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Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward.

Windows 2000 was the peak of Windows UI. While features and functionality has improved in many ways, everything UI change since then has been a step backward. Microsoft (and IBM and others) did a ton of good HCI research in the 70s and 80s, and used that research to make better UI for their operating systems. But sometime around the mid-90s when high-color displays started becoming the norm, UI experts started gradually being replaced by art-school types, and now it seems very little consideration is given to actual UI functionality, and the driver is entirely some bizarre sense of style from people who don't know anything about Human Computer Interaction, but seem to think no more deeply than "less is more". These UI elements had reasons to look and act the way they did. This communicated information to the user (even if the user didn't realize it), and made software much more predictable and discoverable, and ultimately, more intuitive.

xg15 3mo ago
This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe. The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI. So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever. And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'. Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company... Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...

xg15 3mo ago

This is one part of it, but not the whole thing I believe. The other thing that happened is that "UX research" paradoxically became more data-driven and "scientific", with live telemetry that monitors how UIs are practically used becoming standard. We're able to run "experiments" and directly compare the user interactions from two different variants of the same UI. So in theory, with all that data, we should be making more usable and intuitive UIs than ever. And we are in a way, just not in a user-empowering way. UI design is evaluated by target metrics, and those metrics are firmly in service of the companies' interests, not the users'. Hence so much focus on "engagement" and on making certain flows and activities as frictionless as possible - at the cost of consistency and all the rest of activities that a user might be more interested in than the company... Basically, UX design as a field is alive and well, maybe more so than it ever was - it's "just" not in service of the user anymore...