| This article would be even better if it showed the evolution of Mac OS's Finder through the years. The two undoubtedly influenced each other (possibly with one side being influenced more than the other). For instance, I believe the 'duality' of Explorer views (one without tree views, one with) was a response to the success of the Mac Finder -- it was intended to present a simple UI for managing files. The "Explore" mode was a power-user interface that needed you to right-click and choose Explore, or press Win+E (or create a permanent shortcut). To be fair, because right-clicking was new in Windows 95, the help materials did emphasize right-clicking. As the article below indicates, the Win95 team did consider designing an entire 'Beginner UI' for beginner users, but eventually dropped the idea. This article[1] (it has previously been on HN before) has some interesting insights on the design of Windows 95 with respect to Explorer. Bear in mind, one of Win95's design goals was to be usable for both those new to computers as well as power users. > Beginning users and many intermediates were confused by the two-pane view of File Cabinet. (See Figure 3.) They were unsure of the relationship between the panes and how to navigate between folders. Beginners were often overwhelmed by the visual complexity of the File Cabinet and had more basic problems, such as not understanding how folders could exist inside of other folders. Many users were also confused by the Parent Folder icon. It appeared in every folder and looked like a file, yet was really a navigation control for moving up the hierarchy one level. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/238386.238611 Edit: > [For Windows 8+, referring to the icons at the top of the toolbar] Microsoft remains absolutely addicted to the idea of a toolbar with "commonly used" commands on it. Despite the clear internal order to get rid of all these toolbars, someone insisted that they had to remain, had to, and so they got stuffed into the titlebar. Given that Explorer took the "Ribbon" idea from Office 2007 (probably because Steven Sinofsky had a hand in both), the icons at the top of the toolbar are much more likely to be Explorer's implementation of Office's Quick Action Toolbar. In fact, looking at Office 365 UI, there seems to be a trend of bundling more functionality into the Title Bar these days. |
I find this bit apalling. Some users were confused by that. So what? Do you take away the concept of nesting directories altogether because beginners are confused? They didn't, but we've being suffering a sneaky war on treeview for twenty five years. Every version it's more difficult to tweak the file explorer back to 95, losing some features forever. Real state is consumed by ribbons, quick access, libraries, all kind of stuff that's hard to delete if at all possible.
Last annoyance (it's also the shell, but not exactly the FM) is the taskbar hover previews. If you make the mistake to let the mouse over some app icon in the taskbar, a pop-up window appears over your current window showing a preview of the iconized application. There used to be a hack to disable that crap, setting a high delay for the hover. They've removed that with an automated update.