I’m sure most of us here are aware of the bright red-and-yellow colour scheme called “Hot Dog Stand”, included in Windows 3.1. While it’s not the only truly garish colour scheme included in Windows 3.1, its name probably did a lot to make it stand out from the others. There’s been a ton of speculation about the origins of the colour scheme, and why it was included in Windows 3.1, but it seems nobody ever bothered to look for someone who actually worked on the Windows 3.1 user interface – until now.
PC Gamer’s Wes Fenlon contacted Virginia Howlett, Microsoft’s first user interface designer who joined the company in 1985, and asked her about the infamous colour scheme. It turns out that the origin story for the infamous colour scheme is rather mundane. In Howlett’s own words:
I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface—although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.
↫ Virginia Howlett, quoted by Wes Fenlon in PC Gamer
Howlett then lists a few other included colour schemes that were just as garish, or even more so, as examples to underline her point. Personally, I’m a huge proponent of allowing users to make their interfaces as ugly and garish as they want, as the only arbiter on what’s on your screen is you, and nobody else. Hot Dog Stand and similar garish themes need to make a comeback, because there’s bound to be some people out there whose vibes align with it.
It’s crazy to me that UIs were more configurable and more consistent 35 years ago with better dark mode support sort of speak.
You HAD to follow the UI guidelines of the operating system back then if you wanted people to know how to use your application and if you want the performace to be any good.
Now you get things like Electron abominations and each software vendor thinking they have a better idea about basic UI/UX paradigms, and it is very easy to draw custom widgets, etc., so, well… it seems it is hard to resist the urge.
For example, I’d rather have a thin title bar but have a consistent target for activating or moving a window rather than, like browsers, be hunting for a small target to move my browser without accidentally closing a tab or so…
There’s also the issue of backwards compatibility, which makes adopting things like dark mode more difficult, although Microsoft, in our example, could have mapped dark mode to a custom color schema and present that to legacy applications.
Elegant execution is not high on the priorities of anyone in the tech industry these days. Ship out fast, cash in. If it is broken, keep it broken until the customers get used to it.
Shiunbird,
That drives me nuts! Somehow microsoft are the most idiotic here. It wasn’t too long ago a client was struggling to move a MS office window because he was having troubling finding a window anchor point. On a similar note, designers have been busy making resizable borders and scrollbars inaccessible. Some of these borders are so thin with no contrast that they’re obnoxious to interact with. It’s made all the more ridiculous because there are hundreds of whitespace pixels being used for nothing at all.
You are right software UI standards were better adhered to in the past. That’s likely one of the reasons so many people loved win2k. As time passes by, people are going to forget that MS used to promote strong UI standards. Yet it seems that microsoft themselves plotted their downfall. At first they still supported classic mode, but officially retired it with windows 8 when GUIs became a free for all as though UI standards had never existed at all.
Alfman,
I don’t care too much about UI eccentricisms. However I really care about UX breakage.
We can have the most skeuomorphic UI for WinAMP, or have a clock render like an analog clock. But…
Does it properly respond to TAB navigation?
Can I use it with keyboard only?
Do Buttons, Lists, Combo Boxes and other elements respond as “they normally should”?
Can I drag and drop items like every other application on my desktop?
And more recently…
Does it work properly with accessibility features (not directly needed, but will be important as AI agents become more common)
We had much better desktop experience when every window has their own unique skin and things looked like a candy shop.
With the quite visually similar and mundane grey and blue themes, i can see how a sharp and distinct hot dog stand theme could be good for those visually impaired. Kind of like a halfway house between a normal theme and high contrast.
The123king,
We were this close to EU mandating dark mode for all websites: https://www.robinwhittleton.com/2025/01/16/ecommerce-dark-mode/
Yes, the increasing dullness of user interfaces is not a great “progress”
I want to see this theme return as an easter egg, along with screensavers that a user can add.