Designing Windows 95’s User Interface

Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by krylon on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @05:10AM (#16323429)

The fact that the basic elements of Windows 95's GUI have survived for so long shows, I think, how well designed it was.

For its time it was a great design that was intuitive to understand, relatively lightweight and did not get in my way. About the only changes I think improved things notably were the search field in the Start menu and Aero Snap.

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by mustacheemperor on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @01:52PM (#16326982)

The replacement of actual Search with this Cortana-based attempt at a "smart" search or Q&A interaction is absolutely agonizing to experience as a user and just a completely boggling decision to me in general. Why on earth did a search feature that will return something different from what you typed in, with the exact thing you typed in the secondary results, ever make it out of testing for public release? I have faith it'll improve over time, but right now Cortana in general feels like a step directly backwards in every category "she" touches. The Edge browser is actually pretty slick on the Surface, but instead of being able to right click selected text and search it, I have to "ask Cortana." I don't want to ask Cortana, I want to search that in Google.

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by mustacheemperor on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @04:17PM (#16328084)

Addendum: I was just browsing the Dell website and the URL bar of Edge displayed a Cortana logo and blue text "Can I interest you in a coupon?"

So, it's also an ad delivery machine.

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by krylon on Thursday February 08, 2018 @03:19AM (#16330902)

Now that is downright creepy. Makes me think of that scene in Futurama where the crew goes online and is attacked by advertisements... ;-)

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by krylon on Thursday February 08, 2018 @03:17AM (#16330899)

I have not had much contact with Windows 10 so far. But a former coworker had a Windows phone, and there, Cortana was pretty good actually. We once had a "competetion" where we asked Cortana, Siri and "OK Google" to "tell a dirty joke".

Cortana won hands down by actually telling a joke (it was about dirty laundry, but it was ambiguous enough that I think Cortana actually "got it".

OTOH, I feel really weird literally talking to a computer, and I don't think I will ever overcome that.

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by kobrad on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @06:04AM (#16323653)

Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking. This is the new boundary for all interfaces, and I know it's just being stupid - sometimes it really makes me angry. But snap works just fine, yeah

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Re:Designing Windows 95’s User Interface by krylon on Wednesday February 07, 2018 @11:43AM (#16325728)

> Search got the google bug, so that it will change the results in the xx milliseconds while you are pressing enter or clicking.

I only use Windows at work, and my work computer is sufficiently slow that I have not had a problem with that. Maybe it is the version, too, my work laptop runs Windows 7 - and will hopefully continue to do so until Microsoft stops supporting it; as far as Windows goes, Microsoft really nailed it with Windows 7. (I have to admit, though, I have only very little experience with Windows 10; I really disliked Windows 8/8.1 and the corresponding server versions because Microsoft butchered the UI.)

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