Favorite/Least Favorite UI - How to navigate

[Catler]

Best? Windows 95. MS spent unbelievable amounts of money to design and test the perfect operating system UI and it still holds up and is copied to this day.

Everything about it had tons of thought put into it, nothing was overlooked, and it was just before IE integration began.

Worst UI ever? Windows 8.

Have you used Gnome these days?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Almost every modern app is fucking godaweful and accessing something like the settings is very annoying with icons being hidden away or tons of menus to confuse you to where you want to go.
Modern windows is also pretty bad with constantly jamming shit on your taskbar.

Every single game console right now looks like this:
View attachment 3904791

They're variation of horizontal icons that scroll to the right, with the most recent game you played on the far left. Every last one. Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and even Steam Deck. Why?

The answer is that it applies to 99% of uses, you either play the game that is currently in the system or one of the latest games you played. So at most you open the console, and press right a couple of times and then an accept key and you're in the game.

 

[Stasi]

Since people mentioned consoles, the original 360 blades UI was pretty comfy

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Best: Norton Commander.
View attachment 3913410

Worst: Instagram Stories, I think that's what this is. Pictured: one of my bank apps. (inb4 "why do you have a bank app, are you retarded?": sanction dodging).

View attachment 3913425 View attachment 3913428
The four bars at the top are slides, and each in turn serves as the progress bar.

When the time runs out, the slide changes. If it's the last (or the only) slide, it just fucking closes. To pause the timer, hold your finger to the screen (yes, it means the finger's in the way if I try to read something mildly important like "HOW TO PAY TAXES").
View attachment 3913494

Swiping left and right switches between "stories" (collections of slides) - so I open the "how to pay taxes" story, read the text on the first slide, want to read the next page, and it switches to "LMAO BLACK FRIDAY SHOPPING EXTRAVAGANZA 50% OFF !!!!!121! COUPON GODE GREFISAFAGGOT50 ". It's tapping that advances the slide to the next one. I don't know of a way to go back a slide.

This cancer has now infected all 3 of my bank apps.

(inb4 "wamen amirite": Instagram is 50.7% male globally)

One of my favorite interfaces is actually my bank app, it's probably very similar to what can be found on the other side of the globe in functionality. But paying bills by letting the camera take a peek at them is so convenient and novel to me. Doing anything else is also quick and painless. If I want to send money to a Nigerian prince I can do it in a minute.

 

[Mister Uno]

Missing the other theme kings.

Every manufacturer understood, for a short window, that the experience of everything around the game was as important as the games themselves. Then they slowly lost it, with Nintendo being the last holdout with the wii u/ 3ds. Those versus the switch ui are jarring.

I personally don't have much issue navigating the Switch UI. What I do have issue with it is Sleep Mode being the default power option and having to press or hold buttons to navigate or exit menus in the case of their games. Why? Who is going to miss press to leave? Even if they do it only takes them a second to go back to where they needed to be. Takes me 5 whole seconds to exit a lobby is annoying.

 

[Distended Gunt]

Current year UIs are absolutely awful with the shitshow that is Windows 11 being mentioned multiple times (though I reckon the new Firefox UI also deserves to be curb stomped) but you ain't seen nothing until you've used some esoteric industry-specific garbage. Here's one I've had the misfortune of running into, it's called Symphony and it's a library catalogue system that's used literally all over the world

(while this screenshot is old, the UI looks the same even on brand new releases today)
The dated color palette isn't what makes it shit, it's the endless menus and hidden options. If I tasked you with configuring a receipt printer on this thing, you would literally never be able to figure it out except by accident or endless experimentation. (right click on that print icon on the left and click Properties on the hidden context menu you just summoned)

But still, it's kinda charming and if you get used to its eccentricities, it's an alright application. It certainly isn't the worst I've ever used. Here's one that's closer to that title

Its floating menus give me an SC2K vibe and it certainly belongs to that era. This software is part of a suite of education-specific software shat out by a company called RM. It's an astonishingly buggy and convoluted piece of software. Here's an example from the companion student information application called Integris and one of its myriad retarded errors

Oh no! Let's find out what the error was

Wat

A ye olde web 1.0 site cataloguing some interesting design decisions from the 90s is still available in archived form at: http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/index.htm and if you're a UX sped it might be worth a look at.

 

[ducktales4gameboy]

Old MacOS pre-OSX has a bunch of stuff I'm legitimately angry hasn't been replicated in modern OSes. Here's a couple of the big ones:

First off, labels. Very simple system where you get 8 little customizable categories to tag files with that changes their highlight/background color based on which tag they have. Makes them stand out and the find utility can search by label. Simple and fast and you can't get overwhelmed with it.

Second, the resource fork. This was a super mac specific thing that caused all sorts of headaches between filesystems pre-OS9. If you're familiar with Doom's WAD format or the way Garry's Mod pulls resources from HL2, that sort of resource access is implemented at the OS level on classic macos and every single file on a HFS/HFS+ volume can contain whatever arbitrary resources it wants and other programs can reference them. This meant you'd get a nice consistent look and feel everywhere since Apple gave you a crapload of little image resources packed into the system that you could just pull and use, which was a big deal when the Mac launched and the system, programs and data had to all fit into 400kb. For all the dumb shit Apple's done they really knocked it out of the park with the early UI and resource sharing stuff, and this resource packing meant the entire base system on classic macOS was contained in two files which you could just throw into a folder on a disk to create a bootable system.

Also, can we just declare UIs written in Electron a hate crime and be done with it? I don't want my fancy UI wrapper around dd to eat 220MB of ram and show me advertisements.

 

[Distended Gunt]

First off, labels. Very simple system where you get 8 little customizable categories to tag files with that changes their highlight/background color based on which tag they have. Makes them stand out and the find utility can search by label. Simple and fast and you can't get overwhelmed with it.

Thunderbird has something like this where you can hit numpad keys to set customizable labels. Like 0 clears them, 1 is Important, etc. The 'Important' label, for instance, will turn the e-mail bright red in the UI so it's easy to keep track of it. Would be pretty amazing if something like that was supported OS wide but current year UX seems to be all about making things as retarded as possible.

Also, can we just declare UIs written in Electron a hate crime and be done with it? I don't want my fancy UI wrapper around dd to eat 220MB of ram and show me advertisements.

Wow 220 MB! That's very efficient for an Electron application.