I feel like what you’re describing boils down to a change in priorities for designs and how the user behavior is measured. Today, it seems to be mostly about recording what users do and then endlessly modifying the UI to extract the desired behaviors. This results in these kinds of layouts where a clean choice takes a back seat and user manipulation takes the front.

This is less so the case with actual tools and UI’s used for productivity.

Of course when you look at recordings of user behavior for interfaces you realize how dumb the majority of all users really is. And how without those tiles advertising “Xbox” and “TikTok” those users would probably fail to find those even if they were looking for them. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

An old friend of mine and I used to amuse each other by writing press releases for a fictional computing company that we called Infernosoft. Its tag line was "Software from Hell," but it also supposedly made hardware.

One of its fictional products was the Infernosoft Auto-optimizing Keyboard. As you use it, it measures your usage and optimizes itself in response. It makes frequently-struck keys larger and moves them closer to the center of the home row.

If that sounds like a good idea to you, then you undoubtedly have a bright future in today’s software market.

If I recall correctly, Infernosoft developed a type of tabbed dialog, the crowded tabs of which were shuffled anew in relation to the clicked (active) tab.

Other ingenious features followed, as if there were no limit to the creativity that Infernosoft could inflict on its customers. A clear and intelligible application menu was replaced by a set of "ribbons" that shuffled function buttons in relation to the clicked (active) button.

A clear and intelligible OS menu was replaced by a set of active buttons that flipped and showed images dynamically when the user the clicked "Start" menu button. The Start menu button was later replaced because it was excessively identifiable.

In later years, Infernosoft became drunk with success and stock options, and implemented a helpful character that would appear and make useless suggestions when people began to create office-related documents. Following the worldwide success of this beloved character, unseen macros were added to office documents that run without warning and can call Internet infrastructure to download very usable tools that have the ability to compromise Inferndows OS.

Such heights of usability were merely the stuff of nerdy dreams before Infernosoft achieved its total market dominance.

> If that sounds like a good idea to you, then you undoubtedly have a bright future in today’s software market.

Yeah design philosophies matter a lot. I've lately noticed this with a UI/UX person we brought on who came from a web app design background (we are making a standard app for desktop, tiny inexperienced team etc.). It's neither good or bad, it's just interesting seeing someone readjust and realize that they're allowed to make creative decisions based on their gut feeling and not on tangible user behavior data.

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> Of course when you look at recordings of user behavior for interfaces you realize how dumb the majority of all users really is. And how without those tiles advertising “Xbox” and “TikTok” those users would probably fail to find those even if they were looking for them

It's a shame that there are so many stupid users that it's profitable to cater to them rather than leave them behind and cater to the experts.

"how dumb the majority of all users really is" - you could throw in how "dumb" grammar rules are too, given that "the majority of all users" might logically seem like it's singular and hence "is" would be correct, but I'm 90% sure in all cases that you say "the majority of X's", it acts as a plural noun phrase. I.e. it definitely should be "really are".

Majority is a word that can be both singular and plural. When referring to a collective group it is usually singular:

Example: "The majority of HN readers doesn't see any value in reading about fucking grammar in a thread about user interfaces."

When majority is used to describe a collection of individuals, it should be plural:

Example: "The majority of people who care about grammar, also usually care about properly capitalizing and punctuating their sentences."

Touché!

> but I don't want recommendations,

You seem to have this assumption that the Windows 11 start bar is made for you. I'm pretty sure the truth is that this menu is intended to drive sales and maximize profits for Microsoft.

Once you have the right set of premises you can see why it behaves this way and the design is actually fairly decent. (Not great, but don't worry, they are improving it every release)

I agree. Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly, but it was consistent and followed a good design language: eg everything that was clickable looked like a button: buttons, table headers, scroll bars etc. Once you learned the basics of the UI, you could mostly figure things out.

Nowadays buttons look like plain text labels half the time and every app has its own inconsistent style and even I, someone who has used computers for a long time and use them daily, sometimes have trouble seeing what’s what on a UI.

I don’t think it was ugly. It was the most consistent UI Windows has ever had and nothing comes close.

> Win 95/98 UI was pretty ugly

I disagree. I find it much better looking than modern UIs.

> I really miss Windows 95/98 era UIs. They were so much more practical and less noisy than current generation UIs.

This. I miss the practicality of these designs. It feels like designers today make changes to justify having work to do to maintain their jobs, and don't actually care about user experience, and in fact many are actively user hostile (see 'dark patterns').

The start menu is an ad platform now. No business looking for useful programs there.

Late 80s / early 90s Mac OS was a sweet spot too - simple, clean, interfaces.

Actually using it was a pain because it was so unstable, if only it had been combined with a proper preemptive multitasking OS.

Same thing has happened with Ubuntu Desktop/GNOME. I used to know where things were. Now it wants you to just click Activities and type in your search (for an Application, Setting, etc).

Settings is the gear above the "power" icon? The apps at the top of my start menu are ones that were most recently installed. TBH 95% of the time I just type in the name anyway.

Icons are ambiguous. Everybody violates expectations about what an image does. The older UIs had text. More than that, settings was a folder just like every other folder, so you knew what would happen if you clicked on particular section.

Things were fairly unified, even though the standards didn't integrate everything. You knew what would open a new dropdown, and what would open a new window, at a glance. There was no need of any implicit knowledge.

I've definitely used UIs that have these issues, but I can't say the Windows start menu is one of them generally. The idea that "settings" would be a folder seems quite unintuitive/jarring to me now.

If only there were some way to present the user with a form that could be used to type in applications to run.

And maybe to help find those applications.

And offer a streamlined mode for applications where you just need a quick response where the application doesn't open a new window but just provides a response in the same invocation-dialogue.

Maybe apps could even take modifiers or specifications when invoked, so you don't have to hunt and peck around in menus and additional dialogues after launch.

Maybe there's a place for this?

Great idea, I'm sure that would console a lot of people who are grieving over the state of user interfaces.

Any hope to convince them their condition's not terminal.

Yeah, I spent some time on my other Windows computer doing just that. It does help, but it's still not as clean as the Windows 98 start bar imo.

It's not just the start bar though. There are similar things all over the OS. For example, if you right click a document in Windows 11 one of the most common things you might want to do, "copy" isn't there. Well it is there, but now it's behind this little anonymous looking rectangle icon at the top* of the context menu and is no longer clearly listed as "copy" in the menu.

Maybe I'm just getting old... But I find UIs are just generally getting more confusing and assume more of the user. For example, back buttons on browsers don't say back anymore, but are just an arrow, because everyone knows what that arrow does, right? And that's probably fair, but even still, I like the explicit text label so I know for sure what I'm clicking is what I'm looking for. The three dots for accessing a menu might be a better example as my parents actually do get confused by that

* The icon can also randomly appear at the bottom of the menu because who cares about predictability when designing UIs anymore.

Not sure what you mean about Copy being behind "this little anonymous looking rectangle" - it's definitely still there in the context menu for me, under Cut (and above Create Shortcut)?

> You can turn off recommendations

Not really. When you turn off recommendations, the app icons are hidden but the space for recommendations stays there! Yes, just a big ol' block of whitespace with a prompt to turn recommendations back on. It takes up like 30%+ of the start menu.

It's a dark pattern.