Comment by bronlund
1 day ago
I can't help thinking about how much we have lost. Just finding the scrollbar nowadays can be a challenge. Not to mention if you want to resize a pane - in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab.
Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer". This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs. Most managers are not Steve Jobs.
> in some applications they seem to have taken extra steps to make it difficult to find the line to grab
Pet peeve of mine in Windows where the line is at most one pixel now. They also took away the coloured distinction between title bars for the active window, so you don't know where keystrokes are going to go.
> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research
Too many developers nowadays don't know this. On any HN discussion of UIs, I've been noticing a growing number of younger devs insisting that usability is entirely subjective (their words, not mine). It's not just that they don't know about cleverly thought-out things such as safe triangles in nested menus or all the affordances/signifiers espoused by Don Norman et al. The bigger problem is that they don't know what they don't know, and they come across as being unwilling to learn.
It does make UX discussions frustrating and meaningless when they could, and should, be interesting and a learning experience for us all.
> Too many developers nowadays don't know this.
Guess they've never been on the phone with an elderly relative in tears because she can't figure out basic tasks on an iPad anymore after years of learning how.
That's when you realize you, as a highly-skilled technical person, can't either, because they've moved, hidden, or otherwise obfuscated them.
Yesterday I learned there are two icons in the Files app called "..."
Yes, two.
Incidentally I was looking for how to delete a file, which is now deliberately missing from the object's context menu, and intentionally hidden under one of these.
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> safe triangles in nested menus
I did not know about this, but I did notice my own menu-rage every time a submenu disappears!
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There are still UX research. It's just that the collective "we" has changed and we can/may build on some existing design decisions.
You are always designing something with a target audience in mind, and the next, e.g. mobile phone will very likely be used by someone who has interacted briefly with a similar device, so you may re-use some already learnt patterns.
The very early UXs built heavily on desktop metaphors (like folders), but at this point many (and an increasing number of) people are more familiar with OS UI n-1 than a typical office setting.
So I don't think jumping to this conclusion is correct - there are well-designed software, it has just become much much cheaper to create new ones, so the average quality has necessarily went down.
> This sort of worked when the opinionated manager was Steve Jobs.
Steve indirectly had a hand in this, by emphasizing the humanities. That, unfortunately, backfired as a sort of positive feedback loop.
Someone hired a few underemployed artists onto the team, and the artists invited all their friends and soon took over the department.
People that in an alternate timeline would be smoking weed whilst sculpting wood in a derelict loft somewhere are now the lead designers, using our software as the canvas of a perpetual avant-garde art piece.
They also need to look productive to justify their jobs, so the need to change things is constant.
That's why in 2026 you could have a PhD in CS and still need to watch a YouTube video to learn how to change the volume.
Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years? They're simply hiding or moving stuff around at this point while no one has even touched accessibility.
You are so very spot on with this. All of it. Literally nothing is better in the UI world in the past 20 years. Zero. We already had multitouch scrolling on laptops back then.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that most of the problem can be traced back to the transition to Mobile first design. The motivations were arguably pretty innocent in general. If there were no downsides, it’s nice that there isn’t a separate code base and an entirely separate set of capabilities for desktop and little 5-inch phone screens. However, the way that we have achieved that - nearly across the board - is by lobotomizing the experience everywhere.
And because of fashion (those artists who control the UX can’t resist it), even in places where that doesn’t even make any sense because there is no mobile version (say, B2B SaaS products that only get used on a desktop), they still feel the need to cosplay as a mobile app by using all the same stupid design elements (the ••• and “hamburger” menus, the giant grids of “tiles” that should have been a table, etc.
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> a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years?
On the desktop? No.
In human-computer interaction? The multitouch UI using a capacitative touchcreen, as used in the iPhone (2007, so 19 years ago) and iPad (2010).
This redefined how UIs work, so yeah, it's vastly significant.
The trouble is that now there's a whole generation of developers and desighers who literally grew up with it and its imitations, and they're trying to apply its "simplicity" to desktop WIMP GUIs. In the process they are removing things like, you know, the "M" of WIMP (whether it's "mouse" or "menu") because they don't see it as important.
> Can anyone name a single substantive UI improvement in the last 20 years?
That thing Windows has where you can drag a window to the top of the desktop and it pops up a few quick options for resizing. I would love it if KDE Plasma had this.
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idk, i think your underestimating the ubiquity and resources behind stuff like A/B and usability testing nowadays. Certainly a much more sophisticated way of determining whether people are able to find what they need.
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> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this.
Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.
If you haven't tried it already, I've found it useful to get Windows to use the accent colour in the title bar and window borders: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/personalize-your...
Thank you for posting this. I have enabled them at home and work. I am really tired of having to look for a window's shadow to resize it. Which is problematic when you run a black desktop.
Having to resize a window by grabbing it just outside the visible border is so wrong.
Absolutely, but there are many programs that don't use that accent color, making it less useful than it should be.
"Subsequent ones were designed by UI designers, and opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them, and took out usability features to make them "look nicer"."
With desktop OS I feel a lot of designers don't know how to use them. They grew up with phones and never use a desktop OS outside of work.
Chesterton's fence! Don't delete something unless you know why it's there in the first place.
> based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.
It's worthwhile to note that this was not just research in a vacuum, but a lot of user studies where they literally watched and studied people using the software and how they were confused, found or didn't find functionality, etc. Lots of interviews, talking to people, boiling things down to how actual people struggled with the software.
One example of a UI being a result of research seems to be Windows 98. Much of the surface is gray, and a lot of the text is black. It might look boring, but that is how you get to use a little colour for things that need accent, and it will make a difference. Also in a factory, the walls are gray, but the fire extinguisher is red so that you can hardly miss it.
> opinionated senior managers, who already knew how to use them
The latest design of interfaces is designed by people who have barely used a desktop computer and have no idea of the conventions or advanced usage. They create terrible UIs because they have no idea what a good UI is and they often don't even use the product they create.
‘Took out usability features to make them "look nicer"’ is exactly how Steve Jobs gave us the double-click, undiscoverable and timing-sensitive.
Double-click came out of Xerox's research park. Apply might have been the first to put that into a popular desktop PC solution, but it wasn't their design any more than the rest of the system they copied. There are arguments that a second button was a much better idea, but that would still not be immediately discoverable and even with many buttons in modern solutions we _still_ have double-clicking.
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And something my older relatives have trouble with to this day, no matter how much I adjust their double-click timing settings...
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My pet peeve is spacing. My usual resolution is 1920x1080 (scaled or not) and it feels I could cram more information in an old 1024x768 desktop. You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768.
When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.
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>> You have to maximize most windows to get it to show enough information.
At work I use 1 or 2 monitors plus the laptop screen (on Windows). At home I just use a single 55" 4K TV for my monitor and place apps center, left, right, and up top for rarely used stuff (on Linux). The desktop metaphor always wanted a big display but you're right - most Windows apps expect a full 1920x1080 for themselves.
Same here. The Teams meeting page layout pisses me off on a regular basis, with way too much useless space around everything, tons of unhideable icons and crap filling half the screen, and all the actual content crammed into a little box. I'm sitting here with a 4K 27" monitor and all that space and resolution is just wasted. Yeah you can work around it, but what a PITA.
For the brief time I used Windows 11 the amount of times I placed a window over another and then clicked on the wrong window because I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended was absolutely ridiculous.
I'm afraid that the core of the problem is something far more simple and fundamental.
The people designing desktop apps today simply never learned the conventions that make desktop applications good. They grew up with smartphone apps, web apps, electron apps, games, etc.
In fact, you can observe from things like JavaFX, Flutter, WPF, etc., that the trend has long been about the ability of easily creating custom widgets like you could with Javascript (or Flash), rather than the convenience of having a library of widgets that look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system.
"I couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended "
Sometimes I am starting to feel like how my dad looked many years ago when I tried to teach him how to use Windows. He simply couldn't see the window borders. With the latest designs I am reaching this point too. I am struggling moving and resizing windows because I can't tell where the border is.
> couldn't tell at first glance where one started and the other ended
This was even worse in an RDP session. No drop shadows. I'm not sure who thought "everything should be flat and white" was a good idea.
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> look and feel exactly the same as every other widget in the system
Which is what? Windows natively has like 4 official looks. You can click around the 2 (!) settings programs and pop open windows for basically every framework windows has created (and deprecated) in the last 2 decades.
We also lost clearly identifiable buttons, loading bars (replaced with throbbers), status bars that tell you what you're hovering over and what the program is doing, stable UIs to develop muscle memory, etc.
But we did gain some nice things!
- Tabs.
- Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
- Document editors remembering unsaved changes.
- Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
- Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings (we need more of those).
- Easy syncing (if I open Spotify on any device I'll see the same playlists, my clipboard is shared between phone/desktop/notebook, Immich integrates local and remote media, etc).
- Program-specific URL protocols, so that you can click on a link and have it open in a separate program (like `steam://open/games`).
- Map widgets, a small miracle we take for granted.
- Package managers/app stores that cleanly install and uninstall applications.
Titlebar buttons are actually bad. The titlebar exists (or existed) for a reason, so you'd have somewhere you could grab to manipulate the window. Now it's kind of a guessing game with every app on where you can grab without causing the app to do something you didn't want.
If that's a problem for you, you have much to gain with better window management shortcuts. On KDE I have the Windows key + left click set to drag a window from anywhere, and win + right click to resize depending on the quadrant the cursor is on. It's incredibly satisfying not having to hunt titlebar empty spaces or thin edges.
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If they do it correctly there's plenty of free space in the titlebar for grabbing. That's how it works in GTK+3 and later for example.
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> Titlebar buttons and other space-saving measures.
This has been net negative. Now everyone thinks it’s ok to shove every control up there and there’s nowhere to grab a window to move it that isn’t also a button. But the OS interprets button click and mouse drag as cancel the button click.
I wish people would stop doing this.
We HAVE HI DPI screens with large resolutions and even 640x480 had title bars!!!!!
What space could possibly need saving?
On a small macbook that I use for programming, every bit of my screen has been meticulously prepared by me to cram in a lot of functionality
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> Forms that validate on focus lost, instead of submission.
Not always positive. The form briefly loses focus for two seconds (while you open your password manager or whatever) and you are shouted at to “PLEASE ENTER A VALID USERNAME” in red.
Sometimes I see it complaining _on every keypress_. Certainly annoying, but much better than the old "invalid field" red text at the very bottom, leaving you to scroll back up and guess what's wrong.
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> - Tabs.
Tabs aren't really new: look at BeOS which could "tab" windows..
That said I agree with you that tab are really nice, especially the way VSCode manage them with the vertical list of opened files (I switched from vim to VSCode due to this feature).
> loading bars (replaced with throbbers)
There is a very practical reason for this; most GUI apps are webapps (whether local or not is irrelevant), and the fetch API was so poorly thought out that it was not possible to get an indicate of progress - all if gives you is inprogress or done (nothing in between).
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
There might have been worse ways to design the fetch API, but off-hand, I can't think of any - what came before it was immensely better for a user experience.
With a better API we could have a progress bar that goes through the TCP/IP stack: advance when the domain is resolved, when a handshake is finished, when the request is sent, when the response starts streaming back, when the response finishes.
It'd be a very jumpy bar, but it helps develop intuitions. "The first part is always slower on this machine", "when it gets stuck on this spot I need to reset my router", "this part will be slow because the request is large", etc.
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Most of the time you're fetching multiple things in parallel and you could show a progress of how many of those are done (perhaps weighted by estimated size). That's essentially the way many progress bars work.
> As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
We used to have the cursor indicating this in the good old days.
As a result the loading indicator can only indicate in-progress or done.
This is a failure of whatever framework the web dev is leaning on instead of actually programming the computer.
It is perfectly possible to get real progress information other than yes/no. Web sites had it for years before lazy spinners took over.
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I appreciate this balanced take! Let's hope one day we'll get the best of today's and yesterday's era.
I don't miss the loading bar. The progress in the bar never seems to correlate well with the actual time taken. It's not uncommon to have a progress bar breeze through the first half in seconds and spend minutes on the later half or vice versa. It's misleading to the point I recall "progress bar stuck on 99%" became a meme before people started calling them memes.
Just give me the option to view a log of what is happening under the hood. Tell me which step of the process you are at, what files are you copying etc.
There was a brief moment in history where we had the best of both worlds.
I grew up with Windows XP. We had most of these (except the titlebar buttons — although on second thought some custom Windows Media Player skins did have that, haha).
We all carried USB sticks around. So you always had your files with you. The computer itself was interchangeable, for the most part. (Which also led to my interest in portable apps.)
...and of course, Portable Apps require a relatively stable ABI...
https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
>Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux
Though macOS I think has a similar issue.
> - Tabs.
Should have been a generic window manager feature.
Apparently Cosmic will even let you combine different apps in the same tab group. I read that but haven't confirmed.
Web browsers had to innovate because OSes, DEs and GUI toolkits stagnated. Tabs and better sandboxing came from web the browser.
BeOS sort-of did that.
fluxbox have been doing that for over 20 years
"- Document editors remembering unsaved changes."
This can be really annoying when I don't want to save these changes
But we did gain some nice things!
None of the gains you list have anything to do with user interfaces. They would all or mostly be possible in any of the older desktop environments shown.
The screenshots in the post include many old applications, sometimes jarring to modern sensibilities. I think it's fair to have a discussion here about the evolution of application UI too, no?
> Ctrl+P menus to fuzzy-search all actions and settings
Wasn’t that in Emacs for decades?
Yes. The macOS menu bar is also searchable, which is cool. Unity on Ubuntu also had this back in the day.
Most people haven't experienced "addressable interfaces" like Emacs and don't know what they're missing when they only have visuospatial navigability. I would like to see searching and jumping make bigger impacts in mainstream UX design.
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Probably! To quote William Gibson, "the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed". I'm sure you can find some of these features all the way back in The Mother of All Demos, the difference now is that they're more common.
One of my biggest bugbears is losing the OK/Apply/Cancel concept with dialog boxes or settings windows. If I have a window with lots of settings that I want to experiment with then I've no problem with that setting taking effect immediately, but please give me the ability to back out all the changes I've tentatively made via a Cancel button.
I have a feeling you're in the minority. I've been using computers for 35+ years and I feel like I still don't understand OK/Apply/Cancel buttons. I still click Apply before clicking OK even if I know it's unnecessary.
Plus, I don't believe Cancel reverts changes the user made if they clicked Apply already. So your suggestion would go against how the UX of OK/Apply/Cancel has historically worked.
Yeah, me too. The Amiga had a good idea with its Preferences programs (i.e. settings or options) - a "Use" button, which only saves to memory, separate from the "Save" button, which also saves to disk. So even if you make a mess of it, just reboot. Of course, in those days we were used to rebooting often, so that wasn't an issue. But if the idea had caught on, then by now we'd probably also have a "Revert" option that copies from disk to memory and activates it.
My favorite is when I click a button to cancel an operation and a confirm dialog pops up where clicking “cancel” cancels the cancel.
I agree. There's something about those 80s and 90s interfaces with their visible affordances, grab points, etc., that just makes them instantly comprehensible. Many of them are also beautiful.
The absolute peak, for me, though are those early releases of MacOS X. Cheetah and Puma were both incredible, both in appearance, and in use. They looked fantastic but they still had all the affordances and comprehensibility of earlier interfaces.
One thing that's also very noticeable to me: title bars are title bars and nothing else. It's just easy to grab windows and move them, resize them, etc. Nowadays I really struggle sometimes to find a place in (what should be) the titlebar to drag a window in many application.
We have lost indeed.
In Mac I use:
in order to enable dragging windows via `Cmd + Ctrl + Click`.
It is very difficult for people with impaired vision to find the scrollbars, buttons et.al. on windows 11. The scrollbars are too narrow and often auto hidden. The buttons are flat and not easy to separate from normal text. Tell one window from another is also quite challenge.
I still want alt+underlined letter for menus.
Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
> Ubuntu is great for resizing - alt + middle click anywhere on the window. If only other OS'es could do the same.
Not Ubuntu -specific. On all my setups alt+LMB moves, alt+RMB near any edge resizes that specific edge.
No need for pixel-perfect grabbing.
Yeah, this is the one thing about Linux I constantly miss when using anything else.
I wonder how hard it would be to make a thing for that...
Here's a maintained fork of one I used to use in another life: https://github.com/RamonUnch/AltSnap
Microsoft's PowerToys did add that in (I think) the last version. Alt + Left click moves, alt + right click resizes.
Oh my gosh they actually did!
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/pull/47024
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/powertoys/grab-and...
I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar? For me, almost never (or only as an indication of progress through a document). I'm scrolling only with wheel or arrows or PgUp etc.
Perhaps though this is learned behaviour from scrollbars being tiny. I'd rather have the extra screen space. The scrollbar is usually a nuisance when I accidentally touch it (touchscreen) and the page jumps away.
When reading a document in a browser, I rely on the scrollbar to know things like: how long is it? Where am I in the document? How much of the document is on my screen right now?
This is critical for decisions like: "Should I read the whole thing?" and for building a mental map of the whole document.
I use the scrollbar to scroll between parts of the document if I need to flick back and forth quickly, say between the data and the interpretation, once I have that mental map and know where things roughly are.
While reading, I'm dragging or wheeling.
You can do interesting things in the scroll bar. Some coding editors (like Visual Studio) cram a lot of useful information into the scroll bar.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/how-to-tr...
For mouse users, clicking and dragging the scrollbar is the fastest and most intuitive way to scroll through a large document or list. (The scroll wheel, if you have one, is much slower.)
Until some dolt decides to build "infinite scroll" - I've seen dragging the scrollbar with the mouse cause JS exceptions to be thrown on some pages. One for the UI hall of shame.
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For scrolling large distances in large documents, that's an important use case to me. As an indication of progress is another important use case, but also as an indication to show the size of the document relative to the viewport.
> I'm curious - how often do you use the scrollbar?
Almost every time. Scrolling with the mouse has bugs in Windows (focus on the active field) and fine grained scrolling is not possible with the mouse.
I don't think we've lost these things so much as our preferences have now become a minority where once we were the majority. It seems completely normal. With the barrier to entry dropping, designs now match what is appealing to the largest number. Linux DEs are still quite customizable, and we're fortunate that niche desires can still be met there.
Have you been unable to find a DE or a DE theme with that type of UI/UX? I haven't looked into it, since I don't have these issues and prefer a more modern look, but surely there must be options out there if that's what you want.
I think the parent is lamenting the lack of this in a commercially viable DE, like MacOS or Windows.
As much as it pains me to say it: custom Linux distros are not often deployed en masse. Especially not the ones that “look old”.
SerenityOS is the most well known but it's a fully custom operating system of its own. For Linux you can install the chicago95 theme (includes a widget set for GTK+3) and the b00merang GTK+4 theme (doesn't help with excess padding unfortunately, but it still has proper high-contrast 3D for the widgets and color for the headerbar. The mobile-friendly responsive UX of new GTK+4 apps actually works great with the traditional 3D look.)
The latest KDE with a suitable theme actually comes quite close.
Just finding a drag able area of the window to reposition it is a huge pain.