
The Windows 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996) - agumonkey
http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_txt.htm
======
Macuyiko
Very interesting. Seeing this I can't help but feel how much more tangible and
solid the old Windows interface was looking. I miss buttons that look like
buttons and Window edges that are so hard-lined they're easy to grab and
visually separate from underlying windows.

~~~
andrepd
Yes! The current flat design trend makes it difficult to distinguish clickable
from non-clickable elements due to the fact that they are all flat. Android
"Material Design" is even worse because of the dreadful pastel color scheme
which makes things even worse.

~~~
legodt
That's interesting you find Material Design to be a further regression
compared to flat design. Material Design's primary goal is re-establishing
depth and dimension to interfaces with implied shadows and volumes across
multiple depth planes, a move designed to reclaim what flat design has taken
away.

~~~
tdkl
It still looks like someone mounted binoculars on my eyes (everything's huge
and zoomed in).

------
throwawayReply
Seeing the windows 3.1 filesystem reminds me every time of the "Load DB from
Backup" in SQL Management Studio. Even 2008r2 had the same restricted win 3.1
equivalent dialog.

It's amazing how such a dialog held out for so long resisting a change to a
modern modern file selector.

Which brings me to windows 10, which has different dialogs for the same
dialogs depending how you launch them. There are two different "Display
Settings" dialogs depending on if you get there via the "control panel"
desktop app or "Settings".

At least windows 95 was reasonably consistent, even if it feels restrictive
after using windows XP and then windows 7 especially.

~~~
theandrewbailey
I don't think that "held out" is what happened with these dialogs. I think
it's more like "don't fix what isn't broken" or "we forgot about that".

~~~
ascagnel_
Very true. For the longest time, the dialog box to install new fonts on
Windows was a hold-over from Win 3.1.

~~~
theandrewbailey
I never knew there was such a thing. I've always dragged fonts into the Fonts
"folder" in the Control Panel.

------
amyjess
I still maintain that Windows 95 was the pinnacle of desktop UX. Nobody else,
before, since, or at the same time, has released anything better.

Every Windows version since has been incrementally worse. Hell, Microsoft
started ruining it with Windows 98, by merging Windows Explorer and IE into
something really terrible. I still miss Windows 95 Explorer. And then there
was Microsoft's obsession with trying to turn the desktop into a web page...
they ruined a lot of things, like the Find utility, and several Control Panel
applets with that.

~~~
bonaldi
Been a very, very long time since I had this argument, but I do think System 7
was better. Absolutely not technically, but definitely in terms of a coherent
and consistent desktop metaphor, especially across shell and apps.

W95 broke its own metaphors all the time (hell, it supported both MDI and
SDI!) and wasn't consistent. Sure, you can drag and drop this document icon to
this window, but try to drag a document icon on top of a window minimized to
taskbar and you get a popup that tells you "we know what you want to do and
why, but we're not going to let you. Do something else", which is a cardinal
UX sin.

Even the look, which I really liked at the time, is a shameless lift of
NextSTEP (another competitor for "pinnacle of desktop UX") with other bits
pinched from OS/2.

~~~
amyjess
What made me pick Win95 over System 7 is that Win95 absolutely nailed window
management, while System 7's lack of good window management drove me up the
wall.

The taskbar, and more importantly the ability to minimize windows to the
taskbar, was a godsend. WindowShade didn't compare (and it didn't come with
the OS until 7.5), and the oddball options in System 7's multitasking menu
were frustrating to deal with. System 7 was a singletasking OS hacked to
support multitasking, and it really shows.

About the only thing System 7 did better than Win95 with regards to window
management was that they made sure to put the close box on the opposite side
of the titlebar from the zoom box and the shade box, to prevent a misclick
from closing your window (I've since incorporated this into my KDE
configuration).

Oddly enough, it's the technical aspects of the classic Mac OS that fascinate
the hell out of me. The whole OS was made of clever hacks. Resource forks were
a stroke of genius, and I wish modern OSes had them. I spent so much time
hacking around with ResEdit on my Mac as a kid, and later on I learned to
appreciate the subtler things about resource forks. Like how the System 7.1
(and above) Finder lets you drag and drop FONT resources between files as if
they were folders (they called this a "suitcase" instead of a "folder", but
the UI was identical). And then there was the brilliant -- and rather scary --
hackery of how desk accessories were implemented (something that became
unnecessary with System 7, but Apple still had the sense to hack the System 7
Finder to treat DA suitcases as programs, which itself was pretty clever).

Or, for that matter, System 7's extensions were the single most flexible
method of modifying the behavior of the OS I've ever seen. Mind you, it wasn't
exactly stable (untangling extension conflicts was a nightmare, even after 7.5
added a utility to help with it), and it was certainly insecure, but I really
miss that flexibility and hackability in modern OSes. The only thing I've seen
that comes close is Android's Xposed Framework.

Honestly, if there was one thing I missed about the '90s, it was the UX design
across the board. Just thinking that Windows 95, System 7, and NeXTStep were
all competing with each other at the same time makes me realized how blessed
that period of time was, and how things have really gone downhill since.

~~~
bonaldi
You're right that W95 offered a better window management paradigm, but for me
that was also hobbled by the inconsistencies: MDI apps handled windows
differently from SDI apps, for instance, and you couldn't be certain what was
minimized where. The Mac did have fewer features, but they all worked in a
totally consistent and coherent way.

(You're also right about the technical aspects — Mac OS was a talking dog that
also said very interesting things. Don't forget how you could install Control
Panels and Extensions in the right places just by dropping them on the System
Folder, or how you could make a disk bootable with just two files).

I too am pretty disappointed with the state of competition in UX right now.
Man, at one point we had Amiga Intuition, SGI's Irix, OS/2, Sun NeWS,
NextSTEP, Mac OS, W95 and NT all contributing pretty smart ideas to the
desktop UI, and it was a genuinely exciting time. Android vs iOS is miserably
dull in comparison.

------
Jaruzel
From the article:

> We also collected data from product support about users' top twenty problems
> with Windows 3.1.

As someone with a long term interest in Shell design, I'd love to know what
these were ?

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ndespres
One thing I'd like to see explained is the location of "Programs" at the top
of the Start menu, rather than right at the bottom where it would be closer
and less mouse movement. I do think the Start menu is a much better location
for the program list than their earlier idea, a Programs folder on the
"Desktop," and better still than the Windows 3.0 Program Manager. But I wonder
what the thinking behind making the user mouse up past Run, Find, and Settings
to get to Programs, when their research indicates that "opening a program" was
the primary objective of a user. I know it's an old joke that "you have to
click Start to Shut Down," but it does seem far from the way the Apple menu
worked at the time for effectively the same thing.

[http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kd...](http://www.sigchi.org/chi96/proceedings/desbrief/Sullivan/kds_fg05.gif)

"Launching Programs: Start Menu. Although we abandoned the idea of a separate
shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click
access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of
representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience
levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would
need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the
final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu
integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-
button home base in the UI."

~~~
endgame
Am I the only one who misses the Program Manager? I've never found a
reimplementation of the idea in any OS I've used since 3.1.

~~~
unscaled
Windows 95 actually still included the program manager and you could have used
it as your shell, if you really wanted:
[http://toastytech.com/guis/win95progman.png](http://toastytech.com/guis/win95progman.png)

~~~
amyjess
Well, _that_ link inspired me to go through that website and start browsing
the Sick Windows Tricks section again... I'd forgotten about some of those.

Links if anyone's interested:

[http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/misc.html)

[http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb.html)

[http://toastytech.com/guis/miscc.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/miscc.html)

[http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/win1x2x.html)

[http://toastytech.com/guis/misce.html](http://toastytech.com/guis/misce.html)

------
roldie
This is quite fascinating. All these practices are touted as modern design
techniques, however they were being done over 20 years ago.

~~~
blakeyrat
We're in an industry where absolutely nobody learns anything from the past.

People going to school to learn software development don't spend a week on
DOS, a week on Novell 4, then a week on Macintosh 6.0.8, then a week on
Windows 98, a week on BeOS, etc. There's no history education at all. No
learning from past ideas. Not even any conception of history, really.

Compare it to, for example, a film class. Students learning how to create
films _watch films_. They watch films from the 1910s, the 1930s, the 1950s,
etc. They learn how their industry changed and matured over time. They get a
solid sense of history, and an appreciation for their forebears. Software
developers get none of that.

Anyway, this shouldn't come as a surprise, is what I'm getting at.

~~~
dragonwriter
> People going to school to learn software development don't

...usually have offered anything that even purports to be a "software
development" curriculum.

They usually have a "computer science" curriculum.

~~~
blakeyrat
Well, yes... but I don't see how that changes or even addresses my point at
all.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think it explains the reason for your point: that people aren't being
prepared for a career in software development (and particularly user interface
design) by a curriculum that is _overtly not focused on software development_
, and particularly overtly not focused on human/software interaction, is
unsurprising, and not a problem of curriculum being poorly designed for its
overt purpose.

------
petepete
That was really interesting, it reads like a write up of a modern project
(other than having to _justify_ going non-Waterfall).

------
gtk40
It's interesting to see HTML from that time period too. Did HTML tags in
<title> used to be rendered in browsers?

~~~
endgame
It's beautiful, is what it is. It loads instantly, doesn't download megabytes
of crap and is very information-dense.

~~~
Sharlin
Though I think I really have to write some user CSS or a bookmarklet or
something for pages like this, namely:

    
    
        body {
            width: 50em;
            margin: auto;
            line-height: 1.6;
        }
    

The Firefox Reader View is supposed to do that but it's way too narrow (30em I
think) and way too often messes up some formatting essential to understanding
the content.

~~~
Sylos
Reader View being too narrow should get a fix in either the next release or
the one after that, i.e. the fix is in Developer Edition, maybe already in
Beta (I didn't check there), and a small change like that usually goes through
Developer Edition and Beta in one release cycle each.

Basically, they now have a setting for that in the toolbox to the left, so you
can decide yourself how narrow or wide you want it. They also added a setting
for the line height, so even though you didn't complain about that with Reader
View, you can now change that, too, if you should ever need it.

------
m_mueller
My main question here is whether this kind of rigorous user lab testing - at a
time when things could still be changed - was also applied to Windows 8. That
thing seemed such a top down dictated hot mess to me.

IMO the issue of productivity and discoverability has still not been solved on
touch based UI, even with our post-iPhone interfaces. Shame that Microsoft
didn't go back to these roots and innovated on exactly these issues.

~~~
blakeyrat
I don't think _anybody_ does that type of user testing anymore. The last
project I've seen a good write-up about was Office 2007, and that's a decade
old at this point. Which is a shame.

Just _using_ most web-based UIs shows that there's almost zero usability
testing going on in that field, and since more and more apps are web-based,
well.

~~~
m_mueller
You'd think that MS would want to replicate their success with Win95. The task
bar and start menu is easily the most iconic UI to ever come out from them and
made them jump ahead of MacOS in terms of usability - and apparently it can
all be traced back to this lab. The people responsible should all have been
promoted to A level where their lab becomes the equivalent of a Steve Jobs
product curator.

But it seems like MS at some point got on the high horse and started thinking
that they can just shove anything down user's throat anyways. When they lost
the entire segment of the fastest growing computing market, a competent CEO
would have gone back and study why their 95 UI was so successful that everyone
_wanted_ to buy their product instead of being forced to.

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garaetjjte
It's interesting that they doesn't noticed that beginners often mix elements
have to be double-cliked and which single-clicked.

