried to google around, but info was very thin. The bbzero github repo was
last updated 4-5 years ago. Is this something that's bolted on top of the
current WM, or is it a veritable replacement, in that the vanilla WM is
unloaded and doesn't use resources?

The concensus, whether correct or not, is that Windows WM is tightly coupled
with the rest of the system.

~~~
deaddodo
That's how it's always been. Litestep/bbZero/etc have always just replaced
explorer.exe, but ultimately the Windows system is much more coupled than the
Linux one. So you're still going to be using functionality beyond the "window
manager".

------
londons_explore
I love the fact that one of the usability issues identified 25 years ago in
windows is _still_ the case today.

* If you "cut" a bit of text, it disappears from your document, and unless you later paste that text, it's gone forever.

* If you "cut" a file, but never paste it, the file stays in its original location, contrary to the users expectations.

This kind of thing is really the implementation details showing through into
the UI (the clipboard is not a place on disk, and cannot have files and
directories moved into it)

~~~
unicornfinder
I'm honestly impressed that they thought so in depth about these things. That
said, I'm of the opinion that a clipboard manager should be a standard part of
an OS and would arguably solve this problem.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
This wouldn't have been considered a problem in the 90s, but my concern with
clipboard managers is that they would end up containing a lot of sensitive
information, particularly passwords from my password manager.

(Not that this isn't a concern otherwise, but there's a difference between a
pasteboard that holds one piece of information at a time and immediately
purges old information, and one that logs history for an extended period.)

~~~
zamadatix
Clipboard managers, such as the one that ships with Windows 10, allow
applications such as password managers to mark something to not be stored in
the clipboard history. KeePass supports this functionality as an example.

Really though autotype is the safer option.

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Yeah, my concern is that the user won't necessarily be copying from a proper
password manager. Passwords are not the only information that people copy and
paste: there are credit card numbers, SSN's, drivers license info, etc etc.

You could argue the security trade-off is worthwhile, and I might even agree
_if_ the clipboard manager isn't enabled by default. A clipboard manager
requires you to treat your clipboard in a certain way that I don't think users
do in practice.

~~~
zamadatix
It isn't enabled by default (currently) but there isn't really anything you
can do to protect someone who copies important out of a text document and/or
leaves open access to their desktop anyways without annoying them so much they
work around it in an even worse way. Same thing with browser autofill and
password managers.

------
gambler
Worth remembering: the original windowed interface on Xerox machines was a
_view into underlying system objects_. It was designed around a unified
vocabulary of interactions that allowed user to message those objects and also
direct inter-object communication:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn4vC80Pv6Q)

Xerox -> Apple -> Microsoft interface transfer preserved nothing of those core
concepts. UI became a crutch developers grudgingly added to the system for
"those stupid users". Thus, most software engineers today are still convinced
that a teletype emulation is the best possible interface to the underlying OS
that can possibly exist. Also, normal users are treated as second-class
citizens in their own systems.

~~~
swiley
> Also, normal users are treated as second-class citizens in their own
> systems.

I would argue that’s an artifact of corporate software development culture and
not GUI design.

~~~
ChrisSD
Settings > System > Clipboard

Make sure "Clipboard history" is turned on. It will also tell you how to
access the manager: "Press the Windows logo key + V".

------
tolger
I really like the Windows 95 UI. That's why Windows 2000 was my favorite
version of Windows, ever. It was very consistent and functional throughout.

~~~
coldpie
Yeah, despite 20 years of "progress", I don't see today's desktops being any
more usable than Win 95's, for the typical mouse-and-keyboard setup. There's a
couple niceties that have been introduced since then, mostly keyboard
shortcuts for window management tasks, but otherwise it's all change for the
sake of change, and change for the sake of advertisements.

~~~
shantly
Launch-programs-by-search becoming common is the only significant advance I
can think of since the 90s. I've added some keyboard window management to my
personal workflow since then but I don't know any non-geeks who do that—hell,
most of them don't use launch-by-search either.

~~~
JohnFen
> Launch-programs-by-search becoming common is the only significant advance I
> can think of since the 90s.

Windows had this since at least Win 7, so it's not really a recent advance. I
dislike that the the Win 10 start menu is essentially unusable enough that it
requires actually doing a search, though, which is why I use a replacement
start menu.

~~~
shantly
Well, nine or ten years after the 90s, anyway, haha.

~~~
JohnFen
Ah, yes, my mistake!

------
cmrdporcupine
One of the trends that W95 started that I still find objectionable is putting
the 'X' close button gadget next to the other window controls, so sloppy
mousing can lead to accidental closures when the intent was minimization or
maximization.

This is one thing that the original Lisa and MacOS got right (and NeXTstep,
and GEM and I think AmigaOS) but W95 and its successors did not. The close
button was on the far left, and the other actions on the right.

(EDIT: my recollection was wrong about the Lisa, I think. Its window controls
were not as clear as Mac OS)

Unfortunately OS X inexplicably adopted the W95 conventions. And in the first
Aqua releases made it even worse by hiding the functionality icons until
mouse-over.

~~~
elweston2
It was annoying. The problem they had was the upper left already had a control
there. The system menu. In some programs it is still 'there' but hidden. You
can see it if you left click on the upper left corner. They could not get rid
of it as some old win3x programs went trolling around in that menu and changed
it.

~~~
paulmooreparks
Double-clicking the upper-left corner closed the window, a carryover from
earlier versions. I think it still does this, to support programs that auto-
click (such as quick and dirty corporate IT apps and such). They couldn't put
a single-click control in the same spot.

~~~
WorldMaker
Also, every app, whether it is hidden or not still responds to Alt+Space which
does what the single-click used to do and bring up that old window controls
menu, and it still drops down from that same Win 3.x corner. It's a
fascinating commitment to a strange backwards compatibility.

(Up until Aero Snap in Vista and it's keyboard shortcuts of Win+Arrow Key I
used to use Alt+Space,M a bunch because it was always the easiest way to move
any window by keyboard in the event it got stuck somewhere out of mouse range
or you just didn't feel like switching to mouse.)

~~~
jfim
It's also a handy way to get a window that got moved off screen easily, which
can happen in setups with multiple monitors that get connected and
disconnected.

Also, most applications will actually honor Ctrl+C/V as well as the
Ctrl+Insert/Shift+Insert shortcuts, from the 1987 IBM CUA guidelines[0].

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access)

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I feel like Microsoft... well, basically everyone in tech really, hasn't
actually given a damn about the user experience of their products for quite a
while now. Personal computing used to be about enabling people to use
technology to make their lives better and OSs like Win95 were focused on
allowing the user to leverage the power of computing for themselves. Nowadays,
computing is apparently about herding users like cattle so you can get them to
look at more ads and harvest their sweet sweet data. Developers stopped caring
about user experience because thinking of users as people would make their job
of treating them like cattle harder.

~~~
Timberwolf
Every once in a while I'll catch myself trying to read web content in the tiny
window between the sidebar ads, the floating video, the cookie control panel
and the "other content you might like" block... and I'll stop, pull back, and
ask myself, "how did computing get this BAD?"

Especially in the web context, I think it's as you say: the real product has
little to do with the task you came to the site for, so everything is trying
to distract you away from that task. The end experience is as if the people
who used to run warez pages with 9 giant buttons to download dodgy IE toolbars
and one 20px link to get the actual file grew up and got jobs running
mainstream news sites.

~~~
mschuster91
At least the cookie panels are not the fault of IT, they're the fault of
greedy marketers and clueless politicians trying to rein them in.

For the inventor of floating video ads, let's just say I hope that hell
exists.

~~~
Timberwolf
They're a great example of the unintended consequences of regulation. I'm sure
the original intent was not to have a huge banner where the options for
managing what the site tracks were a one click "sure, whatever" or a multi-
stage process of "no -> manage preferences -> categories -> reject all -> find
the actual 'save' button, not the 'enable and save' one -> confirmation page
where 'cancel' is lined up in the same place as 'save' was previously".

------
starsinspace
And they figured this all out without so-called "telemetry" in Win 3.1. Isn't
that amazing. Almost as if today's "telemetry is absolutely necessary for
improving UX" mantra isn't actually true...

~~~
BenjiWiebe
Telemetry could be an indicator of when they've pushed the user too far in
swallowing the horrible design decisions.

------
teddyh
Unstated first step in the design of Windows 95: Copy the window title bar
buttons more or less _pixel-for-pixel_ from NeXTSTEP, but change the NeXT
“iconify” button to do “maximize” instead. But _don’t_ copy the useful
mechanism of having the middle of the “close” button “×” be incomplete and
look more like “⸬” if the window can’t be closed, like if the document in that
window hasn’t been saved.

I can see the reason W95 changed the iconify button; the NeXT iconify button
_looks_ like a NeXTSTEP iconified window, so on NeXTSTEP the button is self-
explanatory. But Windows 95 does not make windows into icons, W95 minimizes
windows to the bottom of the screen into a little line of text. W95 therefore,
intuitively enough, made the “minimize” button similar to a minimized window
line; the “_” button. The NeXT iconify button, on the other hand, more
resembles a W95 window. (W95 was made to run on PCs with low graphical
resolutions and memory, both of which made it reasonable to only run and show
one program at a time. This made “maximizing” a window a reaonable operation,
unlike on a NeXT, where high resolution and multi-tasking was the norm.)
Therefore, the change is understandable.

It’s just odd that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody mention this.

------
Pete_D
I hope chunky bevelled edges come back into fashion soon. The UI in these
screenshots looks reassuringly solid somehow, like how you'd expect a tool to
feel. Not to mention proper scrollbars.

~~~
JohnFen
Or, at least, I wish Win 10 had some option to increase the size of the window
frame. Those almost nonexistent ones are a serious pain in my butt.

~~~
motivated
@Johnfen - I came across your comments at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19623785)
and unfortunately I am unable to post a follow-up question/comment. What's the
best way to get in touch?

~~~
JohnFen
try johnfenderson23 at gmail

------
ahaferburg
It's very interesting how the hierarchical file system was something that
users couldn't understand, and today with mobile and web we see an almost
complete rejection of the file system or hierarchies as a principle of user
interaction.

I always found the hierarchical start menu a pain to use. Every company
insisted on creating a submenu for their company, then another submenu for
their program. And it's quite unfortunate that Microsoft didn't take charge
until Windows 10. They didn't set a much better example with their software,
and they let everyone do whatever they wanted in the Start menu, resulting in
a poor user experience.

What I have been doing since Windows 2000 was to move the shortcuts to the
actual programs into the top level start menu folder, and all these useless
folders into a top-level folder named Crap. So conceptually the home screen of
today's phones. That's what the Start menu should have been about,
exclusively: Start programs. Not a help.chm. Not the uninstall.exe. Not a link
to the company home page that nobody ever uses. Just the program. And
Microsoft should have enforced that from the beginning.

Hierarchies are not needed most of the time. To locate an item, a hierarchy of
folders where the items are mostly hidden is probably the worst solution. It's
easier for me to locate something in a list sorted alphabetically where every
item is visible. And the best solution is spatial consistency: Put the items
in a fixed place on the screen (or keyboard). That's how it works in the real
world, and that's what the brain is optimized for.

~~~
ahaferburg
Oh and if you're willing to dust off a flash player, check out Windows RG
(Really good edition). It really is really good.

[https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg](https://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg)

------
tomc1985
> We realized that a truly usable system would scale to the needs of different
> users: it would be easy to discover and learn yet would provide efficiency
> (through shortcuts and alternate methods) for more-experienced users.

I feel like the UI designers of today need to memorize this principle. Good,
versatile software allows users _of all skill levels_ to accomplish their
goals through _multiple pathways_ supporting a variety of interaction
paradigms. Much of the software I'm forced to use today seems to adhere to the
theres-only-one-way-to-do-it school of thought, which is the biggest source of
why software sucks so much now.

------
zozbot234
85 major versions ahead of Windows 10... and rightly so.

------
asmosoinio
Worth reading the comments - as the original author of the paper Kent Sullivan
chimes in: [https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-
windows-9...](https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-
windows-95s-user-interface/#comment-176)

------
petercooper
It struck me earlier today that while Windows 95 took many big steps forward,
iOS was actually inspired a lot more by Windows 3.1.

Springboard is very much like Program Manager.. every icon is an app, no
documents, plus you can build up single depth 'groups' of other apps. iOS
'Files' is basically the same as 3.1's File Manager, without the
desktop/explorer approach to file organization offered by 95 onward.

~~~
webwielder2
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that iOS was in no way, shape, or form
inspired by Windows 3.1.

~~~
petercooper
It would certainly be going out on a limb to say that the people involved in
designing iOS had not used Windows 3.1 and held no memory of it.

Of course, I am happy to use the word "inspired" in a loose way, like how many
modern musicians were inspired by The Beatles or Kraftwerk even if they are
not deliberately indulging in pastiche.

------
tus88
Win95 is still probably the biggest software launch of all time. Coming from
MSDOS, there has never been that kind of jump forward for PC users since.

------
gandalfian
Sometimes I hold down the Start and R keys and quickly type wordpad or
calculator. It works but then I realise I'm basically back to the MS-DOS
prompt where I started 20 years ago. But minus the 4dos autocomplete
enhancement.

~~~
marcoseliziario
just press the window key and search for the program you want.

~~~
gandalfian
Thank you but that involves the mouse and more time. Using just the keyboard
and ctrl R only takes half a second.

~~~
marcoseliziario
It doesn't involve the mouse at all. press windows key. start menu opens,
search field is focused automatically. start typing, windows start doing an
incremental search, heavily biased towards your most used programs in the list
ordering, press enter if your choice is first on the list, or navigate with
directional keys on the program.

Your method only works if the program you want is on the PATH, and if you type
the full name of the executable.

------
0wis
I find this incredibly humbling and inspiring. 18 month is not much to lay
down fondations of quite a lot of today’s work, 20 years later.

Especially the really simple relational database presented at the end : simple
yet super powerful.

Each steps seemed relatively simple yet had a tremendous impact on the product
development, user experience and on everyone that discovered computers through
Win 95 and following versions.

It gives me a lot of hope that I could one day work on an impactful and
fulfilling project !

Thanks for sharing !

------
dang
Discussed at the time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16323105)

------
ohlookabird
Thanks, very interesting! OT: Great to see FoxPro as an example application. I
used to work with it and liked it quite a bit. As far as as I know it isn't
really supported anymore. Does any one use it still or know if there are
similar environments available today?

------
Qahlel
How would these engineers approached to same design knowing what we know now?
(I mean as in Internet).

Every upgrade is a step taken on the same ladder. Maybe sometimes, designing a
elevator (read:innovating a new UI) might be the real solution.

------
seminatl
Can we talk about the ethics of just reposting, verbatim, a paper written by
others, but with an advertisement inserted between every paragraph? How did
that become OK?

------
timw4mail
So Microsoft was agile in the mid 90s....

