Windows 95 remains the pinnacle of clear, discoverable GUI.
It's like the companies rolling out UI elements don't even bother running them past people, and are guided solely by what the design department thinks looks cool that day.
Windows 95 remains the pinnacle of clear, discoverable GUI.
It's like the companies rolling out UI elements don't even bother running them past people, and are guided solely by what the design department thinks looks cool that day.
I’m might quibble a bit and choose Windows 2000, or even XP despite the Fischer Price skin, but generally I agree.
Clickable things should have some minimal skeuomorphic detail and scrollbars need to be a minimum of some thickness.
Especially scrollbars. For a webdev trying to figure out what element triggers the scrollbar is extremely difficult with thin disappearing scrollbars.
You could disable the Fischer Price skin in XP. Many people did.
It was IBM who established the standards with its CUA books.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access
Windows 7 was the last one that let you select the "classical" pre-XP theme. I was the only person I know who used it, and I miss it to this day.
Lots of educational institutions and public libraries used it here in Britain. I think it was good at squeezing a few years of extra life out of the hopelessly underpowered machines that they bought, but I rather think removing the myriad copies of Java Updater and the McAfee Virus* would have been more effective.
* Officially called the McAfee Antivirus, but I've never understood why
This with MacOS 9 and GTK2 not far behind.