Comment by thefz
4 days ago
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
4 days ago
I still consider Windows 2000's UI to be the peak of computer interfaces and nothing else has come close to its effectiveness and clarity for day to day work.
30 years ago, Microsoft was writing books that were hundreds of pages long detailing not just how to build effective and consistent user interfaces but also with explanations from user-centric research as to why those things mattered. Every user interface component carefully considered and rationalised, every reusable pattern carefully reinforced, all to build a desktop where interactive elements look interactive, skills learned in one application pretty reliably carry across to others, and avoiding dead ends that result in user panic. Windows 2000 was the last vaguely-consumer-oriented Microsoft operating system that was built with any of those lessons in mind.
Everything they have developed since then has strayed further and further from those principles. With Windows 11 and their "modern" application lineup, it is like they have absolute amnesia about ever having done any of this. It is clear as day that nobody inside Microsoft has ever gone back and read one of those books in the last decade or two, nor is there any evidence that they spend any amount of time researching and testing their products with real users or trying to understand the ways that users get stuck or fatigued.
All of the user interface consistency is gone thanks to the half-dozen competing/failed UI toolkits and webview-driven applications scattered everywhere. Visual cues and interactivity hints are either gone or are no longer reliable. You can't even tell when something in Windows will allow you to drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste or even what new and horrifying form the Open/Save/Print dialogs are going to take in any given application. "Disastrous" isn't a strong enough word for it.
I don't even mind WebView or otherwise flatter material design choices... but so many implementations fail at even that... If you actually read through the material design guidelines it makes a lot of sense. But then so many UI toolkits and programs that are allegedly following this are just plain not.
Performance issues aside that is.
So much so that one of the first things I do in fresh 10 and 11 installs is turn off all the transitions/whiz-bang visual effects to try to get back to the pure snappy functionality of that era of Windows.
Coming from 98/ME, Windows 2000 was utterly magic. It such a stable operating system compared to what came before it. Supposedly it was less compatible than 98/ME for games and other applications but in my experience this wasn’t true.
Looks were fine. Functionality was such a step up.