Windows 9x and Word 9x at 800x600 resolution. Spacious. Comfy
oldbytes.space
oldbytes.space
We have higher resolutions and bigger screens. I understand some people don't like the idea of adding more buttons to the UI because it can make it look cluttered and confusing, but rather than just adding padding around everything, why not make the icons higher resolution and maybe slightly bigger to take up the increased available screen real estate?
I'm sick of people associating "modern" with "good" and "dated" with "bad". Modern flat UIs are terrible for discovery, as it makes it impossible to tell what elements are interactable. And IMO, they're just plain ugly, but that's a matter of personal opinion.
Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.
Personally I blame the shift to mobile as much as the shift to web for this - that's what drove the much-hated Windows 8 interface (leveraging the desktop computer monopoly to try and give the Windows Phone offerings a familiarity advantage), all coinciding with Gnome jumping the shark and Ubuntu shifting to something new. Ironic that during the end of the 'naughties' Apple were the pioners of touchscreen UI on commodity devices, but seemed to be the only player who understood that the desktop was a completely separate space, and should remain so.
This is word/office 97 though, peak office, which came before all of that.
Menus removing "unused" items must be one of the worst UI decisions of all time. Imagine how many user stories, thousands of tests and interviews resulted in that abomination.
Sometimes you just can't beat common sense. Problem is to know when you can and when you can not.
Personally, I think the Windows OS itself is one of the most problematic offenders. How can you expect better from third party developers, when MS uses at least 3 different UI paradigms for system settings? And F1 doesn't bring up help - it brings up a web browser!
And this is why I DO feel differently about Word, which does take up way too much space with a ribbon full of tools that really aren't of interest. In word, I'm usually writing something, and then spending a small percentage of the time changing formatting. Quite different from Excel, where it's more often than not working with large datasets pulled either from a csv online or directly from a SQL server and the various tools and functions are central to the task at hand.
I guess the point is, it really depends on use case as for whether the ribbon makes sense, and it should be left to the user to decide to use the old menu based system or the new ribbon based system based on how much time is spent composing vs. manipulating the existing data. Right tool for the job.
The Browser Software Era designs are idiomatic. They're based on (CD-ROM era) multimedia and adventure games, not desktop apps.
The earliest, most influential web designers had been doing multimedia. The earliest creation tools were tailored for them.
That aesthetic has been carried forward, for better or worse.
Browsers, OTOH, used to dsplay content to be copied and pasted everywhere. Nowadays there are silos everywhere, and interoperatibiity sucks.
(Actually, the more the merrier!)
This sounds pretty great to me. If the applications are well designed, they can do their own thing. I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom. It's great that you can immediately tell which app you're in just from a glance. And also it's more interesting when applications have their own character.
I would say idioms should maybe play a role at a company level, i.e. it makes sense that Google products will share design principles. But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
They are almost never well designed. Devs, particularly those who get excited about “clever” UX don’t care about usability.
> I don't see why we need to conform to a centralized idiom.
Because I don’t want to learn dozens of keyboard shortcuts to do the same thing just because a random dev thought it was clever to have their own thing. Because I don’t want to spend hours navigating “clever” menu layouts and figure out whether the settings I am after are behind a hamburger, in a sub-sub-submenu, in a contextual menu, or hidden behind arcane commands (hello, Chrome). I don’t want some stupid software forcing down on me metaphors from another stupid OS, either.
I do want text fields to support the same operations everywhere; I want menus to be used the same way as well, and these are the most egregious.
OS provided widgets offer baseline functionality the users expect to find. Re-implementing your own widgets is fucking stupid: you are spending a lot of time to re-invent the wheel, and in the end it does not even work.
It’s just like cryptography. Don’t roll your own. Your users will thank you.
Exactly for the same reason why humanity has come up with an idea of standards. Same set of reasons I would even say.
> But I wouldn't impose the same principles to all applications just so it will be slightly more familiar to some people.
This is because design choices are more important to you than users' comfort and productivity. Some argue that it should be the other way around, though.
He remarked that high-density UIs confuse and overwhelm most people, while technical people have developed the skill of sifting through lots of on-screen information and controls.
Ah, this is the phrase I see most often when one UX person or team wants to justify throwing out the previous UX person or team's design in order to replace it with their own.
On top of that, it is of course very condescending to the users. Especially those who have invested significant amounts of their own time in leaning how to effectively use the existing UI.
And the funny thing is that this process never ends. Every couple of months the UI must be redesigned. They can never settle on one idea.
And as I mentioned, the flat style hides discoverability, so I think it offsets the usability gains from making the UI appear less cluttered.
So sure, maybe extra real estate means we can allow UI elements to breathe a bit, but keep the 3D look on elements that can be interacted with. Buttons should still be buttons. Text should be text. Interactable buttons should not be merely an icon or text.
You're building software for people to use 5 days a week for their job, make it as easy to use as possible assuming they've spent some time learning how to use it. Don't sacrifice that to optimize for the tiny fraction of time where they're beginners.
See also: basing your entire design on usability testing performed with people who are using it for the first time.
They are looking at people who aren't veteran users of the product because those are the ones who will buy it. If someone new to the product can't understand it quickly, they won't buy.
Does it suck yes but it's very logical.
I gave up on GUIs years ago and just do as much as I can via the terminal. The terminal is the ultimate power user experience.
The shared spreadsheet model is killing productivity.
Same for Windows not allowing to sort programs in taskbar the way they were opened. Tons of office workers have multiple documents opened and dont even know how to try to unfuck their taskabar (that is still bad in Windows 10/11).
Not buying it. Most people can deal just fine with spreadsheets, which are the epitome of high density UI.
What people don't deal with well are badly designed UIs which present illogical controls and information.
And yes, high whitespace UIs results in people seeing less confusing shit on the page, but only because it's now spread across 3 pages, not 1.
If you're dealing with a hundred people in an office, then the vast majority can probably deal with a high-density UI. Because they are there for work and the UI - and more importantly the concepts underneath that UI and the mental model it requires - will be related to the stuff they already know.
But if you're dealing with an audience of millions who are trying to pass the time, or using apps or parts of the system that they rarely interact with, or have no real interest in the device, then a high-density UI will be extremely intimidating. They have no mental model of what is being represented on-screen - and if it's casual usage, they have no desire to spend the energy to learn that mental model. What they will want is the device to have two big buttons saying "do this" or "do that". Which is why the iPhone's grid of icons endures - "I want a bus ticket", "I want the camera", "I want to watch a video".
Personally I think the hardest part of UX design is ensuring the model presented on-screen matches the model that the user is expecting.
Which has two implications - firstly, it's entirely audience dependent and secondly, the further the UX model and the actual underlying model diverge, the more cracks will appear while people are using it - so you have to design from the bottom up for that given audience.
I bet you're thinking about people who have used spreadsheets before. You might even be thinking of people who use spreadsheets weekly or daily. Try putting them in front of a new user, and you will be shocked.
As someone who has performed many usability tests, I can only think of one person who said "I wish this was more dense and complicated", and that fellow sticks out because he is the exception who proves the rule that almost everyone wants it to be simple and above all clear. Most of the time, people just want to know what they should be doing next, and everything else is a potential source of confusion.
Probably time to re-evaluate that prior.
I think part of the problem here is that "high-density UIs" gets used in multiple ways. Some designers, perhaps not those with ready access to users, take high-density UIs to refer to the markings on the screen. A button with borders next to a text field with borders is considered to be higher density than a button without borders next to a text field without borders, because the borders visually divide the field up. And if the border lines provide an affordance (e.g. a button pushed up), then that's complexity (because the lines have different colors, which is more complex than a design where lines all have the same color).
But such an interpretation goes against the research of the 80s and 90s. I have never been directed to evidence that "complexity" and "density" refer specifically to visual complexity and visual density as distinct from conceptual complexity and conceptual density or widget complexity and widget density - all the evidence I've ever come across (as in the old evidence, or the medium post by another descendant comment of my parent comment) suggests that visual complexity and density actually operate to clarify conceptual/widget complexity/density.
So I think the claims made by practitioners need to inspected and made more precise. What kind of complexity and density are they trying to resolve? And what evidence do they have that this specific kind of complexity and density is problematic, rather than clarifying?
They had to do a user research with 600 people to realize that text input fields have to look like text input fields: https://medium.com/google-design/the-evolution-of-material-d...
In their latest iteration they don't even understand the concept of aligning things visually: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1643607965935476737.html
etc. etc.
Yet he doesn't seem concerned that the Flat Design part of Material UI is confusing to those same people.
Except the Japanese?
Meanwhile every day I see people struggle to work with the more minimalist UI designs we see today. A lot of options are obfuscated and hidden away under the guise of keeping it clean, when instead the focus ought to be on laying out tools in a way that makes sense and remains in people's memory.
And of course every bit of software has different ideas about what minimalist and clean is, so you have to remember multiple ways how to do the same tasks.
So the whole UI is being optimised for non-technical new users. Which does make sense commercially - you don't want your product reviews all about how the UI is too complex. But it would be nice to be able to flip a switch and tell the thing "I know what I'm doing now, can I have my pixels back please?"
did he give any references?
Doesn't' mean they're right, of course.
I've always wondered why we diverged so much on UIs between eastern and western countries. Chinese characters pack information in a way that our alphabet doesn't, but that can't be the only reason, can it?
I absolutely hate it. All the app windows just blend into one, it's just so hard to see them.
Also, even basic Explorer windows often lose their borders when logging in via RDP, leading to white on white mayhem, but I've always assumed that's a bug.
With computer mouse you can use much smaller and denser controls of course.
And if using a touchscreen for that is a pain, then at least optimize for a mouse instead of something noone will actually use.
That's smart! : )
Windows Phones are gone, but people still use Office on touch devices: MS Surface tablet, and other manufacture's Windows tablets or hybrid laptop/tablet devices, or just touch-screen laptops¹ which are a thing, and increasingly the web versions of office that might be used on anything modern including iPads.
> I don't understand why they removed the lines between buttons.
The usual reason for things like this is that it makes things look cleaner, or more modern⁴, which it does. Though IMO it has a detrimental effect on discoverability (it that a button, a link, or just some text?!) and navigation, even for the modern touch-first idea it is sometimes aiming at (where are the edges of what I can touch?).
My biggest irritation with modern UIs is focus indication on the desktop. It has been a problem for many years but only gets worse as time goes on: it can be difficult to see at a glance, especially over multiple screens, which window currently has input focus because many app families use different window decorations and even within one app the active/not distinction can come down to the difference between one shade of off-white/black and another shade of off-white/black (MS Office and Firefox are both guilty of this).
--
[1] I know people really like touching their screen where possible instead of using a mouse or trackpad, I sometimes find it preferable myself² though not for Office & similar tasks.
[2] and for the most part I'm an old-fashioned keyboard-or-die person, regularly bemoaning bad design decisions³ (or simple laziness of not implementing standard shortcuts) that force me to leave the keyboard to mouse/trackpad/touch
[3] which can't be good for accessibility reasons, as well as not-irritating-the-like-of-me reasons
[4] though given how quickly fashion changes, I'm of the opinion that “to look modern” should never be a design consideration in a product intended to last into next year!
To sell Microsoft Surface, among other things.
It feels to me that the more advanced graphics and display technologies become, the less GUIs make use of them.
32-bit colors with panels rendering billions of beautiful colors? Naw, black and white only.
Monitors capable of displaying over 33 million square area pixels? Naw, no pixels to spare for borders or shading.
Panels refreshing at 360Hz and faster powered by GPUs costing a few grand and CPUs with two dozen cores? Naw, response times are so last century.
Enough RAM to fit the entirety of Unicode including emoticons for love hotels and smiling poo? Naw, obscure hieroglyphs baby.
There's a part of me wondering if those command line warriors with their luscious neckbeards were right about GUIs being the inferior interface.
There’s nothing quite like trying to hit the narrow grab handle of a borderless window with a white title bar on top of a window full of white content. There’s no way Microsoft’s designers are actually using the stuff they’re making IMO.
After 7, I switched to Mac, and even after all these years, I still have fond memories of that OS. Every time I tried a new Windows version, they seemed to have gone downhill.
Windows 7 didn't use less resources than Vista, it was virtually the same, it's just that PCs have gotten miles faster in the timespan between Vista and 7 and people thought it was the OS that improved (think going from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo, from 256/512 MB to 2GB RAM, spinning rust to SSD).
7 was not that much different from Vista, the problem was that when Vista launched, most people still had Windows 9/XP level hardware and that's what most PC retailers were still selling as well, at least on the budget end, and expected Vista to run the same on the same HW, while Vista demanded more as it was a complete overhaul from Windows XP/9.
7 didn't improve much performance wise from Vista, it's just that by that time people had already upgraded to much better hardware, and they felt a massive performance improvement.
By most metrics, 7 was basically a Vista Service Pack, renamed to distance itself from the bad press Vista got, but it was more or less Vista under the hood, but it's the better HW that brought the speed bump. If you were to review both OSs side by side, you wouldn't notice a speed difference.
But why optimise for an 800x800 resolution (which would essentially give you lots of empty real estate if you have a higher resolution)? I really don't get this post?
We have let the visual designers run mad and it is killing software.
From my side I'm going to continue excluding UX folk from all future development unless it's an explicitly new-user facing app on a mobile device.
Because, unless today, the additional space will not be filled with useless hamburger menus but it will be used by the main working area.
Then there is the baffling (and still present) fuckery of the user directories in Explorer. There are all kinds of shadow copies of your user directories that are "forbidden." WHY? WTF is all of that shit?
I think they also removed (or, again, buried) the ability to organize your programs into groups in the Start menu. WTF are they thinking? I want to put all of my graphic-editor apps together. I want to put all of my audio apps together. Then I want another group for my office/productivity apps. But NO! MS thinks I want everything in a giant, disorganized pile. Or I want them organized by VENDOR name. What the ever-loving shit would I want that for?
There are little regressions everywhere. Another one is in Explorer. Originally, Explorer would show + signs next to directories that were not empty. I think it was Windows 7 where they stopped showing those... unless you happened to roll the cursor into the left pane of Explorer; then they would suddenly appear. WHY? Are we supposed to sweep the cursor across every pixel on the screen, looking for hidden goodies? Absolutely retarded.
And eventually MS abandoned the universally-understood + sign in favor of a stupid TRIANGLE to disclose additional contents. The + sign is fucking UNIVERSALLY UNDERSTOOD to mean "additional." WTF is a triangle supposed to mean?
I'm so glad the world has largely moved on from Windows, because it is a disgrace. I'm just bummed because I want to use MS Flight Simulator, but it would require me to buy and set up an expensive Windows system. NO WAY. Looks like X-Plane for me.
I miss the "put all windows of this app in a grid" command.
The start menu was useful and you could get an overview of apps and add your own folder hierarchy to it.
You could choose your self what Windows updates to install.
There is like no change but 64 bit support I like since Windows XP.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/05/take-part-in-the-new...
That UI is absolutely horrid. Everything is hidden. It is complete and utter unusable garbage that has no business being in an application being used by professionals.
> Meanwhile, the UI trends in the industry have evolved,
No, they've devolved. That's what this entire thread is about.
> and many of our new users tell us that the UI appears heavyweight
Your "new users" are likely your lowest common denominator user. They're beginners at coding and haven't learned all the things that they're going to want a single click away.
> and dated.
Dated? Dated is good.
> Our goals were to reduce visual complexity
A goal that sounds noble, but really isn't.
> provide easy access to essential features
By hiding them behind unintuitive buttons that don't even have any text? Just a meaningless icon?
> It's the first time I've seen a step in the right direction for a long time.
110% disagree. They dumbed down the UI considerably.
> There is so much more room.
Even in 1080p, I think JetBrains IDEs have just enough room. In 1440p, it's great. I upgraded to 4K recently and I have more room than I know what to do with.
Are you using a 14" laptop monitor or something?
Complexity can be reduced to zero by shipping a blank page.
I don’t understand what’s being gained in some cases. For example, their UIs used to have sideways buttons with icons and labels in the gutters on the left and right. Now it’s icons only and a bunch of blank space. I don’t get any extra usable space and now I have to memorize a new set of icons and remember what they do.
What’s behind the hamburger menu in the left gutter and why can’t it be made directly accessible as icons in all that free space?
All of it reminds me of the versions of Chrome where the “show all downloads” action on the downloads page was by itself under a hamburger menu while the row in the UI was basically blank.
Admittedly when I'm at home on my bigger screens I don't value space as much as I do on my small work screens.
I like to think that every single one of those was a pet project of some PM at Microsoft, and they have them on their stupid resume.
I wanted to see how LibreOffice would compare on my netbook, and frankly it's better than the new Word, but still "worse" than the old version: https://i.imgur.com/cWGYh3M.png
That said, at least LibreOffice lets you have your custom themes and actually offers a variety of different interface layouts, which I think is a nice touch: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Videos/User_interface
> Windows 7 with the Classic theme (which really was just a slight evolution over Win2K) was peak UI/UX, and you'll never change my mind. It's been downhill ever since, getting worse and worse with each generation.
To be honest, I'm inclined to agree with this. That's also why I rather enjoyed the Redmond theme even in *nix distros. There's just something so very usable about the old Windows look and more modern attempts, such as SerenityOS https://serenityos.org/ and even ReactOS https://reactos.org/
What The Actual Fuck Is Happening. /rant
Edit: and also, since they've shoved OneDrive/Teams/O365/SharePoint/Etc down our throats you'd think there'd be a clear and obvious interface for sharing a file within this new, enlightened context menu... except that's mysteriously an icon and not a labelled option like the rest of the options instead. Great for discovery!
UI design is not just some designer deciding that something looks good and just doing it that way. UI/UX design is not some "beautiful interaction layer" that you put on top of the actual "real part" of the application. A lot of software developers (me included originally) seem to think that way, I don't know why, maybe it's a bias in education. UI design is an integral part of the software development process, and I would argue more important than the programming itself. In fact, it should be the primary source of decisions that we make in our choices behind the software development process, not the other way around.
UI/UX design is the art and science of looking at your product the way a user would look at it, making it as accessible and intuitive as possible. It is the art and science of making the product that your user wants and needs, instead of whatever you think they need. The decisions made in UI design (like "adding more whitespace") are not made arbitrarily. They are not made because someone thinks it looks pretty. They are the result of years of user research and A/B testing, just like our programming paradigms are the result of years of research. It would be arrogant to dismiss all this effort by millions of people based on personal opinion.
That being said, the Office ribbon is a complete clusterfuck, and kind of the worst example you can find of modern UI design.
That also being said, I do think the original post is making a false comparison. Of course UI's will be designed to fit the technology of their age. If you only have limited screen space you want to conserve it as much as possible, hence why the toolbar approach was chosen for Word 97, as even screens of 1024x768 resolution were rare back then. The ribbon UI was designed for an age where larger screens were common and it could be afforded to take up more pixels. In fact if you were to put a 40px toolbar on a modern 4K screen it would be tiny, hard to see and hard to click on. Putting the modern ribbon UI on an old 800x600 screen that it was not at all designed for is pushing an agenda.
Maybe sometimes it is, but not in the article.
The article in fact has multiple problems.
1. The titlebar of the _host virtual machine_ is included in the offensive version. This is probably not a coincidence but to exaggerate the issue.
2. The ribbon bar that combines the title bar and menu bar of old in fact consumes _less_ precious vertical space.
3. The icon spacing is roughly the same in both screenshots.
4. The major "offender" in white space is the different layout being used but that has nothing to do with UI design but everything to do with giving plenty of space for header and footer editing, and showing "real life" page margins -- the print layout! The Word 9x screenshot doesn't use/have that display mode. It's not WYSIWYG. That display mode can usually be disabled, at least in the latest Word versions.
Case closed. It's a rubbish article especially because this CAN be a problem in modern UI's and there are plenty of better examples.
They look very nice but have very little substance.
And to think that one of the most versatile and used interfaces is a spreadsheet, which has very dense information.
Talking about old vs new, you would never convince me that the abomination that is the ribbon is better than the previous interface (menus/icons).
Everything about that theme was perfection. If you disable all kinds of animations, then it becomes even better.
I put the remainder of the elements on top of their new counterparts.
If you look harder, the icons are larger. Single icons got replaced by more explanatory content. The "expands" symbol is larger. And there are more actions crammed into the toolbar.
Also, yes, there's a lot of whitespace. But let's not forget the reason MS redesigned the office toolbars. It wasn't because it looked bad, it was because after people configured them to be functional it tended to take most of the screen.
This was true only for people who didn't know how to use a computer. And the fault was on MS side. By default, after installation, every MS Office program had the screen filled with toolbars.
And, surprise, surprise, today is the same. The damn Ribbon uses almost 1/3 of the vertical space. And you cannot have individual toolbars anymore. It is all or nothing. And this is for the native programm. The "web" version is a total disaster in GUI design.
Which wasn't a problem in ye olde times with 4:3 screens dominating the landscape, but nowadays is with 16:9 screens.
I held on to Windows 7 until the EOL date and I was forced to upgrade by my company for this reason. Minimal padding, clear borders and drag targets, high contrast coloring, no animations; it was far better usability-wise.
And I had to get to 2560x1440 before I felt like I really had enough room for more than one window at a usable size and placement at the same time. (Not really surprising, as it's finally big enough to put 1280x720 windows next to each other.)
It is all relative. Someone who grew up in a tiny apartment may consider an average-sized house spacious, someone who grew up in a mansion may consider it cramped.
When all I had was 640x480, it didn't feel cramped, because it was all I knew. And then 800x600 came along, and "wow this is huge". And now I start Windows 3.1 in a VM, and "I don't remember it being this small?"
When I was a little kid, I thought our house and backyard were enormous. Then my parents sold that house and we moved to another city, and I haven't been inside it for over 30 years now. I bet if I went back tomorrow, it would look a lot smaller than I remember it being
It was like when we jumped from software rendering 3D at 320x200 unfiltered textures struggling to get to 30FPS to 3D accelerated 640x480 at 60FPS... WOW! We don't see those kind of jumps much any more but you do cherish them when they turn up.
800x600 on a CRT back then really did feel as big as 1920x1080 today.
How so? CRT pixels aren't active, is that what you mean? They are still distinct picture elements ("pix-els").
Of course, that's all for horizontal lines. The number of vertical lines is actually part of the signal. It's just that there's a lot of fuzziness in how many times you can subdivide an individual line.
Also, I'm unsure as to how the monitor type would have any impact on the screen real-estate available to the OS. If the OS is rendering an 800x600 screen, then there are 800 pixels of room available horizontally and 600 vertically, no matter the screen technology.
Given a 32 pixel size of an icon for example, there's would be room for 25 icons horizontally with a 800x600 resolution but 50 icons on a 1600 resolution. The screen technology does not factor into this at all.
What I do give you that it's probably possible to drive a CRT monitor of a relatively small size with larger resolutions because pixels can be infinitely small, though, as I said in the beginning of the comment, at some point you will get issues with sharpness and things become blurry.
1280x1024 was pretty nice on early LCDs as well.
It used to be faster before they started 'scaling' the display.
And why not compare against actual 2023 Word? The Ribbon collapses down to simplified elements that trigger popups when space constrained. The writing surface dominates.
This is what a more fair comparison looks like. https://i.imgur.com/wAqSvrV.png
1) There's plenty of room for editing
2) The UX at the top is about 25% taller because everything (fonts, icons) is scaled to be about 25% larger in each dimension for readability since people have bigger screens now.
And so actually, usable area has actually increased as a proportion of average consumer screen height.
The original Twitter post is just a silly unfair comparison.
And the issue isn't the content margins, it's the UI. There's no reason to have a paste button 3-4x the size of other buttons, for example.
When Microsoft created the ribbon layout, this was the tail-end of when they were still doing lots of user-research, by putting real users in labs and observing how well they did at common tasks.
So I believe them that having a paste button 3-4x bigger than the size of the other buttons is actually better for the majority of the users.
These days UIs are just all defined by the designer or developers personal preference, without any actual user testing ("personally I just use command-V, why would you even NEED a paste button??!!", "lets make all these icons tiny and gray and obscure because it looks cleaner!!")
That gore is the primary reason why Microsoft designed ribbons.
The ribbon is, and continues to be, garbage. Most days I have to resort to the "Search" function in Office to locate a feature for which I clearly remember the exact menu location from 25 years ago, yet I'll be god damned if I could find it in the ribbon after over 10 minutes of searching.
Logically one would think icons and visually distinctly colored ribbon tabs would be better, but (at least for me) they are decidedly worse.
Ribbons surface more elements to browse in a freeform context, which is correct if you need to discover features...but also conflicts with the goal of a toolbar to be a thin layer over the shortcuts.
It's something I think about a lot with the Ribbon because it has some really good keyboard mnemonics in Office applications, but mostly only Power Users think to press the Alt button to let them "bubble in" on the Ribbon. The keyboard mnemonic bubbles make great landmarks, and I think that remains one of the reasons I rather like the Ribbon (as a power user) that a lot of people never discover. (In part because I was there a million years ago when Word first lost the underlines and was used to even then pressing Alt on its own just to see them so that behavior carried over to the Ribbon just fine for me, luckily enough.)
There is a really robust search area, at least as implemented in Office. It will show you where the button is on which ribbontab (at least last I used Office, which was years ago).
So we have:
* Is actually no worse than the existing solution.
* Contains a tool to address limitations carried over from the existing solution.
Correctly implemented ribbons are strictly superior to prior interfaces (ignoring any styling approaches, such as flat UI). The only issue with them is that cheese has been moved, and people are upset about that.
I think the best fix for this problem is to have different sets of toolbars for different tasks, a sort of modality. Ribbons achieve this, but but they also bring odd bits of seemingly arbitrary UI design that can't be changed, like the gigantic paste button in Word's Home ribbon which can't be removed without removing the whole control group. The more uniform/standardized nature of the old toolbars is preferable in my eyes.
There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started.
The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho.
The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today).
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/jensenh/ (unfortunately as with all old blogs, sans images. Raymond Chen was right once again)
I'm pretty sure Office had customizable toolbars, so yes, every menu item should be a toolbar item, but it's unlikely that anyone actually wants them all enabled. And yeah, customizing toolbars is pretty far up the learning curve; so I understand the motivation for the Ribbon, but I managed to stop using office before I had to experience it, so I don't know how well it actually worked.
I have a 10" LCD as a secondary monitor, positioned above my main display. I wouldn’t want to replace it with anything else, it’s just as perfect for my needs as it gets.
Technically it’s 2K, but it’s so small that I use it at 2× scale. That means its effective resolution is 960 × 540, just 8% more pixels than 800 × 600.
Apple is the pied pier, leading all the rats off a cliff (unified and locked-down single device, it's coming), and we're the rats who follow blindly. Nobody questions the design decisions, they presume it's good because Apple did it.
It's good, but not for them.
No they aren't. CSS pixels are completely irrelevant to this discussion, not to mention it is fundamentally misunderstanding what they are.
>all because when Apple does something
I have no idea why Apple is catching strays in a conversation discussing non-Apple software, for a problem not seen in Apple software.
I don't think they're strays or unwarranted. Apple makes icons flat, every else makes icons flat. Apple adds white-space around icons, everyone else does.
They are! look at the viewport specifications
https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/target/using/experie...
They are actually smaller than 800x600. Most of the web is now optimized for these sizes
And FWIW, little to nothing on the web is optimized for less than 800x600. We work with the fake pixels as just another measurement tool, but actually using most websites with physically less than 800x600 is brutal.
Some are Funny and you see, Massive Hamburger (1/3 of the screen followed by a Cookie Consent taking another 1/3 of the screen.) -- I don't stay on these sites often.
Does anything work in 16 MB RAM today? Some jpegs take up more memory than that! Today's systems need 1000x more memory, but are you getting 1000x more functionality? Hardly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeWS#/media/File:The_NeWS_Tool...
Maybe though. There's some pretty sci-fi stuff on my 16GB machine. Just photos alone – it stores tens of thousands of high-resolution photos, reads all the text in them, recognises people's faces and objects, and lets me search and browse the entire database instantly just by typing in a single word from someone's t-shirt in a picture I took two decades ago. And it's all completely transparently synchronised across multiple devices and with globally-available cloud storage.
I think sometimes people underestimate the pretty amazing capabilities of modern software and hardware. That's not to say that there isn't a lot of waste in many ways, and that many modern apps can be sluggish. But I think this stance is often pretty dismissive.
Without a doubt. I couldn't play any of the VR games I enjoy in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to edit the photos from my nice camera in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to videocall my family in 16MB of RAM. I wouldn't be able to reasonably decode and playback streaming HD video content with 16MB of RAM. The vast majority of the things I do with my computer I genuinely wouldn't be able to reasonably do in 16MB of RAM, so yeah, my computer is practically infinitely more useful. Not 1000x, not 10,000x, not 100,000,000,000x. Even more than that.
We did with 256MB of RAM
>Videocall
Kopete, Ekiga. Less resolution, maybe, but much more features.
No, not 1e10x. Maybe, 1e3x. A tiny step over the huge step from 1990 to 2000.
256 != 16MB. We're already 16x past the original claim, and it's still not as useful as my current machine.
And were those photos the same resolution and bit depth? Would you say the experience is really similar? Back when I had 256MB of RAM, editing even a couple megapixel photo from my Nikon Coolpix 2000 was usually pretty slow. There's no way it would reasonably process a 20MP photo and have an acceptable experience.
Still no VR gaming.
And yeah, sure, I did video calls at 256MB RAM. It was a pretty crappy experience, like 320x240 at like 10fps, nowhere near comparable to having multiple participants in HD and reasonable frame rates. I did maybe a handful of calls a month, now I have several calls a day. However, I never did video calls on a machine with 16MB of RAM.
The person I was replying to was talking about a 16MB desktop, not a 256MB desktop.
And like, yeah, if you scale back the expectations to the other stuff we had when desktops had 256MB of RAM on average, and you squint real hard, it kind of looks the same. But that 2MP photo isn't the same as a 20MP RAW, they're not really comparable. A laggy, pixelated, single video call really isn't the same as multi person HD calls. The expansion in features makes these things a lot more viable in actually using them day to day. Like, I didn't bother video calling many people because the experience in 256MB RAM was miserable. Now I do it all the time, because the experience is way better because our computers are just so much more powerful.
If the experience of doing it is so bad from it's limitations that you practically never use it, it's utility value is practically zero.
BIOS had to fit in a couple hundred kB. There was no room for nonsense like UEFI has. Other than POST, it booted pretty quickly because even a slow CPU can do anything that credibly fits in 200kB pretty quickly. (O(n^2) algorithms were pretty unlikely at boot time.)
Having three or four different control panels each controlling part of, say, the network configuration takes developer time, compile time, and distribution space. When everything needs to fit on one CD or, better yet, a few floppies and the companies were new and very small and scrappy by modern standards, this would be utterly impractical. There was one control panel because it was cheaper and less code!
Want one developer and zero professional designers to make a dialog box? You use one well-designed widget set (from the OS vendor!) and you just do it. Everything is easy to use because the resources needed to make pretty-but-undiscoverable UIs weren’t available.
(We see this today writ small in the embedded space. For example, Secure Boot is an abomination that, as implemented in essentially all cases, requires truly bizarre CPU resources and complexity. So embedded systems use vastly simpler chain-of-trust systems.)
Joke's on them. When they killed classic solitaire, they also destroyed the last reason to keep my older family members on Windows. If everything is going to be unfamiliar anyway, it might as well just be a Chromebook.
Always having a map on me which has almost every business on it? Immediately finding where something is and getting turn-by-turn directions?
Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers!
Computers have permanently altered society. Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D
In this world where my pocket supercomputer keeps having slot machine apps and candy crush pushed onto it by the service provider, I wish I had the more utilitarian and less brand friendly version of technology dreamed up in science fiction.
This was already possible with Win CE, I had a palmtop with gps and voice navigation, maps for whole Europe were stressing that compact flash card space, but it was almost as good as current maps. Lot's of POI's too.
> Always being in contact with friends across nations. Discord servers!
Yeah, we had irc and email and ICQ too (working effortlessly on 100mHz pentium).
> Yeah, your desktop is slower and more aggravating to use, but we're living in a world only science fiction could have dreamed of. :D
It's just that average user doesn't care that much about speed, so UI's are tweaked for look until they are barely usable on prev-gen devices, but good enough on latest shiny ones. On the other hand - all those need for more hardware speed gave us truly new possibilities, but somehow apart from better graphics I can't remember anything I could only dream of (maybe discovering plants or birds from photo, which was deemed "too hard" by XKCD[0] in 2014).
What.
Well, Linux runs quite well in 1GB. And for me the killer app that requires that 1GB just for Linux is package dependency resolution on apt. Outside from that, I've run it quite well in 500MB. (Does it have 30x more functionality than a 90's SunOS? Well, without any doubt, just by replacing that stuff with GNU tools is already a great gain; and the DE doesn't even compare.)
Now, I use several applications that require many GB of RAM. One of those is a Windows VM :)... But also, compilers and IDEs. Firefox by itself needs close to 1 GB. Those last 3 do absolutely have a lot of features that justify the extra memory.
But funny thing is that LibreOffice stopped at near 1GB too. It doesn't do much more than when it used 300MB, but it's not such a huge difference as it is in MS Office. And neither require anything as much memory as Teams...
Relevant: https://youtu.be/IagZIM9MtLo
Hey Hey 16k, what does that give you today? You need more than that for a letter, old-school RAM packs were much better
If you need to interact with the modern web that calculus will change rapidly. If you could run something like Dillo (or lynx) on a non-JavaScript site and never need to access the public web you might be ok. The moment you need to open a modern browser you'd be boned.
Current apps are designed to be run at much higher resolutions, and are also fine at utilizing the available space.
If we try to put current apps into small resolutions there will be very small usable space as they aren't meant to be there.
If we try to put old programs to current huge areas there will be too much working space, looking very disproportional and potentially distracting focus.
Both are fine for the environments that they are targeting.
What's more, I feel like people aren't bothering to recognize that the newer UI shows the document as it would be laid out on a page when you print it. This is really helpful if you write documents to be printed. It seems clear that the newer UI, while there are elements I dislike, is more useful.
Word 9x was WYSIWYG also.
This just hides the page barriers to give you more space to type.
Most of the Word documents I've typed never even made it to paper so the only reason I didn't disable pages all together is that some of my school projects had page count requirements.
The reality is non of these people use the software from 30 years ago because it's missing functionality, and if the developers would take away tools from the toolbar they would be the first to complain that they have to access them through a menu (or that the fonts look pixelated). Optimising for 800x800 resolution is counterproductive if 99% of users have at least HD screens.
Ironically someone pointed out that you can take away most of the toolbars in textmaker to make it look very much like the old software (except for smoother). So really what are you complaining about?!
I do agree there, but it's less that more functionality is being pack into menus today, and more that software is confused whether it should be trying to optimise for mouse and keyboard or a clumsy touch screen. As a result context menus get replaced with tabs and icons get replaced with large clickable tiles.
Another issue with modern UX is that it assumes far more of the user for the sake of minimalism. If you look at software from around the Windows 98 era the UX was designed to be as functional and clear as possible. The obvious examples of this might be how browsers back then had a button that actually said "Back" and Windows had a button that said "Start". Contrast that with today – my browser has a rotated triangle for a back button and Windows has button with four squares which you need to know is what we used to call "start".
These two trends combined imo are what causes most of the problems – the UX itself is often clumsy because it's poorly optimise for your device, and it's confusing because often UI elements aren't clearly labeled (or they're simply removed in a push for minimalism).
Windows is uniquely bad for both of these trends. Functionality which would have previously been easy to find with a textual context menu is now often on some randomly ordered tab panel behind a vague icon.
I get that some people need things to be bigger because their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, but my 6.5" smartphone displayed less content on screen than its 5.5" predecessor when it came out of the box because of whitespace.
Just for a bit of nostalgia I've installed Windows XP and Visual Studio 2005 in a VM and I was blown away by how much code it fit on a screen despite the stacked toolbars everywhere. VS Code wastes major amounts of space for aesthetic reasons and Jetbrains is changing their use of screen real estate for the worse as well with the new theme.
More and more software is taking away the ability to claim back the ever growing whitespace. What once served as the huge, whitespacey standard is now labeled "compact". I know I can mess with scaling and CSS and UI themes and other stuff to bring down the bloat, but it's rather annoying that I have to do it in the first place.
Not exactly. The reason I had to ditch my Galaxy Note 2 with Cyanogenmod 4.4 is because apps stopped running on that Android version, not because newer is better
Battery life was fine because I had bought a new battery for a few tenners and could pop it right in. Nothing wrong with the hardware even today; the main improvements that have been made is faster GPS acquisition and a better camera but neither is essential for me (especially with Mozilla Location Service enabled) and I definitely prefer Cyanogenmod with XPrivacy and Xposed mods. Notifications worked better (no need to manage notification "channels" because you didn't need permanent "notifications" for a background service), buttons used less screen real estate, when walking outside and my screen being literally blank I could just swipe over the top of the screen to adjust brightness (instead of sliding over the status bar, now I need to estimate what height the brightness slider is at), the status bar icons were customisable (don't need to show a battery icon if I've already got the percentage! wtf modern androids), I'm missing a network usage indicator that you could mod onto your status bar back then, my current keyboard I'm typing this on is literally the same one as I used back then, I don't remember missing anything in terms of homescreen functionality either, the lockscreen had shortcuts and was customisable whereas today Fairphone ships with literally a bare android that has no functions there and Samsung graciously allows two buttons.
More functionality my ass, it's the reverse if anything, at least on mobile.
The only positive development on Android since 2013 (from a user perspective) has been "allow permission while using the app", and even that is a "two steps forwards, one step backwards" type of story as it has replaced "allow always"! Having OsmAnd do track recording is a pain, I remember not getting that working on LineageOS but then I ditched that phone for a Samsung with stock OS such that I can have a proper camera app, and there it seems to work after the OsmAnd dev team jumped through the necessary hoops.
Within apps, as well as on desktop, I'm often excited for new software releases because of new features, but I disagree that this is the explanation for why we need a hundred times the hardware resources as a minimum to run things smoothly. If Moore's misheard law had broken down in the 90s, software would probably do similar things today (an asterisk here being neural networks) just with a lot fewer resources.
Beginners like big UI's with a few large buttons with nice big icons clearly illustrating what they do.
Experts like to fit as much functionality in as possible, so want keyboard shortcuts and millions of buttons.
The logical thing seems to be some slider to adjust 'UI density' that defaults to beginner mode, but can be slid on a per-app basis. How hard can it be?
So while I agree with your comments, I still hate the one on the right because it makes my eyes jump around all over.
The first, by contrast, has a much smoother eye flow over the controls. This is something most people don't understand when doing UI design, and is somewhat independent from the amount of stuff on the screen.
It has eventually culminated with a rejection of GUIs entirely now; everything I do lives almost entirely in the command line with tmux and Neovim. I am reasonably happy with pandoc markdown for about ~85% of document tasks, XeLaTeX for the remainder. I use LSP for something approximating an IDE.
It’s not for everyone, but I really like how little superfluous crap is in my window now.
I feel like software engineers are more or less used to leaving the WYSIWYG world; virtually all of use have dealt with HTML+CSS via the use of plain text editors. Once you’re used to that paradigm, I don’t think that it’s too much of a stretch to just a command to compile to PDF.
Just to be a little clear, I run all this inside vanilla macOS. I live in the terminal 90+% of the time but I am not a complete Luddite!
The idea of the Ribbon is to use more space/text to tell the user what the icons mean. In practice, users don't actually know what those buttons mean on the Word 9x example. While the Ribbon-interface at least has "Paragraph" or "Styles" to describe what their icons are.
A ribbon has tooltips too. But they aren't there to solve the space problem but the information problem.
You can also create a toolbar in the titlebar. So if you minimize the ribbon by default and add the old style icons to the titlebar, you end up with a really nice setup.
https://f.toi.sh/wordscreenshot.png
That looks perfectly usable to me. Not exactly 800x600 but it’s scaled close enough.
It really isn't, though.
Word 97 has a single row for each toolbar. It is very easy hand-eye coordination (anyone remember that term?) because the toolbars are very orderly and organized. It just takes practice, which most of us did.
Word 365 and its Ribbon bar has 1 row splitting to 3 rows combining to 2 rows splitting again to 3 rows and then combining back again to 1 row. And some icons have text, most don't.
Also, the menu bar doesn't fit and runs off the window/screen despite having less than Word 97's menu bar.
WHY?!
That is utterly hellish disorder and requires the eyes to scramble all over instead of moving along one straight line.
As for ribbons, you said it yourself "It just takes practice, which most of us did."
this seems like a problem with "textmaker from softmaker", not something that needs to be generalized out to the whole modern world
I can't get over how cool windows 95-7 looks today, so ergonomic and obvious to use. And it's so simple because it so optimized to use psychophysics in the most computationally efficient way.
Pretty much anything today makes me puke. Turning off the animations in any smartphone instantly makes it 2x faster. I wish i could turn off all the flat CSS of the world
Also Azure Portal. God damn try to open a Log Analytics query window.
Do you have two-display setup btw?
That's fair, but VS Code (out of the box) only puts stuff on one side of the content. If you see stuff on both sides, it's because you did that.
FL? Go ahead, compare it to what we could even theoretically achieve a few decades ago.
These are also completely at odds with the text processor goals. In music/3d you've got multiple modes (recording/effects/midi-patterns/mastering/playback/... and modelling/texturing/post/...) while in text editing you've got text. Maybe an outline on the side. One favours multiple layouts and modes, the other favours simplicity and presentation.
I've switched to LibreOffice, which suffers from some style-management issues and of course bugs... but is still better than Word and doesn't badger me for a goddamned "Microsoft account."
Resolutions and density have increased, applications have taken advantage of that, in the case of TextMaker to show much more functionality to the user in a way that's easy to interpret.
You normally wouldn't run your word processor at 800x600 either.
Why not? My 2nd monitor is portrait. The window manager tiles are ~1080x630.
I have Word open in one right now. Right above the tile with the browser I'm typing this comment into.
But, I know, I said something about a tiling window manager so my options are icky. And I probably have a technical job, double ick. No parallels could be drawn from my experience to what normal people with desk jobs would do or want.
But there are times when I do! Like having two windows side by side so I can transpose text from one into the word processor.
When reading posts like this, it reminds me of the times when I re-used an older-than win95 machine and was cursing about the clumsiness of the UI.
People seem to recollect past times very differently.
I'm mostly struck by the folks who seem to recall GUIs working "instantly" in the 90s. I remember them being incredibly slow and laggy, not to mention how sluggish disk access was. There's much to celebrate about older software and I'm a huge fan of retro computing, but there seem to be a lot of "good old days" glasses being handed out by someone out there.
Recently, I've switched to using VSCode for my first draft (written in markdown), and then converted via pandoc to .docx. From there, I can reformat to the industry standards.
Why the extra step? Because when you're fighting with the UI for your attention, the ability to focus on the written word takes a backseat. I'll often end up tripping over some auto-correct feature (the autocorrects for copyright and euro are two of my greatest foes) or cryptic formatting issue, and end up getting farther and farther away from my original focus.
Word processing is broken. VSCode in markdown with a few extra plugins for QOL (e.g. spell check) is a nice balance between something raw and plaintext like VIM and an unbearably clunky MS Word. I can't wait for Microsoft to add Clippy 2.0 powered by ChatGPT into Word so that it can finally complete the slow erosion the author in favor of pure computer-generated text.
[1]: Just because I spend most of my time writing and editing for a living doesn't mean I'm great at it. I explicitly disclaim any typos in this comment!
This is a horrible, cherry picked example that can be fixed with less than a minute of customization.
Also, I don't understand why UI developers don't try to replace all those buttons and the menubar with an omni search bar. Something where I can lookup functions that I can perform but also documentation. Still, we should be able to call function also by shortcuts and maybe we also want to show some important ones below so that people could also click them.
I think people are very much used to typing into search bars (browser, Google, ...) so this might be a valid approach in general.
Also instead of a toolbar I have a large array of physical buttons on my desk which I use to interact with the computer. Nobody uses an on-screen keyboard instead of a real one. I simply go all the way.
And, yes, recent versions of Word have such a search in addition to the buttons for those that have already discovered the features but don't remember where it was
(( I still have a softspot for featureful IDEs that are actually integrated, instead of collection of parts that seem…cobbled together. ))
Being trained in certain things brings so much joy to my life. I would hate it if my life was just a caveman who can only press buttons and see what happens.
Now we’re bifurcated into toy UI for people who don’t have any idea what they are doing, and terminal interfaces. This is probably the only way to do things. But it does seem like a bit of a retreat.
The “cramped” window on the right shows a word processor on "Print-view", meaning it shows the A4/Letter including lots of white space around all corners...
Apples and Pears...
The ribbon bar example in fact consumes less vertical space.
A _massive_ portion of the white space is from the page display mode where Word 9x uses non-WYSIWYG and the modern one uses the real page layout with page margins. Well of course that's going to introduce a lot of white space because there is on the paper!
The author definitely customized the toolbar. This is what it looks like on my Word, granted it's not 800x600, but there's a lot less items and it doesn't look so cluttered: https://imgur.com/a/oZp45vz
And other apps I do use are much more efficient with screen space. Browsers, code editors, 3D design programs, text terminals..
There's a lot of implicit and forgotten learning going on because one has no expectation to already know where something is when it's one's first time doing something new. Lots of people use Word for the first time today. I'd be more inclined to agree and say that things are successfully "hidden" from you if a new person today takes more time than a new person then. Or a new person today given then's interface, if we don't already have then-data.
I have a diploma for Microsoft Office 2003/2007 and used Microsoft Office until ~2013, but nowadays find it 10x easier to, as you say, do more than marking text bold in LibreOffice Writer than in Microsoft Word 2007 because that's what I've been using this decade. It's a matter of getting used to and anyone saying they can't find anything in LibreOffice (one of the most common objections I hear) is kidding themselves and ignoring the prior learning from the huge discounts Microsoft gives schools and nonenforcement of copyright/licensing such that everyone is used to Word and Windows from the get-go. They'd rather pay, what is it today, 90 euros a year?, than find the bulleted list button again for their holiday checklist and occasional formal letter (that's what I see most people use it for at home) and get angry when I refuse to pirate the software for them.
On my eReader I have plenty of whitespace, though. That's the difference between work and pleasure.
Yes, things look better for the resolutions they are designed for. Perhaps TextMaker could reduce the paddings or do some other stuff for lower resolutions but then what is the point if that is not an expected use case
I haven't used the most recent version.
It is just here in the HN circles that feel that UI has degraded over the years, or do people outside of this highly tech-savvy group have similar feelings?
The Windows 9X and Word 9X versions will quickly become unusable while the current Windows/Word, for all their design flaws, will actually be quite comfortable.
I'd much rather talk about how, in the name of "rapid development", we write using languages and frameworks that bloat memory usage and CPU needs.
But of course, there's also SerenityOS ;)
Why not do an apples to apples comparison, and show it in something like 1920x1200? You'll have more page space than you'll know what to do with.
The point is that a properly designed UI will adjust to the resolution in use. And this doesnt just mean monitor resolution when running full screen. This also pertains to /floating windows/. Which often are the equivalent of 800x600 resolution.
A lot of modern UIs are full of bullshit white space that takes up tremendous amount of screen estate for no damn reason.
You can have a high DPI screen and a UX/UI that comfortably scales information density and widget sizes.
That one commenter mentioned running the old word on a modern 4K monitor and of course that wont be great for a lot of people /if it's not scaling at all/ (i try to run everything native but my vision is great).
Tl,dr: white space is abused and wasting screen space in modern UIs. High density is wasted on extreme scaling. Modern UIs and UXs are "optimized" for fat fingered geriatrics with tremors (touch) or blind geriatrics (desktop) at the expense of information density. Also, apparently users are too dumb to understand denser UX according to some engineers.