
Windows: Interface Guidelines (1995) [pdf] - tosh
https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf
======
qubex
Windows 95/98/2000 and Office 95/97/2000 is in many ways my “native
interface”, probably because those were the platforms I grew up using most
during my late-teenager formative years in High School and in the early years
of University.

I have to say that those interfaces are clunky in retrospect, but they are
undeniably _clear_ and do not place form over function as many of the modern
‘flat’ and touch-orientated interfaces seem to.

The other two graphical interfaces I remember most fondly are NeXT’s and
BeOS’, which are also, probably not coincidentally, OSes I used frequently
over the same period of time.

(Just to give you some context, I remember avidly reading the _Windows 95
Resource Kit_ in the run-up to the Windows 95 release in August 1995 because I
had no internet access and therefore had had no way of downloading and testing
the many “Chicago” betas that everybody had been raving about... and therefore
I know that radio buttons on the interface were originally intended to be
diamond-shaped rather than round.)

~~~
Narishma
In what way are those interfaces clunky?

~~~
MaxBarraclough
I agree - I'd say _clean_ rather than _clunky_. The old and (by modern
standards) spartan appearance of Windows 95 applications doesn't mean the UI
design is no good. Similarly, command-line interfaces can be very effective,
even if they lack GUI gloss.

Somewhat related: long live the FOX Toolkit and its hard-coded Windows 95
theme [http://fox-toolkit.org/screenshots.html](http://fox-
toolkit.org/screenshots.html)

------
Ididntdothis
The 90s were definitely a time when people thought deeply about how to make
computer applications more usable. Apple also had excellent guidelines.
Problem was that back then the hardware and the operating systems sucked. Now
it’s the opposite. Hardware and OS are very stable now but applications are
getting worse.

~~~
crazygringo
> _but applications are getting worse_

So many people say this but I fundamentally disagree.

Applications are _so_ much more complex today, supporting more combinations of
OS and input method and data storage and accessibility and display modes and
whatnot.

Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more. Your
interface has to work and be responsive whether your file sits on a local disk
or in the cloud, or maybe has to be synced. It needs to work with mouse and
touch and a screenreader. And so on ad finitum.

Relative to their complexity, applications are doing just fine today I think.
(Also don't forget there were so many terribly designed applications in the
90's. It's not like everybody was even _remotely_ following established UX
guidelines.)

The same kind of clear UX standards just don't _exist_ anymore because there
are _so many_ different apps that do so many different things, and there's no
obvious best answer.

But the good news is that applications _do_ slowly converge on best practices.
Think of how things like hamburger menus or swipe-to-refresh or pinch-to-zoom
have become expected standards.

~~~
dmitrygr
> Applications are harder to use, yes, but because they do so much more

I use Microsoft office 2000, because since then, no new features have been
added to word or Excel that I care about. In fact, I couldn't even name a
single feature added since then. What they did add, is the ribbon instead of
the toolbar, which makes it impossible to find things you need, and a whole
lot of bloat.

On modern machines, office 2000 opens faster than I can release my mouse
button from clicking its icon.

That is to say, I entirely disagree with your statement.

~~~
rkagerer
Me too! With the exception of Outlook, I stick with Office 2003. I'm so much
faster and more productive with it.

The problem with the ribbon is I find myself constantly having to click back
and forth between different tabs. It's annoying, and takes twice as many
clicks to get things done. Microsoft lost sight of the purpose of a toolbar:
to make commonly used functions ONE click away.

When the rest of the industry followed suit and emulated them, the result was
a tragic loss of precious vertical pixel space for the content I actually
cared about: whatever I was working on.

I also miss the elegant discoverability of classic menu bars. I loved being
able to open a program and quickly become familiar with what tools are
available.

They did a great job surfacing keyboard shortcuts. Hints were right there
beside the menu items, subtly advertised every time you clicked them. You
naturally learned the ones you used most. I worked alongside a younger guy for
a few months who was blown away by how quickly I navigated around my PC and
got work done, for many sequences using like 90% keyboard and 10% mouse.

~~~
Causality1
Exactly. Modern UX seems to split everything into two categories: things that
happen automatically, and things that take ten times as many inputs as they
did two decades ago. For example, it's nice that modern Windows automatically
switches between wifi networks. It's not nice that instead of being a checkbox
on a settings menu, turning off the superfluous Lock Screen requires creating
registry keys.

------
seisvelas
Some good stuff in there! I really like this one:

Forgiveness

Users like to explore an interface and often learn by trial and error. An
effective interface allows for interactive discovery. It provides only
appropriate sets of choices and warns users about potential situations where
they may damage the system or data, or better, makes actions reversible or
recoverable.

~~~
RegBarclay
Yes! And if software lets a user do something that lands them in an error
condition, then there should be a way to recover from that condition _in the
software_.

~~~
grawprog
For me, undo is probably one of the greatest inventions in computing next to
the compiler and the internet.

------
hrayr
One of my fondest memories in learning to program as a kid in the late 90s,
was writing windows 98 UI clone in QBasic.

I would screenshot the start menu, buttons, window borders, and various other
UI components and try to recreate them in QBasic by zooming in and inspecting
all the pixels.

I had subroutines to create windows, buttons, menues, various fonts, 255
colors and mouse support. It was coming together incredibly well given I had
no idea how any of these were built. I had a working version of minesweeper
and a text editor.

~~~
bluedino
Did you build a gui toolkit or just hard-code everything? I remember creating
a GUI paint program in Turbo Pascal (the only language I could get my mouse to
work in) and I quickly got over my head as I didn't abstract anything out

~~~
hrayr
It was abstracted out, but I don't know if it qualified as a GUI. I had
subroutines for creating the various components and placing them anywhere on
the screen. I don't remember how I handled the events. One of my biggest
regrets is loosing all my work around that time.

------
badsectoracula
The best Windows UX, except one thing that to this day i never liked:
minimized windows in MDI applications having a "button" form instead of an
icon form. I always found Windows 3.1's approach of using icons much better.
Though i guess they tried to mimic minimizing the top level windows to the
taskbar, but a real inner taskbar would work better IMO - mIRC did it best
there - and functionally closer to what most applications do nowadays with
tabs (but without losing the functionality of also having unmaximized windows,
like opening multiple views of an image side by side at different zoom levels
in an image editor - or just having multiple documents visible at the same
time in general instead of being forced to only view one).

~~~
int_19h
Opera had pretty much the perfect MDI interface - with a tab bar mimicking
taskbar, but otherwise all MDI features were still there, like resizable
windows.

And hey, MDI is still there, and often still the easiest way to organize
things in a desktop Windows app.

------
blululu
90's era HCI research was so excellently focused on details. Apples Human
Interface Guidelines from 1993 should also be mandatory reading for anyone
building a human facing applications:
[https://woofle.net/impdf/HIG.pdf](https://woofle.net/impdf/HIG.pdf)

~~~
duskwuff
Oh hey, that's my web site. :) Those PDFs were generated through a rather
nasty process (print to PDF on a Mac OS 9 system), and the quality is a little
uneven.

There's a nicer version of that PDF at:

[http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...](http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/HIGuidelines.pdf)

as well as a 1997 update for some newer interface elements:

[http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/doc...](http://mirror.informatimago.com/next/developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/HIGOS8Guidelines.pdf)

------
tartoran
In some ways interfaces were richer at that time. I can't wait for the flat
interface fad will go away and some old thing to reemerge.

~~~
tasogare
Many seem to think like us on this front (at least, in the NH comments). Now,
what can we do concretely besides implementing those concepts in our own apps?

~~~
karatestomp
Convince designers people will hire them if they see designs like that in
their portfolios. AFAI can tell designers favor whichever design will produce
screen shots likely to make their next job search easier, actual usability or
cost of implementation be damned, which makes perfect sense.

------
graiz
I actually worked on the followup to this book for the release of Windows XP
at Microsoft. You can find it on Amazon if you're interested.
[https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-
Professi...](https://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Experience-Professional-
Editions/dp/0735605661)

It was written largely by Tandy Trower (inventor of Clippy) and has many
similarities to Apple's original Human Interface Guidelines though very
different too.

~~~
myu701
Yeah I've been consulting this a lot lately. Been writing a data-dense desktop
application and trying to make it as good to use on keyboard-only users as it
is for mouse-using users.

I figure the closer I get to that, the easier the port to gui.cs will be.

Another good UX book I found was "The Definitive Guide to the .NET Compact
Framework" by Larry Roof and Dan Fergus. Yes, it had mostly back-end stuff,
but the UX concepts taught the reader to consider his audience.

Is the person using your app likely to be using it in a dock hooked to a full
keyboard like you, Mr. Dev?

No, he will be standing next to a cellphone tower wearing gloves and trying to
get the Falcon x3 out of the sunlight enough to see what the screen is showing
him.

Okay then, make the buttons big enough for a gloved finger to mash, use combo-
boxes everywhere you can stand it. So what if its ugly - if its functional and
the user never has to use the SIP, then fine.

------
walrus01
I think in some regards, classic GUI interfaces peaked in about 2002/2003 with
KDE2. The influence of Win95/98/NT4 on KDE was definitely there, but they took
it in its own unique direction. Definitely some inspirations from NeXT as
well.

I had a really nice FreeBSD+xfree86+KDE setup at that time. The closest I can
come now is something based on XFCE4.

~~~
anthk
KDE3.

------
paco3346
I'm mostly surprised by the number of pen input elements 95 had. I was still a
kid at the time so I didn't have any exposure to more advanced hardware. How
common was it?

~~~
Ididntdothis
Windows 95 was developed at a time when people thought that Pen computing
would be the next big thing so they put in a lot of pen stuff that eventually
was barely used. It always stayed a niche.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Maybe now is the time for it to come back? Windows 2-in-1 devices with a pen
are magical these days, but there's far too little well-designed pen-oriented
applications.

(I'm worried this won't improve until web folks fix the broken pointer events
APIs, and even then it'll only lead to proliferation of pen-oriented Electron
apps.)

~~~
int_19h
It was used heavily on PDAs and similar devices until iPhone came to the scene
and introduced "proper" touch.

Of course, those ran WinCE usually. But I don't think pen input code was any
different.

------
oogetyboogety
[https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-
reality/about...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/mixed-
reality/about-this-design-guidance) interesting parallel 25 years later

------
FpUser
Wow, "user centered". It was a refreshing read. Something quite contrary to
modern: it looks purty to me and if it is not functional the rest can go eff
themselves.

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janci
Now I see control panel icon is hammer and screwdriver and not cold and hot
water tap as I always thought.

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akling
Thank you for posting this! I grew up in this era of computing and I’m working
on recreating it for myself.

This looks like a fantastically good resource for inspiration :)

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pkaye
I realize I still have the hard copy of this book on my bookshelf for 25
years!

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speedgoose
I don't miss the child windows. It was so confusing.

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mkchoi212
oh my. This looks like half research paper, not a design guideline :p

~~~
TeMPOraL
Back then HCI involved actual research, and not misinterpreting telemetry data
to justify sales goals.

------
earthboundkid
Best: Okay

Acceptable: OK

WTF: Ok

