[zwaps]

I really wonder how they made something like the windows2k interface in the 90's. Compared to that, today's interfaces are garbage. And this is especially true for the web or anything that is even remotely in contact with Javascript.

Were UX/UI people and researchers in the 90's just better? More competent? More careful in their research? Did the objectives change so much from usability to selling clicks?

[amluto]

My take is that they had more limited tooling and resources, so they designed a set of controls, made them visually distinct, and used them almost everywhere. It was easy to make radio buttons that looked like radio buttons and worked like radio buttons. It was substantially more difficult to do anything else.

Also, the default interface wasn’t composited, so nothing was translucent, so no one layered their controls and content. Sure, it looks kind of pretty in Material Design when a round button with nice antialiased edges sits on top of the content, but it’s terrible UX. In Win2K, if you wanted to do this, you either used “layered” windows (which were no amazingly slow that no one wanted to use them) or you had to go outside the Win32 library entirely and render the whole mess yourself. So designers mostly didn’t do this.

[simulo]

No. People were not just "better" and I also think that the core motivation was and is making money.

However, how companies earn money changed. In the 80s and 90s computers were marketed at professionals working in offices. Software was sold shrink-wrapped on disks. It was very costly to change software later (send disks?), you better tested it really, really carefully. The promise was often to make experts more efficient at their tasks: Software was customizable, had macro recorders and had a familiar interface of buttons, menus and docking sub-windows. Computers were used with keyboards and (finally!) mouse: Two very efficient input devices. People (including me) are nostalgic for that time, and that makes memory very selective: We probably remember the best software created by large companies with great teams. We also remember software created for specifically for professionals working with computers, many HN readers will be that people. And, last but not least, there were a lot of terrible UIs too, that we gladly forgot and for every fondly remembered non-standard, fun UI (bryce?) there are sooooo many terrible ones.

A lot of what irks people can be explained with shifts in how software got made, for which audience and for which devices: Having many small teams working independently makes a coherent vision for a product more difficult (but has other advantages), user customization became less important since products were more targeted to non-experts and it also can mess with your automated testing; moving to the web as main way to deliver software meant that some types of interactions (drag and drop, using large amounts of data directly) were harder to create than others; on the web, advertisement and subscription models became popular, leading to very different ways to advertise software in contrast to the former "buy the bi-yearly upgrade in a big box" and the web was more OS independent so the old one-system, one UI-standard did not match anymore.

So, a lot of what "got worse" can be explained by changes in the ecosystem that software-creation and software-use happens in and by the position of people that assume it "got worse".

There are many things that I find worse now than in the 90s but this perspective can help to see if software got worse just for people similar to me and it can also help to find ways to make sustainable changes that fit the ecosystem that exists today.

[pjlegato]

"Products targeted to non-experts" bears emphasizing: prior to the early 2000s, "using computers" (for any purpose) was a very niche activity, not a mainstream thing that everyone did all the time every day.

Either you were a highly trained professional using a computer for serious work, or else you were a dedicated hobbyist. Either way, you expected to put in significant time to learn and understand how this magically complex machine worked before you could actually accomplish anything. "Normal people" without strong motivation to study the computer simply did not use computers much during that era.

Fast forward to the smartphone era, and "using computers" has become a casual everyday activity for normal people. Companies are now incentivized to produce software for a mass audience with UIs that require as close to zero thought, study, or technical skill as possible.

All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI. Surely we needed the Baroque masterpiece that was AltaVista's UI to ever gain useful work from a search engine; there are so many parameters the user might wish to vary! But no; as it turns out, the new Eternal September mass computer user audience strongly prefers slightly less control in favor of less time spent thinking.

[JohnFen]

> All the computer nerds were shocked when Google came out with just a single bare text input as its primary UI.

Yes, if by "shocked" you meant "delighted". Not just that it was a single text input, but that it could also do the desired task better.

[izacus]

I think you're off by a decade there, in the early 2000s computers at home and in any kind of white collar (and many blue collar) professions were normal and common.

[systemvoltage]

I agree, good things still exist when it is B2B or only designed for a highly trained or professional users. But, when we need to design things for 80 IQ crowd, everything suffers. RGB lighting and diamond studded so to speak in UI/UX field.

[simulo]

My point was that "good" is good only in connection to an ecosystem of tech, values, practices and the people judging what is "good". I personally do not think any group of users "drags the field down".

[systemvoltage]

Yes it does. A certain group of people definitely drags the entire field down. It’s not a nice thing to think about but it’s a fact and the reality IMO. You can continue to lie to yourself but eventually you realize that you need to dumb things down for the below 2 std deviation folks or you won’t get them as users.

[JohnFen]

> But, when we need to design things for 80 IQ crowd, everything suffers.

I really think that the only way to adequately serve both demographics is to have two different UIs.

[hedora]

It was standard practice back then to sit non technical and (separately) expert users in front of a product, film their reactions, and then adjust the product design until most of the swearing stopped.

Gnome 2 famously did this. Gnome 3 famously threw out the findings, which is why Linux Mint exists, and how KDE (eventually) caught up on usability.

[lmm]

Nah. KDE 3 was better than Gnome 2 in the first place. KDE 5 has almost recovered to that level.

[kps]

GNOME is an interesting case, because you can't blame it (directly) on managers pushing dark patterns to maximize conversions. Is it all just trickle-down of user-hostile design philosophy from the commercial web?

[taneq]

Same as the reason Visual C++ was so good: They made all the developers use it.

[pjmlp]

Except for WinDev, that is why we keep getting such bad tooling to deal with COM/WinRT, although the concepts behind it are great.