For me, Windows 7 is the peak in terms of UI/UX. It has been refined over many years, and it was close to perfect, so much that between later versions, nothing changed much. In Windows 7, changes were mostly cosmetic, taking advantage of modern graphics hardware and it was good. So it is certainly a good guide.
Windows 8 broke everything and we still havent recovered. I blame mobile devices, as designers now try to offer a similar experience on mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing, except it is almost impossible to do well.
I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up?
> I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up?
They didn’t. Flat design, invisible scrollbars, lower contrast, rounded corners, unintelligible monochrome vector icons, and other loss of affordances have found their way into macOS (and iOS of course). But at least the macOS UI does not try to be touch-compatible.
Windows 8 broke everything and we still havent recovered. I blame mobile devices, as designers now try to offer a similar experience on mobile and desktop devices, which is a good thing, except it is almost impossible to do well.
I don't know much about the Apple ecosystem, I am sure it is great, but did they survive the mobile apocalypse and managed not to mess things up?