[makeitdouble]

I was a wee little kid when I first touch windows 95, and only ever used dos before.

The "Start" button made no sense. The computer was already started, and clicking randomly popped up menus and opened documents in their right programs, so it felt like the natural way to progress. The owner of the computer had to point me to the start menu.

Even now I still think it was a cursed UI. It was the place primarily to close and shutdown the computer (again, when you see that button the computer and OS will always be already started), get to the control panel or run commands. None of it felt like "start", and the current windows logo only design makes a lot more sense.

To your point, small kids get proficient very fast with smartphones and iPads. I'd call their interface a lot more "intuitive"

[ndiddy]

The Windows 95 UI designers wrote a paper going over their design methodology and how they incorporated feedback from real-world users at a variety of levels of computer proficiency into their design. https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

For example, the reason for the single "Start" button in the taskbar was that they initially had multiple buttons for different specific purposes, and relied on a "Programs" folder on the desktop for launching programs, but found that this design didn't hold up in testing:

> Users had considerable difficulty deciding what each of the three buttons on the Tray was for and later had trouble remembering where to go for a particular command because their functions overlapped in certain contexts (e.g., to find something in Help, do you go to Find or to Help?).

> Users of every type were confused by the Programs folder. We thought that having a folder on the desktop with other folders and links to programs inside it would be a natural transition for Windows 3.1 users accustomed to Program Manager, while being relatively easy to learn for beginners. We were wrong! Beginners quickly got lost in all of the folders and other users had a lot of trouble deciding whether they were looking at the actual file system and its files or just links to actual files.

> The results from these studies and interviews greatly changed the design of the Windows 95 UI. In the early Windows 95 prototype, we had purposefully changed some things from Windows 3.1 (e.g., the desktop was now a real container) but not others (e.g., File Manager and Program Manager-like icons on desktop) because we were afraid of going too far with the design. We were aware that creating a product which was radically different from Windows 3.1 could confuse and disappoint millions of existing users, which would clearly be unacceptable.

> However, the data we collected with the Windows 95 prototype and with Windows 3.1 showed us that we couldn't continue down the current path. The results with beginning users on basic tasks were unacceptably poor and many intermediate users thought that Windows 95 was just different, not better.

[projektfu]

> Beginners quickly got lost in all of the folders and other users had a lot of trouble deciding whether they were looking at the actual file system and its files or just links to actual files.

TBH, I often have no idea whether anything is really a file/directory or some fake thing in Explorer, and this aspect has gotten worse over the years. Now they make it hard for users to find their home folder and present a bunch of virtual things that are confusing. Home, Gallery, Music, Videos - all virtual apparently. Moving things into OneDrive that used to be in the home folder. The Downloads folder, if clicked from the side panel, doesn't have a path, etc.

[makeitdouble]

I understand their research...and at the same time, looking at the Macintosh interface, Apple came up with something often touted as better and more user friendly while offering a different paradigm.

It feels like the Windows UX designers came up with the local optimum for the UI they were willing to try, but didn't go beyond.

[wpm]

It's where you start every activity and process. "Start to shutdown the computer" "start to run a command" "start to run a program" "Start to change some settings". It in the passive voice describes what you are going to be doing in there: Starting some activity, process, program, change, access, whatever.

Start > Programs > Maxis > SimCity 2000 is psuedocode for what I just did. I started a program by Maxis called SimCity 2000

Four Squares in a Grid Button > All Apps > EA Games > Sim City 4 describes crap I'm clicking on in the UI, nothing about what I'm doing.

[makeitdouble]

TBH I'm OK with having no labels.

To make a real world comparison, I have a single closet in a my room with a lot of stuff in it. Would sticking a "Start" label to say "Start > first aid > bandaid" help that much ? Someone coming to my home could as well just try to open the closet randomly, the more important thing is it looks like a closet that can be opened.

That's where I prefer the Grid button, as it just looks like a button (and it could still look more like a button TBHO)

[jerf]

I never liked the word "start" itself, but if you're going to have a GUI, a single central clean place to say "every interaction you may want to do can be found from here" is a good idea. In principle having search there is pretty useful.

In practice Microsoft has consistently from the beginning gone out of their way to make the search useless and slow, a policy that is now old enough to vote. How the start menu has now gone nearly two decades without you being able to type "note" and see Notepad just pop up as one of the choices instantly beats me on my ever-more-super super computers, but that's an implementation detail that Microsoft has consistently botched. And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants.

Nevertheless, the general idea of that top-level "here's everything" is a good one. The open source desktop environments do a much better job with it, without marketing trying to figure out how to stuff this half-decade's marketing push on to the user or "monetize" it.

[ConceptJunkie]

> And more and more over time, Microsoft has thought more about what they want in the menu than what the user wants.

This pretty much describes _everything_ in Windows in the last 15 years.

[steve1977]

This reminds me about one of those seemingly small differences between Windows and macOS - on Windows, it's "Search", on macOS, it's "Find".

[steve1977]

I do remember that when Windows 95 came out, we used to joke that you need to click "Start" in order to "Shut down".

So yeah, as far as I remember, the terminology was a bit controversial also back then.

[smcg]

As a kid who started on Windows 3.1, the 95 Start menu made so much more sense. It felt revolutionary.