Even if it looks 'ugly' by today's standard those were good days UI/UX wise and things kept on improving. UIs were consistent and easy to use by mouse or keyboard and in my opinion things started going downhill ever since. I think good UI/UX will of course be rediscovered and the old ideas will be recycled into something new at some point.
- Easy keyboard shortcuts with underlined keys in menus (Alt-F Alt-O!), and reconfigurable in general,
- F1 Help working everywhere,
- Unified keyboard shortcuts: F2 to rename, F5 to refresh (except in Lotus which closes entirely),
- Reconfigurable an draggable toolbars!
- Icons (those don’t exist in the web)
And so on. Treeviews! Lists with sortable and reorderable headers! They were awesome. It was the ultimate UI. Then they flattened everything and, worse than everything, came the time where treeviews disappeared and were replaced with infinite list sorted by “last document opened” like in Google Drive... That is what I regret most: Old documents being buried behind an infinite scroll, you can never be sure that you see and sort everything.
Remember selecting more than one of something, and then being able to drag-and-drop it somewhere, or right click it and perform actions on the whole list?
Remember tables with sortable column headers, in every app?
Oh man. The web sucks so hard, and the kids working on it now are so used to it they don't even know how hard they've been fucked over. To think that in 2021 people still have to think about how to wire up a data table to some backend, thousands of people writing their own version of that every year....
Imagine. The computer giving you a list of the actions you can do, written in a language you already understand, organized hierarchically by the kind of thing you are operating on. And as a bonus, most of them have keyboard shortcuts that are/were immediately spelled out directly on the menu!
The other day, I was using the Twitter web interface, and I realised I'd accidentally clicked the "Like" button on a tweet as I was going back to the previous page. Oh no, I haven't liked a bad tweet, have I? Of course, I go forward, and the page has completely changed, showing me a bunch of stuff that wasn't there the last time I saw it. Great, now I need to navigate the UI. I scan the interface for some sort of "likes list". It's not in the sidebar. It's not in the "more" in the sidebar. It's not even in "lists".
So I open Tweetbot, search the menu bar for "like", find it in "Tabs → Likes", and perform the action I want in seconds. Web applications can never compare.
IMO things started going downhill the moment laptop manufacturers started putting touchscreens into laptops. No one uses them with any kind of seriousness, but apparently every single UI designer now designs with them in mind for some bizarre reason.
Yes, mixing the 2 paradigms was a disaster. Windows 10 got a lot of pushback when it removed the start button. They put it back and things improved a bit since then but I still disklike windows 10 a lot.
8 removed it and replaced the system interface with a gesture based one even to go so far to remove it from server versions so people wouldn't put that version of explorer on their machine to get it back.
It helped that Microsoft put out a design manual laying out their standards: "The Windows Interface Guidelines for Software Design: An Application Design Guide"
To offer a counterpoint - back then everything in an interface had to be painfully obvious and usable in a myriad of ways because a significant portion of users were computer-illiterate first timers.
As it is now, and forever will be, I think the balance between usability and ease of development will be those 20% of effort to make your app palatable to 80% of the users (barring some exceptions by people with underdeveloped moneymaking sense whose self-description might involve the word "artisanal".)
Yes, you have a point. When IPads/Iphones first came out they were so usable that old people who never touched a computer or toddlers could use them without much direction, they were quite intuitive. They've messed up since then though, they've gone into a dubious direction. And the rest of the industry followed good and bad apple UI/UX decisions, some of them even poorly and we have a confusing mess, confusing and headache inducing at times even for the computer literate.
I find touch interfaces have infantilized computing, turning everything into scrolling and big, fat, ad-looking buttons, and there is no way to really become skilled at them.
