<story><title>Windows: Interface Guidelines (1995) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>qubex</author><text>Windows 95&amp;#x2F;98&amp;#x2F;2000  and Office 95&amp;#x2F;97&amp;#x2F;2000 is in many ways my “native interface”, probably because those were the platforms I grew up using most during my late-teenager formative years in High School and in the early years of University.&lt;p&gt;I have to say that those interfaces are clunky in retrospect, but they are undeniably &lt;i&gt;clear&lt;/i&gt; and do not place form over function as many of the modern ‘flat’ and touch-orientated interfaces seem to.&lt;p&gt;The other two graphical interfaces I remember most fondly are NeXT’s and BeOS’, which are also, probably not coincidentally, OSes I used frequently over the same period of time.&lt;p&gt;(Just to give you some context, I remember avidly reading the &lt;i&gt;Windows 95 Resource Kit&lt;/i&gt; in the run-up to the Windows 95 release in August 1995 because I had no internet access and therefore had had no way of downloading and testing the many “Chicago” betas that everybody had been raving about... and therefore I know that radio buttons on the interface were originally intended to be diamond-shaped rather than round.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Windows: Interface Guidelines (1995) [pdf]</title><url>https://www.ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>Ididntdothis</author><text>The 90s were definitely a time when people thought deeply about how to make computer applications more usable. Apple also had excellent guidelines. Problem was that back then the hardware and the operating systems sucked. Now it’s the opposite. Hardware and OS are very stable now but applications are getting worse.</text></comment>