Windows 2000 control panel was perfect.
I'd take pretty much any of the interfaces over the abominiation that is windows 10 control panel.
It's form over function so hard it hurts, in a place where function is all I want. I'm not on a "journey" or having an "experience" or whatever they're aiming for. I just want to change a setting, so show me ALL the settings programs, RIGHT NOW. It's laughable how much you need to click on random stuff to see where stuff may be hiding.. Search is great, if you can remember what it's called, but often, I can't and I need to look through the options to be reminded.
I agree about Windows 2000, it was the pinnacle of Windows UI.
The font, buttons and how everything is spaced is just perfect. I wish we could have a minimalistic Windows, that have this UI.
Just x3, x4 integer scaling so it can display on modern screens.
No crapware included by default. And then you download software you need form the net, like browsers, mailclient, torrent client, games, or what ever you need.
Windows 2000 was something of a local maximum of UI. I contend you simply can't do much better without completely changing the paradigm. While the underpinnings of Windows have improved since then, the UI only continues to go backwards and it's a real shame.
IMHO Windows XP classic view was the best from what Windows offered. To be fair, every design between Windows 95 and XP classic view was good. Icon view was Windows oldschool design that just worked. They could add categories, kind of like OSX did at some point and just leave at that.
Windows 10 control panel is just a viewer you can't even do control stuff in it. It's not even doing a good job as a viewer of what you have on your computer. I don't know what Microsoft was thinking when they were building it.
Why does the control panel need an address bar and back buttons?
I think the 98 side panel added to 95 would be the best usability. Not every user knows it is safe to open the programs in the control panel (maybe it’ll change something if I run it!) so the select icon to view description was a really good idea imho.
Double clicking on an icon in windows does one of 3 things:
- opens a folder
- opens a document
- executes a program
I think it is reasonable for a user to assume those icons in the control panel are programs and worry whether they’ll open a dialogue with an “okay” and “cancel” option or just do something.
We have the same problem on the command line. We can reasonably assume that `config-program -—help` won’t execute anything, but we don’t know until we try. However, we are assured that `man config-program` won’t execute anything.
The sidebar brings intermediate users closer to assurance and helps novice users understand where they are.
At least that’s how I see it as a good UX addition to windows. I wouldn’t be surprised if most scared users wouldn’t even look at the sidebar.
Programs meant to be ran by doube-clicking (rather than invoked as a command) generally are not meant to do anything until the user commands them to by clicking something else in their window. An application launching is meant to be kind of a "pure function", a side-effect-free operation (of popping up the app Window) from the user point of view.
If you design an app which writes anything into a document file as soon as you open the document in them you are doing it really wrong.
This given, the confusion you describe comes straight from lack of awareness of the UI metaphor logic in the software engineers. A well-designed GUI app (a non-GUI app should not be executed by double-clicking at all) would do virtually nothing to leave any traces (let alone break anything) right after you run them, by just launching them or "launching" any specific document to be opened in them.
But I get your point. From the practical point of view - given the reality, what we actually have, you are perfectly right.
One of my most-used muscle memories is Win+R -> "control". Works even as far as Windows 11 and is still the most effective way to make changes happen on a Windows PC.
10 is half-assed attempt at porting control panel to tablet/touch UI. I hated it. At the same time I have to say that 11 ported enough of it to new UI that I barely need Win32 control panel anymore.
The old one that people praise isn't that good. It does all the things it needs to, but it uses eight layers of popup dialogs, it works poorly at DPI's over 150% and so on and so forth. Basically, a 2005 Windows UI is mostly a bad windows UI.
The proper solution would have been to refresh the old one. Make a full-featured control panel that uses just slightly more modern UI paradigms and technologies. And with zero weird extension points for third parties.
But no, instead we get half the controlpanel made into a usless minimalist web design look, and the other half is still the original.
I don't know what parts of the control panel must remain for backwards compatibility (with what!?) or why someone even thought it was a good idea to have extensibility points that become a nightmare of compatibility of maintenance. Or why it's apparently more work to rewrite a single control panel page than it is to ship a whole major release of Office. But more importantly, I don't care.
> [...] Basically, a 2005 Windows UI is mostly a bad windows UI.
It is good to look back at what they did wrong, but also what they did right. For me the most notable things:
BAD: too many windows and dialogs. The 90s GUI paradigm was all about pumping out a new window or dialog for every interaction or feature. In this regard Microsoft Windows was actually the least offender, most Unixes and Macs went even further and had each toolbar on its own window, it was madness. In this regard modern single-window apps are much better, the modern tabbed web browsers being the best example (I love that even the config dialog was turned into a tab).
GOOD: the clear visual separation of "layers". Modern GUIs are too flat for their own good, there is little visual cues separating the app window vs app content, everything has almost the same off-white background so the app toolbars and the app content sit on the same visual domain. The late 90s Windows had a very clear distinction: content have white background, app (window,menus,toolbar,widgets,...) had grey background, so the eye was automatically drawn to the one you wanted. Looking at the screenshots in the article the difference is jarring, the Windows XP/8/10 panels are mostly visually flat, there is nothing guiding your eyes to what you want (content vs toolbars), while the 95/98/2000/ME and Vista had clear visual layers.
> I don't know what parts of the control panel must remain for backwards compatibility (with what!?)
Because programs and drivers can and did ship their own control panels, it's fairly easy (https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29264/Control-Panel-App...). Java comes to my mind, as did some virus scanners, and drivers for all kinds of hardware - and the latter is the key why MS keeps the architecture in place, they take backwards compatibility extremely serious, to the extent you can (generally) use Windows 95-era games and other software on a Windows 10 machine!
The other part is that there is an utterly absurd amount of things that can be configured in Windows, with a lot of ways to do so: text-based configuration files on the disk (e.g. /etc/hosts), registry settings, group policies that are mapped to registry settings, classic control panel applets, new control panel applets, the whole mess that is the bootloader config... all of this needs serious effort to re-organize, for something that 99% of end-users won't ever touch.
And that explains why there is such a split: the stuff that end users regularly need (display resolution, wallpapers, audio, ...) is in the new crap look, and the stuff that even nerds rarely touch (user-wide environment variables) is in the old school CPL applets.
Yeah Windows UI really took a turn for the worse with Windows XP. People now praise it mostly due to a nostalgia factor, but when it came out its UI was derided due to resembling something out of a Fisher Price toy. Still given that it finally brought NT to a mass of people accustomed to an interior OS, it was a massive improvement.
I was involved in part with the Windows 8 control panel refresh. What a nightmare it was working with that team.
There was just no care for actually improving user experience, everything was shoehorned into the modern ui mainly as a push for ARM windows devices which were so slow they just never took off. MS wanted to force an enclosed ecosystem like apple iOS, but just didn’t have the hardware to make it happen.
I remember one story asking why it was so difficult to manage switching to Bluetooth speakers for the surface which was still somewhat secret at MS at the time only to be told that they did follow up with my question and only 0.005% of users ever used Bluetooth speakers with windows and it wasn’t a priority. (Obviously the number is t right, but it was something utterly tiny)
I tried using bluetooth speakers with Windows. It was fucking atrocious because Windows makes zero effort to compensate for bluetooth lag. Watch a video file or a Youtube video on Android and it inserts a split second of delay into the stream so the video and audio sync up. Windows does nothing of the sort, and it feels like you're watching a dubbed foreign language film.
This does not match my experience using Airpods Pro on Windows.
On the other hand it is seemingly impossible to use the microphone of these Airpods and listen to music at the same time. The quality is atrocious. Something that I assume is possible on a Mac. (Anybody knows of a solution? I read it's because of bluetooth profiles or whatever...)
Regarding quality, what version of Bluetooth did the chip on your windows machine supported and what features? This can be the answer, it usually switches profile when using mic to compensate for latency that gives you shitty audio quad liturgy but it's much better with newer Bluetooth versions in my opinion.
This is where a "funnel" approach can be useful. E.g. you want to measure people on their way to feature X, so you measure the steps before feature X too and see how far down the funnel people get.
When you start to see people going in loops or doing the same things over and over but not quite reaching the destination, then you know you have UX issues.
Of course this is good only for "near misses" - you may have users who don't even know where to start - that is harder to identify.
And why oh why does the Microsoft Xbox Elite 2 controller (which is not cheap!) can't keep a bluetooth connection open with a Windows computer to save its life, but connects flawlessly to the "Xbox wireless connector" usb dongle?
Here's an idea: take that wireless controller thingy, the logitech thingy that talks to the keyboard and mouse, and the jabra one that moves audio between a headset and base, put them all inside the computer instead of in dongles, call it "greentooth" and charge people whatever you want for it.
In windows 11, clicking the wifi icon shows a list of available networks to connect to. I can’t seem to remember that clicking on the Bluetooth icon doesn’t give a list of devices but simply switches Bluetooth off.
I can understand Bluetooth speakers being rare, but at least now Bluetooth headphones must be increasing rapidly in popularity. I don't remember how common they were at that time, but it should have been clear that they would increase in use in the near future.
If you want to connect to a pair of previously paired Bluetooth headphones in Windows 10 you can press Win+K to open the connect quick action.
Windows 2000 was clearly the peak in this article, and (as a whole system) it did feel like it at the time. (I do wish it had included ClearType though...)
I think all the icons looked great, with minor changes, until Win10's new "Settings" --- in which it looks like they just decided to throw away decades of careful design and replace them with dumbed-down flat and bland ones. All the more infuriating that new Settings is noticeably less responsive and at the same time less functional.
Seems like the beginnings of the "flat" trend was of Jonathan Ive's making -- once Steve Jobs and Scott Forstall had gone, there was nobody who would prevent it.
Same here. One thing I also felt about Windows 2000 is that it was designed for professionals. Windows XP, in my mind, made compromises to appeal to a wider swath of consumers.
On that thread torgoguys says "I see 2000s UI as being from a time when (for the most part) they weren't trying to impress you with the gloss on the UI. They were just trying to make it clear and usable. More modern iterations of Windows has some advancements in interactions but not much in the GUI controls themselves." which is such a good observation, I think it bears repeating here. (emphasis added by me)
While I agree, Id also argue virtually every posters opinion on HN about design of the Windows CP is useless. Most of us are power users and it we are not power users we are incredibly opinionated about some UX stuff.
Mate, thank you! I always forget the name of the website, but regularly go down a deep rabbit hole looking at how things were, whether I remember a detail right or not, and how were the other platforms at the time. It’s a great resource, I hope you can keep it running for a very long time.
Well done. To improve on it you should add screenshots of the internal dialogs. I'm always pissed off by those non resizable windows that never changed since 20+ years ago. They were large enough back then but they require a magnifying lens on our screens now. And not being able to read all the content of text input boxes because they are too narrow? It's a common problem in many MicroSoft programs. The inner dialogs of Task Scheduler are the ones I'm running into more often.
As a side note somehow (and as I see it) "evolution" has a positive connotation, i.e. an evolution step brings something that is seen as "better", and unfortunately, in the case of Windows Control Panel, this is very hard to state.
By reading the title only I had the at first sight impression of the article being some form of MS fanboysm.
Something like "How the Windows Control Panel design changed over 36 years" would IMHO be more neutral.
That's an interesting viewpoint, thanks for this. I hadn't thought of it that way but I guess I can understand that angle. To your point, the HTML title of the page is "36 Years of Microsoft Windows Control Panels Design History" which is what shows up as the title/first line in Google searches.
This could be much more interesting if it included shots of the various windows listed in the panel, and perhaps also the ‘advanced’ interfaces available since Win2000 (iirc)—opened via ‘properties’ on the ‘My computer’ icon, though I think it's also in the panel somewhere. For me, the control panel is the litmus test of the OS interface—partly because usually it's where the OS has the most of its interface, while the rest is a bunch of bars and menus. Compare e.g. Gnome's panel to KDE's panel, at least around KDE 4 (last I've tried it): Gnome's is an example of austerity lifted from OSX, while KDE went full-in on tree-lists of dozens of pages of settings.
So: in Windows 7's control panel I've counted ten different kinds of windows—with ten somewhat different approaches to their design. Some of the widgets in there aren't used anywhere else in the OS. This only includes MS' own built-in settings windows—no third-party stuff, which frequently also has custom one-off looks and widgets.
And apparently, things became even worse in Win 8 or 10, with half-assed attempts at a redesign.
My first PC had Windows 3.1 and I very vividly remember the buttons, the menus, and many of the icons. In a way, they still inspire me to this day. In fact, I themed a Shoelace button based on 3.1 a few months ago.
Classic view with classic icon arrangement is still the easiest to find things. Mostly, I guess, because the organisation of things doesn't change every other version, or goes to hide under a different vaguely named subsection every so often.
The fact that Updates are under Security, and not under Apps does say something about Windows, though...
Eh, updates and security go hand-in-hand. I'd say it would be best to completely split it out. Updates should just contain security update and be mandatory. Some other thing (call them upgrades) should contain new features and be optional.
This is, unfortunately, for a lot of OSs not true. Windows and Android for example combine security patches with normal updates which introduce new bugs.
Try _editing_ an existing WiFi Enterprise profile with Windows 10? Looks like they dropped all links to arrive to the right windows in the classic control panel, and there's no way of doing that with the horrible minimalistic modern UI that has less settings than you can find on a usual smartphone...
Windows 11 still leaves a few things in the legacy Control Panel, but there's less that's only accessible there than there was in Windows 10, and every recent dev channel build has moved more things into the modern Settings app.
More importantly, they've gotten pretty good about linking into legacy Control Panel applets from the modern settings app-- so, even if a setting hasn't been migrated yet, you should be able to find a link to it in a logical place from the new Settings app. That's not new in Windows 11 (Windows 10 is pretty good about it too, for the most part), but the Settings reorganization in Windows 11 helped this along a bit.
W10 wasn’t pretty good at it, and something tells me I wouldn’t find my relevant settings quickly in 11 either. Settings reorganization never helped, I know this because never heard from my non-power-user friends or relatives “oh, I just went to settings and set it up myself, so convenient” even for easy things. It’s always arcane don’t touch it thing for them, every release. And every power user I know basically said “I can’t find shit after every damn release, why the fuck they do that every time???”.
I have a vague memory of feeling slightly cheated the first time i clicked on the XP control panel. I saw shiny icons hiding plain, (ugly?), mundane texts. I felt they were spending more time on the pretty and clever button image, and less effort on the options behind it.
I came to dislike the control panel interface on Windows because it is disjunct from management console snapins and does a bad job at reconiling administrative/power user access knobs with basic computer controls. The control panel does not adapt to the user level / user role (Administrator, plain user) well enough. You have to switch between control panel (including "modernized" network controls), advanced properties dialogs (interesting network settings, classic style), and msc snapins for diskmanagement, event viewing, task and device management in order to get things done. On top of that gpedit is not even included in the default compmgmt.msc. Oh and these days add powershell scripts on top. Oh and regedit.
One more issue is that they kept "evolving" the design (classic, settings view, etc) without retiring previous interfaces. Now you have access to everything and you keep wondering how the controls and components all interact. Almost as catastrophic as explorer.exe and "shell" integrations, resulting in the most laggy explorer.exe yet.
It's degradation, not evolution. Windows 3.11 - 98 control panels were the best. If only they had built-in parameter search option (kind of like VLC's settings advanced view) they would be perfect. All the GUIs should have been searchable by the way, so sad Ubuntu's Unity is dead.
No, I was a beliver on WinRT as merge for COM/.NET world, .NET Native as it should have always been and C++/CX as Microsoft finally getting the point of C++ Builder.
They just borked the whole execution and burned the bridges that many of us had, with the multiple rewrites since Windows 8 came to be, dropping support for devices and finally dropping even .NET Native and C++/CX.
The irony is that Windows 11 is so rushed out, that they needed to still make use of UWP for the new UI regardless of WinUI 3.0 marketing.
The windows 98 one brought back some serious memories! That was when I first started to really dig into computers and started to want to control and change everything I could.
I remember when they changed (in Spanish) the "Agregar o quitar programas" (add or remove programs) to "Programas y características" (programs and features).
Not only was the new name less descriptive and harder to search, but it also made that setting to no longer appear as one of the first icons (they are sorted alphabetically).
I'm still mad about that change, and to this day I still take a couple failed attempts to find it.
I had completely forgotten about wireless link. Tried it with my Sony Walkman phone once. I was able to transfer a presentation to my phone via infrared, then use my phone to show (and control) the presentation in my classroom. It was one of the most magical things I’ve probably ever done.
I think the control panel is fine. You can search for all the functionality you need through the start menu search bar so I rarely have to use it directly but when I do it's perfectly usable. I also found windows 11 to be an improvement.
The control panel was solved, so to speak, once they added a search interface. It doesn’t matter how complicated the hierarchy of modules is if what you want is only a search away.
Only Microsoft could unsolve a solved problem by segregating the settings into two paradigms, neither of which is a superset of the other. Even the duplicated functionalities are not equivalent—the list of programs you can uninstall with the new UI is not the same as old UI.
No sane person would ever intend to engineer this outcome, but it’s what we get. Very strange how that can happen.
This is what happens when you have too many chefs in the same design kitchen.
Microsoft really could use some product/UX zealot in the driver seat for a while.
They should also work on reducing the latency of their products in general... Everything feels like laggy trash now. Someone should do a study on stress levels between windows XP and windows 11 user groups for basic daily office tasks and then throw it into the boardroom.
Hi, Windows Phone fanboy here. I've posted most of the below before. ;-)
The sad truth is, that the new Metro UI introduced with Windows 8 specifically for Phones was pretty efficient and slick. A mid-tier WP phone was running circles around a mid-tier Android phone in 2014 when it comes to smoothness. Then we got another reboot of the whole mobile endeavor with UWP for Windows 10, which was more resource intensive, continuing the megalomaniac idea of having a unified mobile and desktop experience. And I don't think it's impossible to create this somehow. I just think developing a nice Phone UI and forcibly bolting it onto a 30 year old desktop OS that mostly evolved in gentle steps before was... stupid.
Anyways, the ironic thing today is that that whole UI mess Windows is in was caused by something that doesn't even exist anymore. These two disjoint worlds that lead to these jarring moments where you're thrown from that modern flat-clearly-coming-from-a-mobile-design-paradigm settings window into another dialog coming straight from the 90s. The new one wouldn't exist without Microsoft's botched attempt of re-entering the phone market!
Without WP, we could have simply gotten more thought-out iterations and improvements to the plain old Windows GUI, with a desktop-centric approach, but more modern design philosophies. But now we have a mobile-first UI that is being spent lots of effort on to make it usable on a desktop OS.
And sure, I'm over-dramatizing a bit here. We got more touchscreens, convertibles, yada-yada that still benefit from these changes. But it was approached in a really twisted, stupid way, and I still don't know anyone who prefers UWP apps. Especially my old folks are rather confused by this and would prefer Windows still looked like XP or 7. Younger people might not care so much but spend all of their time in a browser anyways if they don't use their phones. Everyone else is a professional, and professional software doesn't exist as UWP apps.
That'll also legit lead to customers leaving Windows. Just last week I had to assign multiple IP addresses to a same interface, which is totally legit operation, and I firmly believe it will be too much to ask highly skilled UX designers to also be aware of every such minute details as that an interface can have multiple IPs or that PostScript is an Adobe trademark across the whole scope of Windows Control Panel.
Yet another camp is the most likely outcome, but it could be avoided by declaring a winner.
But that's certainly the approach they always try, yet it never works. Because that declared winner always turns out to be yet another superficial subset full of broken promises. And this declared but failing winner is always the latest incarnation.
What they have never tried: going back to the oldest and extending that with new additions. There are always far fewer new additions than the backlog of existing settings that would have to be ported to the latest variation, doing the reverse, properly, wouldn't be that hard.
They were on the right track, but again the too many cooks part borked the whole execution, now we have lots of tiny kitchens each managed from one of those cooks trying to sell their special dish going forward.
It would be particularly ideal if the brand of zealotry employed was “roll the look and feel of everything back to Windows 2000 but add proper scaling support”.
> * The control panel was solved, so to speak, once they added a search interface. It doesn’t matter how complicated the hierarchy of modules is if what you want is only a search away.*
Uh-huh... unless you don't know what the option is called. Ever tried using translated Windows? I spent hours upon hours wading through those dialogs gawking at the oddities that were supposed to be computer-themed terms in my native language. If you tell me I need to formulate those freaky things in my head, you're gonna get a laugh in your face.
I’ve come to hate the “search” option - places like Salesforce default to that even in documentation- open Admin, search “Users” - it works but you lose the spacial context and it makes it harder to “discover” related things that may solve your problem more directly.
For an outsider it is difficult to imagine how big task it is to rebuild the control panel experience. It's not just the things Microsoft has created. There's plenty of 3rd party stuff that integrates to the control panel applets and brings its own UI elements there.
It's form over function so hard it hurts, in a place where function is all I want. I'm not on a "journey" or having an "experience" or whatever they're aiming for. I just want to change a setting, so show me ALL the settings programs, RIGHT NOW. It's laughable how much you need to click on random stuff to see where stuff may be hiding.. Search is great, if you can remember what it's called, but often, I can't and I need to look through the options to be reminded.