I love the aesthetics of that era so much: Efficient usage of screen space, clear borders between different elements - brings back happy memories!
the GUI design of this era was really something else, its hard to describe but the UIs felt so discoverable, the basic core features were presented up front and easy to use, intermediate features could be found in widgets surrounding the core UI, and a whole set of advanced features within the menus once you've mastered your surroundings. It's as if the UIs of the time were designed to create an efficient learning path, at the expense of some information overload when first using the application.
The most important thing is that it was consistent. Once you learned about top-level and context menus, you could find basically everything in any app. Toolbars, hotkeys etc would provide shortcuts, but you didn't have to bother with any of that except for the few apps you used a lot. Similarly e.g. lists worked the same everywhere - same scrolling behavior, same ways to select multiple items etc.
These days, something as trivial as finding the settings dialog in the app can be a challenge, especially on mobile.
In my opinion, UIs back then where created with the expectation that users would learn them. Good designers made learning and discovery easy (bad ones failed, of course), but either way, learning was expected to happen.
Nowadays, UIs are designed with the expectation that users don’t learn them. This limits what software can do, but (I don’t mean this cynically) was probably necessary to bring those apps to the majority.
Comments
the GUI design of this era was really something else, its hard to describe but the UIs felt so discoverable, the basic core features were presented up front and easy to use, intermediate features could be found in widgets surrounding the core UI, and a whole set of advanced features within the menus once you've mastered your surroundings. It's as if the UIs of the time were designed to create an efficient learning path, at the expense of some information overload when first using the application.
The most important thing is that it was consistent. Once you learned about top-level and context menus, you could find basically everything in any app. Toolbars, hotkeys etc would provide shortcuts, but you didn't have to bother with any of that except for the few apps you used a lot. Similarly e.g. lists worked the same everywhere - same scrolling behavior, same ways to select multiple items etc.
These days, something as trivial as finding the settings dialog in the app can be a challenge, especially on mobile.
In my opinion, UIs back then where created with the expectation that users would learn them. Good designers made learning and discovery easy (bad ones failed, of course), but either way, learning was expected to happen.
Nowadays, UIs are designed with the expectation that users don’t learn them. This limits what software can do, but (I don’t mean this cynically) was probably necessary to bring those apps to the majority.