What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
73 points by luke8086
73 points by luke8086
Notice how (almost) everything that you can interact with is clearly identified: It's either shown as some kind of button or handle, or it uses white background (or blue if it's already selected), which sets it apart from the slightly orange tinted gray of the rest of the window
Much more than that. It used the 3D imitation to great effect. There was a flat layer that contained anything informational that you couldn’t interact with and anything you could was bevelled to appear 3D. Buttons and button-like objects that performed an action when you clicked on them or dragged them stood out towards you. Radio buttons, text fields, checkboxes, and anything that you put data in sank back like a hole that you could fill with something.
No one using the UI needed to think about this because, once you’d seen it a coul,e of times, it would register subconsciously.
Look at the WordPad screenshot:
The last one is the most important. Most of the others are reusable UI elements that you’ll see elsewhere, but the sunk-back effect on the ruler makes it immediately obvious that it’s something you can interact with and not just a page-size indicator.
Later MS UIs lost most of these things.
The core UI elements were similar on contemporary MacOS but a few of the things on top were better, especially:
If I had ever learned that "inset" meant "this component accepts input", it was a completely subconscious lesson. Thanks for pointing it out because I never noticed that before!
I like how this isn't fully a nostalgia trip, and the author can point out the occasional flaw in the UI.
Imitating real objects is good, too -- I don't have a single one of Android's "sliders" anywhere in my house, for example, so why don't you make this a checkbox, because writing down a check mark ✔️ on paper is something that I actually do:
This surprised me! I don't have a ton of sliding toggle switches, but I definitely have some in my house: on multiple wireless mice and keyboards, a smart speaker, a desktop timer… our kitchen timer has two separate toggles for brightness and volume. We also have some things that might stretch the definition of a toggle switch but have similar behavior (privacy slider on my laptop's camera, retractable USB flash drives).
Maybe the author fills out more paper forms than I do.
I think this is one of those physical devices that at some point ran out of fashion, making the slider kind of similar to the floppy disk save button at this point. 30+ years ago a lot of the electronics I had used sliders. The TV and the turntable had them, my uncle's car had a bunch of them, as well as a lot of electric heaters.
Oh, interesting trend. I'm not sure if toggle switches themselves are a fashion thing, because I still see them on recent electronics whose design is somewhat sleek/modern. Even the iPhone had a silence toggle up until just a few years ago, which Apple wouldn't have kept so long if they hadn't been in style since the 90s.
If I had to guess why there's a trend, it's that software-based toggles have become cheaper over the years. If your buttons don't have to physically latch into position anymore, that gives you flexibility: you can dynamically change the button's function, you can assign different levels for multiple pushes, you can long-press a button, etc. This comes at the cost of tactile and visual feedback, which is less prioritized these days—so there's still an element of fashion there. But it's more about shifting priorities than looks.
What bothers me about the toggle switch thing is it isn't clear what is on and off. I like literally can't tell which is which, so if you say like "when the toggle is on the right" im like.... which nondescript blob is the toggle? Is it the side with color? Or without? like the iphone has light grey and white (already hard to see contrast sometimes) then it changes to green and white but the green is on the other side. The physical switch on that same device has a little red line when it turns off the sound.
So I find the checkbox clearer in that it is either empty or filled.
Apple's UI manual says though there is a difference: you're supposed to use a toggle switch when the change takes effect immediately, and the checkbox when you need to click an apply or submit or whatever button on the form before it actually takes effect. I don't think this distinction is consistently applied, but even if it does, it doesn't help with seeing what is on and off. You do get used to it though.
I'm not sure whether this is an improvement because of the mixed metaphor, but Android recently changed their toggles to have icons. On the settings pages of my phone, the knobs of the toggles now show crosses and checks for disabled/enabled states—unlike the author's screenshot where they're blank.
And in terms of touch events, they behave like checkboxes: you tap to toggle them, and as far as I can tell, swiping doesn't have any additional meaning (swiping left can move the toggle right if it registers as a tap). So it's so close to being a checkbox already. It's just a really weird looking one.
On the settings pages of my phone, the knobs of the toggles now show crosses and checks for disabled/enabled states
I haven't seen that in my Android but that sounds a lot like the accessibility features Mac OS and Gnome provide; they show a circle and dash for on and off (IIRC)
Huh, I never associated slider toggles with the sliding toggle switches on a wireless mouse or keyboard.
Windows 98, 2000 and XP: the golden age of Microsoft Desktops and UIs.
I'd go so far as to say that Windows 95 was peak UI for MS. Windows 98 started the "flat" trend which the author mentions is also in Windows 2000, I believe it was inspired by the web - now you had hyperlinks instead of buttons and an "active desktop" which meant you could even put a web page as your background. At least the hyperlinks were still blue and underlined at the time...
I'd go so far as to say that Windows 95 was peak UI for MS
It was also the last time the whole UI and all of the applications had a consistent look and feel. All the applets were fresh and new, Office and their development tools got new releases with the new Windows 95 UI. Old 16bit stuff and apps built with Borland OWL did still stand out a little, but not nearly as badly as today where everyone including Microsoft seems to work against the platform UI rather than try to match it.
Amen. There's a few incremental changes I actually like, quick launch is a cute addition, putting the start button in the corner is good, even the option to rearrange and sometimes pin windows to the taskbar is good (though they botched other parts of the taskbar in the process). The start menu search is nice.
I can go both ways on some of the Explorer changes though. In Win95, it defaulted to remember where the window was on screen for each folder. I don't have a win95 vm ready so some of this is on my memory, but like you opened a folder and it was always in a new window and that window spawned where you left it for that folder last time it was open. I think 98 changed the default to use a single window you'd browse through and have a back button. I kinda like 95 in theory there but in practice kinda prefer 98 i think. Then the explorer sidebar, usually im kinda meh on but it can have some useful stuff.
I like gradients in the title bars too lol so I guess that's something i'd call a win from later. But clouds.bmp from win95 <3
Overall, yeah, I'd agree with you that 95 is where they nailed it. Each tweak since then, some positive, some negative, but the overall cohesive whole was peak in 95.
A lot of the Windows 98 UI was introduced with IE 4 for Windows 95. This made things more web-like in a variety of places, including the flat toolbars where the buttons didn't gave the 3D bevel effect until you put the mouse over them.
Almost all Linux DE can be customised to look like Win 9x/2k. As an example for XFCE see the Chicago95 project.
Interestingly, it seems to be much more popular than you might image: 5.8k GH stars and last commit 13 hours ago.
If this does not sound crazy enough, it also include a Python application named "Plus" to install original Microsoft Plus! themes from old .theme files.
Nowadays, the cult around these old UIs is easy to understand - their appearance has remained the same for many years and so has the user interaction. Just think to modern DE and how many things change between one version and another. Each change requires a little cognitive effort to do the same thing we did yesterday, but many little things make a big one. We traded usability for eyecandies and now our productivity is decayed.
Almost all Linux DE can be customised to look like Win 9x/2k. As an example for XFCE see the Chicago95 project.
These sorts of things always seem to suffer from some kind of Uncanny Valley-type effect for me. If I look at that Chicago95 screenshot out of the corner of my eye I might mistake it for Windows 95, but as soon as I look directly at it, its just this weird corruption of Windows 95. The colours and icons and font are right, but everything else is subtly wrong in some way which makes it uncomfortable to look at.
The unfortunate thing about it is there's only so much that skinning can fix. It helps with a lot of things that people who've seen good UIs want to have again (like being able to tell a label from an interactive widget). But then you look at the toolbar and find icons or buttons misaligned and/or incorrectly separated, as soon as you click Open it still opens the dysfunctional GTK file finding dialog, you're still stuck with hamburger menus in a lot of applications, that weird GTK bug where menus pop up in "compressed", scrollable form, despite there obviously being enough space on the screen for them still hit you, and so on.
The grass isn't much greener at the other end of the DE spectrum -- Qt still ships with the Windows theme but a lot of KDE applications have obvious artefacts with it, especially if they integrate Kirigami bits.
a lot of KDE applications have obvious artefacts with it, especially if they integrate Kirigami bits.
I use KDE but I am not familiar with the details of what is pluggable and what isn't. Do you know of any blog posts that explain how hard it is to achieve something similar to Chicago95 on KDE/Qt?
Part of the problem is that Windows 95 was designed to run on like 15" monitors with very low DPI. A lot of the UI dressing and fonts were pixel perfect, and you can't just scale them up without losing that unless you happen to run a monitor with an integer multiplier resolution of a ~95 era display.
On top of that you had CRTs, which had rounder pixels than flat panels. Not with as much smearing as consoles had at the time, but still. Display technology matters for the feel.
Chicago95 "looks like" Win9x, maybe, if you've never used Win9x. But there's no attention to detail, which is the whole point of Win9x-style UI. Obvious stuff like the taskbar icons not being inset like the clock makes you wonder what those years of development were spent on.
I actively use Chicago95 on XFCE for remoting into machines with GUI as it's faster to use and transfer/render than the Cinnamon I typically use whilst sitting at the machine.
Yeah I ran Chicago95 for a good while. Pretty neat project. Though I'd probably target something like 2K to be honest for something like this. Windows 95 had a lot of rough edges and so on that later windowses polished away.
Thanks for taking the time to write this.
Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it's worth pointing out.
This sums it up. Crazy that what was obvious and existed for clear practical reasons and the benefit of everyone, has been destroyed to the point that we need to explain it.
This puzzles me. Why do humans do this? Why do we have the urge of destroying nice things we created?
Great post.
I repeat myself from another UI thread but I think we're living in the world of After Virtue as interpreted in terms of UI. We essentially speed-ran the loss of a common ethics of human-computer interaction in a couple quick decades. UI Virtue, if you will.
Design language, like any language is metaphorical. The thing that makes these skeumorphic designs work so well is that it kinda forces a consistent metaphor, and consistency above all else is huge for UX.
The fact that it's based on things we've seen in real life is also helps, and even if we haven't, because it looks like a real thing it means we can reason about the UI with the same spatial faculties we've spent our entire life training: Above, behind, in front of, inside of, concave, convex. A 5 year old has mostly grasped these concepts. Even cats and dogs understand such things.
The cool part is that it works even if the thing you're analogizing isn't around anymore, as a forcing function that ensures UI consistency. You don't need to have used a paper folder, which was a real thing, to rapidly learn that a paper folder on the desktop is something that has other things in it. You can even kinda tell intuitively from the XP-era icon what a paper folder is and how it works.
Do you need to have seen a floppy disk to understand that the image of one means to save? Well do you need to know the meaning of the latin words manus (hand) and facere (to make) to understand the English words manual (by hand), factory (place which makes things) and manufacture (to assemble)? Do we need new words now that Latin comprehension is dwindling? Not really. There's no loss in using such symbolism, but grabbing a line art icon out of Linear B to free the UI of such history does come with a loss, which is that literally nobody understands what it means at first glance, and the UI becomes inconsistent with the established design language of computers.
For me one of the best features of old windows UIs was that they were super quick to use without the mouse
Writing windows apps with good usability took some effort on the dev side (to avoid clashing shortcuts, etc) but it was the norm back then.
Things started to change with the mini UI revamp in win98/2k and got worse since
Windows 2000 Pro was peak Windows, for sure, and for all the reasons the author lists here.
I still preferred Macs, and still do, but Windows 2000 was my favourite version of Windows. I was consulting back then and I got a lot of work done in it, it was more stable than 98, and it was much snappier than NT4. And hey, no Windows activation.
I mostly used Mac and Linux when possible (and still do). I didn't hate NT4 on a desktop (and I liked it better than 2000 up until 2000 SP2, at least) but 2000 had the distinct advantage of being the first NT to be able to do reasonable power management and USB.
For years after, whenever I needed a Windows dev/build VM, I installed the oldest currently supported server version I could. (So it was 2003 for quite a while, then 2008, etc.)
That let me at least keep a 2000-era "feel" for using Visual Studio when I needed to do that.
Even though I do not endorse the project, SerenityOS's desktop environment is an impressive tribute to this era of Windows GUIs. It's pretty easy to boot up a VM and click around to experience a twist to the original design.
SerenityOS usee to be one of my favorite projects. It's so sad that things turned out the way they did with the author.
How so? I know they focused efforts on Ladybird but is SerenityOS still alive or with some devs on it?
11 PRs merged in the last week, so there is still some ongoing activity but obviously not as much as when there was someone working full-time on it. And it's probably become a lot more obscure now that there aren't regular youtube videos being made about its development
The git repo still shows signs of life. There aren't really "state of the project" updates like there used to be, and the build instructions don't quite look current to me, but I didn't ever do enough with it before to say that for certain.
My read based on what I looked at is "still alive" but even less friendly than it used to be* for people who aren't already steeped in it.
(*) - I don't mean that the people were unfriendly, only that the project was a little unapproachable unless you were ready to sit in the discord or heavily read between the lines on the published pieces. It now looks like the discord would be critical, and I didn't sign in to look at how lively that is.
One of the nicest things about the UX of Windows 2000 was that you never hard to restart it, instead of having to restart it every day.
2000 is perhaps my favourite Windows of all time – in terms of UI, stability, and the general sense of minimalism.
