| "The usability of an OS is inversely proportional to the size of its control panel."
--A college friend, circa 2000 Let's pick a particular UI/UX combo, the GUI: how have GUIs evolved over 3 decades, what has their complexity curve been like? Microsoft: MSDOS->WIN3->WIN3.1->WFW311->WinNT->Win95->Win2000->WinXP->Win7->Win8->Win10 Having used all of them, I'd say there was a huge drop in UI/UX from MSDOS to Win3, but then steady improvement which peaked around Win2000, cratered, and is crawling back. The complexity ramped significantly: MSDOS6.22 was simple, solid (yes) and predictable, and Win3 destroyed that for a loooong time. WinNT was a solid rebuild, and merging it with Win3x led to Win2000, IMHO the peak. Now Win10 can't decide if it is a mobile OS or desktop OS, or an advertising platform, and it feels that way when I try to use it. Tiles and old-time Dialogs are in constant contention, the look in feel is at war with itself. I don't even know how to help people with problems anymore because I've lost track of the Win10 control panel after WinXP when I stopped developing. Microsoft has seen what Google is experiencing, but I do not think MS is out of the woods yet. They appear to be trying to make it simpler... Apple Mac Classic MacOS up to v9 -> MacOSX -> all the mountains I did zero Mac development until OSX, but I spent a lot of time using Adobe products and eVision/Max audio tools. The controls remained largely consistent: from one OS to the next for over 15 years the paradigms were the same. That's the longest stretch of stability. OSX has been exploding with features, specifically cloud based things that I don't want. I think Apple is on the "oh shit this is a mess" peak. They too are trying to figure out the macos+iOS strategy and it smells like convergence, but I bet they have 5-10 more years in this feature-rich mess. iOS Do we all yearn for the simpler days of iOS when the control panel was more compact and there were fewer confusing gestures? Yes. iOS is exploding in complexity. Android - I don't use it. /shrug/ Linux Desktops - I've been using MWM since 1992. The entire KDE / Gnome debate was a giant clusterfuck IMHO. I've tried using fancy Linux desktops that were supposed to be Windows-killers and its like wearing your shoes on the opposite feet. I can't say this has hit peak complexity because it hasn't really gotten attention from serious UI/UX talent. Amiga, OS/2, NeXT ... I don't know enough about these, or they didn't last long enough to experience the complexity curve. TL;DR I think it is safe to say that Microsoft has the most experience trying to wrangle failed UI/UX experiments at scale. Mac & Google are just learning this. I think it will be at least a decade before the latter two are able to conceptually shrink the UX footprint of the O/S. My guess: everything converges to tile-based mobile-like UIs on desktop, laptop and mobile. Mobile OSes are just fine for desktops. IMO. |
Many years ago MS made a book which pretty much said "Official UX guidelines" on the cover; later this was available in MSDN. It was actually quite good, though of course the OS never managed to adhere consistently. Useful advice for developers. Now there is only a short guideline with a mixture of different technologies and mostly focusing on tiny details, no big picture at all.
The change in these guidelines is reminiscent of the change experienced in the accompanying Windows releases.
(That being said, I'm baffled just how bad the default styling of Windows 10 looks. It reminds me of the flat styling available in 2000/XP [I don't mean the standard 3D 95 look]. And I was taken aback that someone somehow somewhere managed to actually make the Windows 10 start menu worse than the Windows 7 start menu, which was already laughably bad.)