<story><title>Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)</title><url>https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe-&amp;gt;Photoshop, Microsoft-&amp;gt;stuff.&lt;p&gt;I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I&amp;#x27;d propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu.&lt;p&gt;Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.&lt;p&gt;I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.</text></item><item><author>sickcodebruh</author><text>Re: usability of the Start Menu...&lt;p&gt;When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.</text></item><item><author>alxlaz</author><text>Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:&lt;p&gt;- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless&lt;p&gt;- Good contrast&lt;p&gt;- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it&amp;#x27;s weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they&amp;#x27;re important on touch-enabled systems but that&amp;#x27;s no reason to use them anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus&lt;p&gt;- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.&lt;p&gt;The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...&lt;p&gt;I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>MereInterest</author><text>I thought that Win7 had a good solution to that, with typing immediately doing a search within the start menu.  Then, Win8 made it also search for files,  destroying any utility of the search.  If you want people to have muscle memory (e.g. WinKey + moz + enter to start Mozilla Firefox), then having severe lag on the search, and having the top result vary as a function of time (as more search results are found), is horrendous.</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)</title><url>https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>One huge problem with the start menu is that every company put a folder with their company name in there and you had to go inside to launch your program. Adobe-&amp;gt;Photoshop, Microsoft-&amp;gt;stuff.&lt;p&gt;I think the desktop designers should have made a fixed set of top level menus. Only show the non-empty ones, but at least make everyone put apps in them. I&amp;#x27;d propose a set including: games, programming, engineering, design, media, office, entertainment, audio-visual, system tools.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d also suggest subcategories particularly for games. If there is only one category, or not that many programs total, it could omit the subcategary level when showing that menu.&lt;p&gt;Put users first and stop sticking your company names in their menus. Add a little structure and some reasonable heuristics. Done.&lt;p&gt;I think Linux distros could do this since they have packaging guidelines and huge software repositories.</text></item><item><author>sickcodebruh</author><text>Re: usability of the Start Menu...&lt;p&gt;When I used to do tech support, from Win 98 all the way through Win 7 days, I would consistently find that reasonably intelligent human adults had difficulty understanding the Start Menu. If something wasn’t on the first menu, they weren’t going to interact with it. It seemed like such a no-brainer to me — just expand the folders! — but a staggering number of people found it alien and never adapted. Even the idea of a right-click VS left is too much for many people.</text></item><item><author>alxlaz</author><text>Not just the icons, the entire user interface was excellent. You had:&lt;p&gt;- Clear indication of whether something was clickable or not, vs. everything flat and featureless&lt;p&gt;- Good contrast&lt;p&gt;- Normal-sized widgets which left enough room for content vs. the huge widgets we use today for some reason (it&amp;#x27;s weird for me to say this, but Linux desktops are the worst offenders here). I get why they&amp;#x27;re important on touch-enabled systems but that&amp;#x27;s no reason to use them anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;- Useable scrollbars, no hamburger menus&lt;p&gt;- And -- although Windows-specific: the Start menu was something you could actually use.&lt;p&gt;The state of testing, examination and debates about user interfaces was also light years ahead of what we see today. I was genuinely fascinated about what my colleagues who did UI design were doing, and about the countless models they developed and metrics they used. If it was the same bikeshedding we see today, they sure as hell knew how to make it look like they were having a real debate...&lt;p&gt;I suspect the reason behind this drop in quality is largely economical. Fifteen years ago, you needed a great deal of understanding about perception, semiotics, about computer graphics, and a remarkable degree of mastery of your tools in order to produce an icon set. This made icons costly to develop, to a point where it was pretty hard to explain it to managers why you &lt;i&gt;need&lt;/i&gt; to pay a real designer a heap of money for a real icon because, dude, just look at every other successful app on an OS X desktop!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pantalaimon</author><text>Gnome 2 did this (and Mate still does), but I actually find it more confusing.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s sometimes not obvious which category a program belongs to, so you have to meticulously search all categories that could apply.
And you&amp;#x27;d only to that if you don&amp;#x27;t exactly remember the program name in the first place, otherwise you would have had quicker ways to launch it.&lt;p&gt;Here the old windows way offers more &amp;#x27;breadcrumbs&amp;#x27; to find something.</text></comment>