In my opinion, peak usability for platforms I use:

- iOS 6

- Windows 7

- Snow Leopard

- Windows Phone 10 (may actually have been the best mobile OS user experience I ever had)

I felt the same way about XP, despite it being generally regarded as a UI abomination. I think it was just familiar.

Anyway, I eventually shook lose of that nostalgia, and for me the best usability has been more recent. The wmii/i3/sway family of window managers are have been just great: simple, to the point, and automatic.

I dunno. There are pretty clearly some bad trends in computing generally and mainstream UX specifically, but improvements are still bouncing around in the margins.

If the homogeny of flat design makes the main interactive elements less salient, then everything designed to look 3D with glossy surfaces and brushed metal outlines does the same, just with noise.

I think there should be a combination of both, which I think is why many find the older interfaces from the 90s and early 2000s much more usable.

That's a long way of saying that I prefer the flat application icons and dock on current macOS. The dock stays in the peripheral and the icons identify the application all while not drawing my attention until I purposefully go to it.

Funnily enough, these are precisely the elements that are flat in the Windows 9x look. (Windows 9x does not have a "dock" but it does have a quick launch bar and a system tray, and these show flat icons.)

Mavericks to Yosemite I would understand, but Snow Leopard felt like a strict improvement to me. What did it do wrong?

Apple moved on from Snow Leopard, so they moved on to Linux.

One thing I don't think enough people mentions is the messaging app. It integrated with Facebook, before Facebook Messenger. This might not be a big thing today, with people leaving Facebook, but it was absolutely brilliant back then. Basically like iMessage, but with Facebook as the non-SMS protocol. I think it may also have integrated with LinkedIn, I don't recall, but it was suppose to just merge all your contacts into one messaging app.

As much as I dislike Windows on the desktop, Windows Phone made perfect sense. The UI was completely tailored to the touchscreen and was so easy it use and navigate. It's a real shame it didn't take of. In some sense Microsoft should have treated it more like Windows on the desktop and aggressively offered it to OEMs.

The UI was fairly consistent. There was no guessing what was a button, what an accidental drag would do, etc.

The live squares on the homepage, in my opinion, are still better than anything iOS has come up with.

The interface was incredibly fast and intuitive. It was slick and easy to understand but felt modern at the same time. The font felt timeless, it had the best camera app for the time, which was a time where amazing mobile phone cameras were just starting to become a thing (Nokia famously made a 42 megapixel camera for their flagship windows phone and the pics were gorgeous)

The first party software was really fast and stable. They were also some of the first phones I ever used with proper OLED screens

If you ever get a chance to use one it’s worth it even if it’s only for a day. Really changes one’s perspective on what’s possible with mobile devices. IMO nothing has captured that magic again

I had the Nokia Lumia 920, which wasn't an OLED screen, but an IPS, if I recall correctly. Even that screen looked beautiful. I think part of it was the font rendering and the UI design just being perfectly suited to the platform. In any case it just looked amazing.

It's hard to put into words because you have had to use it to understand!

I despise Windows 10 Mobile though - it killed the whole platform and made the OS unbearably slow. It was full of bugs and it was clear that it was the beginning of the end for Microsoft's mobile amibitions. I use Android now but it's a mess. Google can't decide on a consistent UI + UX and everything is all over the place.

Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?

Unless and until you need to do something that isn't one of the three or four basic functions.

> Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?

A perfectly-designed window menu is going to be simpler than a perfectly-designed iPad interface. There's only so much you can really have access to in iPad/Android-land, and any functionality that can't be encompassed with tap/long-tap/tap-and-drag is going to require a drastic break from the ordinary functionality. With window-menus, since you're already using window-menus for lots of stuff, it's not as drastic a break from the routine.

Now, I was careful to say "perfectly-designed" for each, because around the edges it can absolutely be a bit of a pain (my favorite go-to example is finding a "preferences" menu, which in Windows software can be in any of File > Preferences, Edit > Preferences, Tools > Preferences, or Options > Preferences - among many other options; and sometimes there's even a separate "Settings" menu with different options buried somewhere else), but even so, more often than not, window-menus still win by virtue of flexibility.

I don't disagree.

However, a mouse will always be more versatile than a touchscreen. There's a finite theoretical ceiling for touchscreens that's well underneath that of mice. Even looking beyond the completely-obvious fact that there's no real way to distinguish between "point" and "drag" on a touchscreen (other than "did this start on a draggable element", which is far from ideal), two fingers and a thumb can readily control five separate buttons plus a scrollwheel, and I can add even more buttons to a mouse.

I can't add more fingers for touchscreens.

Are you saying those elaborate 90s style window menus are somehow simpler than iPad interfaces?

"simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"

Also, do you realise you attempting an apples to pears comparison?

Compare with current-gen GNOME then.

> "simpler" == "easier to find the feature you need", not "fewer gui items to click"

The tabbed ribbon design of post-07 Microsoft Office apps is a LOT simpler by that definition than the traditional menu based one before it, and so are a lot of modern interfaces across various applications and OS's. Neat tabs and toolbars > oblong menus, anytime.

Not when the menus were 15-20 entires with occasional icons and the ribbon is 50+ icons of various sizes (and hidden functionalities - the little group corner arrows). "Easier" also implies easy visual parsing.

GUI gaslighting.

Disagree. Aside from nostalgia, there are numerous visual clutter issues that affect the ability to overview. Not to mention the aliased text rendering. Then you have double click to open files/dirs which might feel normal, but both younger and older people struggle with (like long press on iOS) + knowing what can be double clicked. My mom always asks me if she’s supposed to double or single click. But she can use a smartphone UI without my help.

That said, the one thing I like compared to modern designs is the very clear layering (with awful fake bevel 3d but nevertheless it does the job). This makes it very clear what toggle state a button has, and also which things are on top of other things.

Maybe the right idea is to just pick one arbitrarily and stick to it consistently.

I’m only mildly joking, UX guidelines are basically just this. There is no way to make people implicitly know how to do things (skeuomorphism was a solid attempt).

In society it’s only things like hammers that have a universal/innate understood use.

That's honestly just an old person thing to do, usually coupled with a huge helping of learned helplessness "I just don't get these newfangled computers" and refusing to learn anything new. Show them right click one time and they'll forever ask if you if something that they've always double-clicked on requires a right click.

To add on top of that, the double click navigation isn’t even consistent on the same platform. In the sidebar on desktop you have single click navigation even on the same type of entity (directories). Look at the younger gens who only used phones. They struggle too.

I don't really see clutter here, it is as minimal is it can get. Perhaps you would disable some controls on the explorer, but aside from that everything is indeed more minimal than alternatives today.

Meanwhile my modern Windows start menu is more or less unusable. The search is decent and I might miss it. It is the only function the start menu provides for me. The modern explorer is cluttered with senseless shortcuts that tries to force certain behaviors. In this example I can probably disable the tool bar to have even more space.

Double or single clicking is supported either way. This probably provide an alternative with a context menu.

I cannot even begin to explain why the weaknesses of smartphone OS. We have a duopoly with all its negative effects and I am constantly supporting people here, far more than for Desktop PCs. That said, the use case is different.

For those who didn't live through these days: the physical size of common computer monitors wasn't very different from what we have now (other than being more square, bulky, and really heavy), but the resolution was much lower; 640x480 was not just a "basic resolution", it was the standard display resolution everybody used (a higher 800x600 resolution became common later). Icons, labels, fonts, etc, were designed to be readable and look good on a typical-sized CRT monitor at 640x480 resolution. The whole user interface was designed to work well at 640x480 resolution.

At the time when 640x480 was a common resolution, the most common computer monitor was a 15" CRT, and 21" was for rich designers.

I agree with you wholeheartedly, but would note that this isn’t anything new. I can remember seeing messages like this on HP and DELL machines as early as 2007.