If this isn’t catnip to the average OSNews reader, I don’t know what is.
Windows 95 is a comprehensive upgrade to the Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 products. Many changes have been made in almost every area of Windows, with the user interface being no exception. This paper discusses the design team, its goals and process then explains how usability engineering principles such as iterative design and problem tracking were applied to the project, using specific design problems and their solutions as examples.
↫ Kent Sullivan
This case study was written in 1996 by Kent Sullivan, who joined the Windows 95 user interface team in 1992. I consider the second half of the ’90s as the heyday of user interface design, with Windows 9x, Apple’s Platinum in Mac OS 8 and 9, and BeOS’ Tracker/Deskbar as the absolute pinnacles of user interface design. Coincidentally, this also seems to mark the end of a more scientific, study-based approach to designing graphical user interfaces.
Reading through this particular case study for Windows 95 feels almost quaint. Where are the dozens of managers pushing for notification spam, upsells, and dark patterns to enable expensive data-hoarding services? Why are none of the people mentioned in the study talking about sneaky ways to secretly and silently convert your local account to an online account? Where are all the “AI” buttons? Why is there n chapter on how to trick people into enabling telemetry data?
The user interfaces of the late ’90s were the last ones designed by people who actually cared, by people who approached the whole process with the end user in mind, rooted in scientific data collected by simply looking at people use their ideas. They were optimised for the user as best they could, instead of being optimised for the company’s bottom line.
It’s been downhill ever since.
Although Windows is not my cup of tea I was the first to admit that Windows95 and WindowsNT were the pinnacle of UI design and consistency and all went downhill since.
I am using a XFCE/Gnome mix with the beautiful GTK4 TokyoAtNight Moon theme. It is elegant and it works.
But when I saw the GTK4 Irixium theme https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1802783 recently I reckoned how much clarity we have lost w/o gaining anything in return.
Indeed, it’s already 25 years back.
QNX 6.2.1 Photon was good too (and BeOS with its isometric icons) : http://toastytech.com/guis/qnx621.html
I lament the loss of QNX Photon as a daily driver OS to this day. Slackware was primary on my computer back then, but after the loss of BeOS I discovered QNX Photon and fell in love with it. I lived in it for quite a while, only rebooting into Slackware for stuff that wasn’t yet ported to QNX.
These days Xfce is as good as it gets for me when it comes to keeping that classic interface design while allowing for modern standards. It’s the baby bear porridge of productivity and usability, not too flashy and not too threadbare.
Morgan,
+1 for KFCE. There’s something to be said about not trying to be flashy. They don’t have as many resources as KDE and GNOME desktops, but then I often feel those desktops are too eager to change things for change’s sake rather than prioritizing changes that users actually benefit from. I really appreciate KFCE’s focus: simple but it works.
Were you hungry when you were typing your response?
Sorry I couldn’t resist. But yes, Xfce thankfully remains committed to sensible design while still building towards the future with their work on being Wayland compatible. Their Wayland native mode will likely be finished around the time I’m ready to move to Wayland on Linux (i.e. a long time from now) so that works out well for me. And there’s always MATE for those who still need a GTK based, simple desktop environment after the switch is flipped. Mycophobia’s Desktop Classic System(1) shows just how flexible MATE can be when one needs to bend it to their will.
1. https://www.osnews.com/story/144111/desktop-classic-system-wants-to-bring-some-classic-mac-os-to-mate-and-debian/
You’re absolutely right to worry about privacy-invading algorithms and the overwhelming amount of spam notifications every day, because seeing that change truly breaks my heart. I hope that everyone finds true peace and freedom in the digital world, or in other words, that you will love Unblocked Games, where I’ve poured my heart and soul into creating the most beautiful things to help our souls feel lighter and more refreshed.
Kuiper Lotte,
Damn you spammer.
Thom, The heuristic login verification barrier that’s in place isn’t stopping the spam and is annoying for established users including me. Would you consider a rule for new accounts where posts with links get auto-moderated? Because that’s what all the spammers are after. If they can’t post links, then osnews becomes a less valuable target for spam.
@Alfman
Date Registered: 2026-03-03
Date of post: 2026-03-02 9:23 pm
Wut ?
Kochise,
Good catch.
2026-03-02 9:23pm EST = 2026-03-03 2:23pm UTC.
I did not research what wordpress does, but my guess is that the posts are saved and/or adjusted to reflect time zone, but the account registration didn’t get this adjustment (servers often use UTC).
Andreas Reichel,
Back in those days microsoft actually tested usability with user focus groups and they were genuinely working on creating best practices and optimizing UI. Personally I would say win2k was still improving over win95, regardless, those days are long gone now. Even classic mode themes have gotten stripped from windows and the bad changes can’t be customized back. Blah.
Windows 2000 was the absolute peak of Windows design. Everything after that was downhill. Windows 98 SE was their best consumer OS.
Windows 2000 was, perhaps even Windows XP (classic theme though).
The Win32 guides are still online : https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/appuistart/-user-interface-principles
For XP here’s a 2001 snapshot (http link) : http://interface.free.fr/Archives/GUI_Xp.pdf
Around the time Windows 8 came out, I asked my company’s Microsoft account representative something along the lines of, “So after all the studies, testing and iteration that went into perfecting the Windows 95 UI, did Microsoft’s designers all of a sudden smack themselves on their foreheads and say ‘Oops, I guess we were wrong. Throw it all out and let’s redesign from scratch!’?”
She didn’t really have a good answer.
that happened….
It’s fascinating how some tech “enthusiasts” hate something, on principle, when it is released. And then wax poetic about it once enough time has passed.
It is an indication of how commoditized/normalized tech has become, that follows the same patterns as other areas of life (music, movies, sports, cars, politics, etc) when people age.
Xanady Asem,
People were raving about windows 95 and 98 when they were released. The absence of enthusiasm is more recent.
I agree there are natural cycles, however it also exists within the envelope of diminishing novelty. Younger generations take a lot more for granted. I’m not sure we’re going to see win95 level enthusiasm in a desktop operating systems again. Even mobile devices that evolved in the lifespan of younger generations are likely to be boring for the next.
I remember as a kid plenty of complaining about windows… with all sorts of memes and creative spellings.
The newer generations are focused on newer forms of tech, which the tech “enthusiast” crowd are invariably trashing and complaining about. Same as it ever was.
Xanady Asem,
Sure there was criticism: the crashes were bad and there was even decent parody song 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4sH6lopuzdc
However the mainstream public reception was still very different. Consumers went bonkers for win95. People couldn’t get their hands on it soon enough and there was immense interest pirating the beta releases even before launch. Compare that to say win11 and the public sentiment at launch has soured dramatically. Customers bemoan microsoft’s new operating systems, so much so even microsoft had to make them free and customers are still not sold on upgrading.
I understand your point about cyclic patterns, but it’s really not the same. We should recognize there has been an unmistakable waning in public interest.
Nah. It’s pretty much the same. You’re just on the old fart side of the equation of that cycle.
Xanady Asem,
We were both school aged kids then and now we’re both middle aged.
Also you don’t have to look very hard to recognize that the interest in proactively upgrading windows has been very weak.
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/windows-11-finally-gets-some-love-from-users
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/windows/after-nearly-4-years-windows-11-is-finally-more-popular-than-windows-10/
I suppose you’re not going to acknowledge it, but this didn’t used to be the case.
LOL. Using the royal we I guess.
In any case. In a couple of decades, y’all be posting from the retirement home about how great Windows 11 was, unlike whatever latest-tech-you’re-having-a-hard=time-keeping=up-with. Yawn.
Xanady Asem,
We were both kids during win95, something you literally said yourself. What’s the problem?
Well, you’re welcome to make this prediction if you want to. But regardless of your theory that people will start to love win11 more as time passes, time will not change the fact that win11 was unpopular at release.
I was born in the mid 80s and vaguely remember the Windows 95 launch and what I saw, either directly or from things like Usenet archives, was that the people who were complaining about Windows 9x were complaining about one of three things:
1. It was an inferior mimic of Mac OS’s UI (I’d agree that Mac OS was better at UI consistency, even if the Start Menu was better for people with more than a few applications if you didn’t have the shareware that the later System 7.5 bought and integrated for hierarchical Apple Menu support.)
2. It was inferior to UNIX for terminal use and scriptability
3. It was too crashy/buggy (i.e. It was inferior to UNIX and Windows NT)
As Cathode Ray Dude explains, Windows 95 was the first time Windows felt like something you could “live in”. As Nostalgia Nerd’s video on the Windows 95 launch points out, it was basically the same thing the iPhone launch was, but for bringing the more affordable side of the computer market up to that standard.
ssokolow (Hey, OSNews, U2F/WebAuthn is broken on Firefox!),
I certainly agree with you that win95 had stability issues, haha. All your points have merit although I would say they may be overlooking the main audience for win95: DOS & win3.1 users. These aren’t users who cared about apple or unix. As a kid I grew up with windows and would only get to experience macos and unix later. When I started playing with linux, it was still too incomplete and my first experience with a real unix (ie Solaris) was at university.
It was years later that I would see an Amiga desktop, and honestly I was “retroactively impressed” but with the microsoft’s monopoly being so dominant it doesn’t seem that others really had a fair chance.
Alfman, I agree.
For people used to DOS and Windows 3.x, Windows 95 was objectively superior and, as a kid, I certainly felt that way.
Likewise, some of Windows 95’s flaws were intentional, with Microsoft’s stance being “If you don’t need these compatibility hacks for DOS/Win16 software and/or hardware drivers, then Windows NT is the product we want to sell you”.
From what I saw, the people who complained were generally making some kind of “Why can’t everyone see how superior this other thing I’m using is?” argument… and, obviously, there were reasons, be they price, software compatibility, or user-friendliness.
There were different groups of people back then. The marketing campaign did it really well and a lot of people were really onboard with the new look and feel. For a lot of people it was one of the first really fully graphical user experiences they had. Before, most people were stuck on DOS or only used Windows 3,1(1) occasionally or only for business applications. It also helped that the Windows 95 look and feel was pretty consistent, with mostly some older Windows 3.x programs looking “off”, but not entirely alien.
But there were also a lot of complaints. The “Start” menu, that was heavily pushed in their marketing material, was for many considered a step backward. The old progman style starting of application offered much better organization of applications and was always front and center. The new way meant more clicks and submenu traversal or putting things directly on the desktop (which wasn’t easily exposed iirc) without good grouping support.
The taskbar was a great improvement. But the notification area was almost immediately abused to start many background resident programs, often in the form of “accelerators” or “quick loaders”. And with the old display resolutions and no good support for hiding them meant the would quickly fill up a lot of real estate.
And with the new style windows came all the “Wizards” for “help” with doing basic stuff. This wizard style workflow often lead to overly simplified setups on one hand and very unintuitive interfaces (because people were almost encouraged not to use them) for many other things.
In the end many learned to live with it and for most it was their first foray into fully graphical desktops and as such holds their most nostalgic expierences. And in truth it wasn’t horrible, but it certainly wasn’t good.
internetionals,
Agree.
You liked progman? I don’t think many people did. IIRC you could still use it several versions of windows later but I prefer the start menu personally.
I don’t recall it being too bad a problem for me on win98, but naturally it will depend on what you install.
I’m not sure what you mean, do you have a screen shot?
To be clear, I’m not trying to convince anyone that win95 was a great OS free from criticism. However I was referring the public’s interest in it, which was huge. I’d immediately suggest that win2k was a better OS given more time to fix the bugs while still coming in before microsoft’s decline in UI best practices.
And while I didn’t like their default look, many subsequent operating systems still supported a classic theme, which I could still appreciate.
Honestly, despite it being annoying as Shareware, I never used Program Manager without Plug-in once I was aware of it. Progman without custom group icons was barren.
Windows XP Service Pack 2 was when they replaced it with a stub that proxied to Explorer.
That wasn’t the taskbar’s fault. If anything, it was encouraged by Windows 9x bringing the experience closer to Windows NT with pre-emptive multitasking, better stability thanks to more memory protection, new systems just generally having more RAM to waste, and the explosive growth of the Internet as a way for people to download new bits of shareware and freeware.
Resident programs which live as permanently minimized icons on Windows 3.x’s “desktop” exist… they’re just not as common.
Wizard interfaces as a “simple solution to a complex problem” were all the rage at that moment in time. Windows 9x included them as part of the ready-made suite of UI elements IIRC, but they were already ramping up via the growing popularity of VBXes and DLLs that implemented them.
Stuff like WinZIP’s Wizard mode and whatever that bundled photo retouching tool was (an early release of Photoshop LE?) that had wizards for everything, such as red-eye removal.
Windows 2k is still the best product MS ever produced. And it’s UI is no exception.