Comment by Telaneo
13 days ago
The amount of research that went into making Windows 95 a user friendly OS is actually quite impressive. They didn't have all the kinks ironed out, and they couldn't foresee everything, but it's was a pretty solid effort.
I wonder how much research went into Windows 11, or 10 or 8 for that matter, and to what ends that research was made.
There actually is a concrete reference for the Windows 95 era research. Microsoft published detailed results from their usability work in the mid-90s, including task based testing with real users, error analysis, and iterative design changes.
Article title: The Windows® 95 User Interface: A Case Study in Usability Engineering (1996)
Link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611
Windows 95 Plug and Play (now called Legacy Plug and Play, which brings a tear to my eye) was a marvelous engineering feat. If operating systems had kept improving at that pace, who knows what they'd be capable of today?
These days Operating Systems (desktop and mobile) have mostly stagnated; even open source Unix derivatives are strongly committed to backwards compatibility, and have reached an island of mostly stability.
I hope to see in the future something like Plan 9, who was an effort to reimagine what an OS could be. BeOS brought innovations, but those have become commonplace while Haiku still has growing pains.
I yearn for weird again, but I don't have the skill set and resources to design/build a weird OS. Then again, standardization is good for progress, and I much prefer that the de facto standard is something free like Linux, and not proprietary Windows or MacOS. Standards should be public.
I've heard that MS took a different path (than previously) for the Windows 8 Metro design and wonder if a big source of the initial UI issues was a result of shoehorning the new design into the existing Windows UI.