Re: what was nice about Win2k UI

On 20 Jun 2026 03:33:23 GMT, Retrograde wrote:

> From the «UI experts made it worse?» department:
> Feed: OSnews
> Title: What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
> Author: Thom Holwerda
> Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2026 20:21:34 +0000
> Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/145346/what-was-nice-about-the-ui-of-windows-2000/
> 
> I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway.
> 
> I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly
> using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in
> QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
> 
> Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it’s
> worth pointing out.
> ↫ movq.de blog[1]
> 
> Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user
> interfaces were back in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’ve lost so many
> affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we
> ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn’t really
> matter where you look – user interface design has deteriorated since the
> early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of
> the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the
> advertising people took prominence over the design people.
> 
> I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.
> 
> Links:
> [1]: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-06-16/0/POSTING-en.html (link)

The worst about "modern" UI is that, it's aggresively not
keyboard-accessible. The more cool/beutiful it looks, the less
keyboard-accessible it is.