Design language, like any language is metaphorical.
The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
The loss of the theme menu and 'Windows classic' from Windows 8 onwards is dearly missed. But Windows classic hasn't gone away. If you run a 32-bit executable on Windows 10 or 11 under Windows XP compatibility mode, and set 'reduced colour mode', Windows Classic comes back. I have also noticed that when Adobe Acrobat crashes (heh) it momentarily flashes Windows classic on the title bars.
It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
> Since that button down there is called "Start", it implies that you can probably do something with it, maybe start programs? Click and you'll see the Start Menu:
Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.
I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?
Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
I agree that we had much better patterns back then. The software industry in general worked towards sharing visual paradigms, making use of system designs of their host playforms, facilitated discovery etc etc. All that was good and the recent trends moving us away from that consistency and discoverability are a detrement being steamrolled over by agents…
But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.
But even then I thought it looked like shit.
The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.
But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.
I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).
What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
> Me: "I don't like smartphone UIs. Everything is flat, nothing indicates where you can touch or not. I have to randomly try everything on the screen."
Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"
I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.
From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.
(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)
I am an enormous fan of the unambiguous UI design adopted in aircraft cockpit displays.
Only six colours are used for text:
White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values.
Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.)
Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.)
Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem.
Red - Things that are an immediate danger to your safety.
Magenta - For navigation purposes, where you should be aiming the aircraft.
On touch screen UIs, buttons are bevelled grey and so what you can touch and what you can’t is extremely obvious.
Activated buttons are a distinctive colour. This colour varies between vendors but at least it’s consistent for a particular aircraft type; usually a light blue on Airbus, green on Boeing. The green seems most consistent with the text colour system, the button is green because the crew pressed it.
> for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
Sounds like you know quite a few packers[1]. I once knew someone at the extreme packing end of the mapper/packer scale. She constantly needed help with her computer, always for seemingly simple things we had already covered. Once I realized she was a pure packer, I changed my approach.
I wrote out a complete, step by step, exact sequence of actions, when to push what, what to expect, etc... and made it as variance free as possible, making zero assumptions, and printed it out on a full page of paper for her.
She was delighted, and never needed help again, for years!
This could not have worked in a modern environment. We used Windows XP, Office 2000 Professional, with Windows 2000 servers, for as long as humanly possible. No training turnover, just things working. Working so well they didn't need me anymore. ;-)
I agree with the author's wish for visual cues when something is clickable, scrollable, etc.... This, on the other hand:
> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:
feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.
I liked every version of Windows that I’ve used, back to 3.1 all the way up to 11. Nowadays I mostly use 10/11 at home and at work. A new Windows upgrade was always a magical treat for me, the old slow HDD speeds building up anticipation during the installation phase, making me excited to finally use it. Growing up with computers unfortunately demystifies many things, but such is the price of poignance.
I felt the same way up until around Vista. The launch of Windows 95 was probably the pinnacle for me. XP already started having a sour taste with the whole activatin thing, and Vista and 7 weren't really exciting anymore. My reaction to a new version went from curiosity and excitement about what new things might be in it, to dreading finding out about all the things they removed or made worse this time. I went from wanting to try out the new versions soonish, to trying to stay on the previous one for as long as reasonably possible. And I don't think it's just a nostalgia or age thing, it's about very concrete things for me (dwindling customiation options and growing usage restrictions being the main ones).
When Windows XP came out, computer magazines wrote articles on how to switch the more modern, colorful UI back to the old, grey, drab, boring UI of Windows 95/98/2000.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
Andreas Kling has said that one of his inspirations for SerenityOS was the Windows 2000 UI (https://corecursive.com/serenity-os-with-andreas-kling/). I found his general goal for SerenityOS ("Roughly speaking, the goal is a marriage between the aesthetic of late-1990s productivity software and the power-user accessibility of late-2000s *nix.") to be strangely validating ('Wait... So it's not just me?!'). And so of course I decided to try out the KDE desktop, which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche. And it's great. It really is wonderful to use an OS that is designed from the ground up for serious technical users. And the ubiquity of web apps nowadays makes Linux a far more practical choice than it was back in the day.
Even KDE has started to fall into the modern UI trappings. For example the taskbar somewhat recently became rounded and detached from the screen edges making it more annoying to reach the start button or the clock widget. But at least you can still configure it to how it used to be.
> which I had always kinda dismissed as being a bit too much of a niche within a niche
KDE has been one of the two big, by far the most popular FLOSS DEs for decades, even predating the other one; how could it be "a niche within a niche"?
> In Windows 95, those toolbar icons were still actual buttons. In Windows 2000, they are recognizable as a button when activated, but in their default state they're not and you have to hover over them:
This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
> Hiding filename extensions was one of the capital sins in computer history
Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.
I agree with these points, but I will still be disagreeable and take a more nuanced position: Windows NT 5.0 Interim Developer Release build 1796 (and some preceding builds) were peak Windows UI, because they had all the points in the article, plus a "show desktop" button in the lower right corner that you could blindly throw your mouse at-- a feature relegated to a Quick Launch action from the subsequent build, and only restored in Windows 7.
I really liked when XP came out, and you could have both the clean 2000 look with advanced font rendering like cleartype. That was the perfect combo for desktop use.
I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin,
then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop,
now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.
RE: Start Menu, the article does not mention or show the obnoxious “Personalized Menus” feature which is the one and only ‘must disable’ when I use Win2k. It triggers after some number of days and hides infrequently-used programs from the Programs submenu as a workaround for the menu growing large and unwieldy when many programs are installed, but IMO I think it's even worse than what it claims to fix.
Unfortunately marketing helps sell OS upgrades and new PCs, and one way to market a new OS is to advertise its “new and improved” UI. OS UI used to be more utilitarian and rooted in HCI principles, notably the classic Mac OS and Windows 95/98/NT/2000.
Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.
45 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 54.5 ms ] threadThe thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, as it means we can reason about the UI with the same faculties we've spent our entire life training.
I would say so, but the Active Dekstop stuff wasn't the right move.
Fisher-price came next, with Windows XP. At least you could easily switch back to classic.
And then Windows 8, we won't even talk about that.
Buttons looked like buttons.
Windows (which have frames), looked like windows.
And there was no distracting design elements.
It's all still there. Bring it back, Microsoft. And put HiDPI and all your other modern technologies like D3D12 and borderless full-screen on it. I want to write old-school Win32 applications that fly.
Over time it seems like a lot of designs stop feeling the need to lead the user in this way. There is an assumption that by now everyone knows what the menu in the bottom left corner does, and we are no longer in the phase of trying to teach the population to use a computer for the first time.
I feel like this is the wrong approach. Every day there are new young people using a computer for the first time. Wouldn’t it be nice if all these conventions that evolved over the past 50 years could be intuitively discovered, instead of needing explanations from someone who already understands them?
Of course, as the world becomes more digital, many skeuomorphic designs become more abstract to those same young users. The floppy disk, the traditional telephone, even the file folder.
But I don’t agree that it “looked nice”. I hated Windows 95 and 2000’s “style”. They looked like engineers had made them. They looked stiff and unfriendly, eith too much border and outline. Real life has no outlines. I was in my late teens when 2000 came out. My friends and I jumped on it and felt it was the Os we had been waiting for.
But even then I thought it looked like shit.
The affordances were great. I agree that details like button depress and consistent scrollbars are valuable.
But I genuinely prefer things a bit rounder, a bit flatter, less grey, or late Aqua-style flat-with-shiny-affordances.
I agree that backgrounds should be flat (or very subtly textured so they recede but arn’t “boring; again, late-00s Mac OS nailed this for me).
What I’d really like to see is something new that takes the consistency of NT/2000 and Mac OSX prior to Lion, mixed with the novel affordances of BeOS/Haiku (docking windows, small title handles), and puts it through Apple’s “zing” (but not too far - transparency is highly overrated).
Response by non-tech person: "Well, yeah, of course you have to try everything? How else would this work?"
I think this goes deeper than many tech people realize.
From what I understood from talking with "nontechnical"(*) friends, relatives, etc, for a good potion of them, computers had always been "unpredictable magic". They got by through memorizing some very strict and rigid interaction sequences - "click this icon, then click that menu, then click that button, etc" and prayed nothing unexpected would happen. They were too scared and/or uninterested in computers to even try and find any rules or consistency in it.
I feel as if those nontechnical people "won" now. Now all UIs feel as inconsistent and unpredictable even for "techies" as any computer interaction felt to those people back then.
(* repeated from another thread: "nontechnical" in the "not fluent with PC use" sense, which is actually quite arrogant - they can have very high technical skill in other areas obviously)
Only six colours are used for text:
White - Used for UI labels and other fixed values.
Green - Values provided by the crew (e.g. text input.)
Cyan - Values provided by the aircraft (e.g. sensor readings.)
Amber - Things you need to be aware of and keep an eye on that could be a problem.
Red - Things that are an immediate danger to your safety.
Magenta - For navigation purposes, where you should be aiming the aircraft.
On touch screen UIs, buttons are bevelled grey and so what you can touch and what you can’t is extremely obvious.
Activated buttons are a distinctive colour. This colour varies between vendors but at least it’s consistent for a particular aircraft type; usually a light blue on Airbus, green on Boeing. The green seems most consistent with the text colour system, the button is green because the crew pressed it.
Sounds like you know quite a few packers[1]. I once knew someone at the extreme packing end of the mapper/packer scale. She constantly needed help with her computer, always for seemingly simple things we had already covered. Once I realized she was a pure packer, I changed my approach.
I wrote out a complete, step by step, exact sequence of actions, when to push what, what to expect, etc... and made it as variance free as possible, making zero assumptions, and printed it out on a full page of paper for her.
She was delighted, and never needed help again, for years!
This could not have worked in a modern environment. We used Windows XP, Office 2000 Professional, with Windows 2000 servers, for as long as humanly possible. No training turnover, just things working. Working so well they didn't need me anymore. ;-)
[1] https://wiki.c2.com/?MappersVsPackers
> Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark on paper is something that I actually do:
feels like an idea from a time when many people were encountering UIs on screens for the very first time as adults. I think the slider would be recognized as a toggle in its usual context of a settings screen by most people who have seen a settings screen before, but not that specific design for a toggle.
I was young at the time and this seemed absurd to me. Why would you willingly use a UI that looks like wearing an old grey tie for a dusty office job in a depressing concrete building?
KDE has been one of the two big, by far the most popular FLOSS DEs for decades, even predating the other one; how could it be "a niche within a niche"?
This is something I've struggled with as toolkits change and old widget themes stop working. There are still some decent themes out there (e.g. Skulpture for Qt has been my default for many years), and with a little patching they can be dragged into working on the latest toolkit versions. Yet I can't seem to avoid this "you have to hover over to see that it's actually a button" behaviour. Very annoying!
Amen. The first thing I do on any (Windows) OS installation is make sure file extensions are shown. I guess Microsoft did that for "simplicity", but it also made for easy "virus.jpg.vbs" files.
Check it out: https://dn721308.ca.archive.org/0/items/usa_1796.1_winNT50.w...
I had my xp running a blackbox 4win and coLinux/cygwin, then moved onto vmware/virtualbox with windows vm and linux desktop, now I'm doing win11+wsl2 and loving it for cuda/ai/building projects.
One recurring question that I keep asking myself is why UIs have to constantly change for the worse?
What would happen if vendors kept using the same UI for decades? Would people hate or love having a one well thought UI?
Clean, concise, no surprises, dependable.
Ironically Apple got the ball rolling with fashionable UI when it released Aqua in early Mac OS X, though Aqua was well-executed, having style while still being rooted in HCI principles. Unfortunately the industry took the wrong lesson; competitors responded to Aqua’s style without providing UIs of substance. Sadly even Apple has slipped once Steve Jobs passed away; its UIs have increasingly become more style over substance. Apple has long abandoned the days of Bill Atkinson, Larry Tesler, Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman, and unfortunately Jony Ive was less effective when Steve Jobs was no longer around to provide critical feedback. macOS 26 is one of the biggest UI regressions in the entire history of the Mac, though thankfully it’s not unusable and it appears that macOS 27 will be a big improvement thanks to user and reviewer feedback.