My hypothesis is today's "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective, obfuscating key functionality behind layers of confusing menus.
It reminds me of these "OS popularity since the 70s" time lapse views:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cTKhqtll5cQ
The dominance of Windows is crazy, even today, Mac desktops and laptops are comparatively niche
These kinds of things almost always give me an uncanny-valley feeling. Here I'm looking at the screenshot and can’t help noticing that the taskbar buttons are too close to the taskbar’s edge, the window titles are too narrow, the folders are too yellow, and so on and so forth. (To its credit, Wine is the one exception that is not susceptible to this, even when configured to use a higher DPI value so the proportions aren’t actually the ones I’m used to.) I’m not so much criticizing the theme’s authors as wondering why this is so universal across the many replicas.
The problem is that the interfaces these bootleg skins draw "inspiration" from were designed on the back of millions of pre-inflationary dollars' R&D from only the best at Golden-Age IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.. BeOS, OS/2, Windows 95-2000 do not look the way they do because it looks good, they look the way they do because it works good, countless man hours went into ensuring that. Simply designing an interface that looks similar is not going to bring back the engineering prowess of those Old Masters.
In modern times telemetry can show how well new designs work. The industry never forgot how to measure and do user research for ui changes. We've only gotten better at it.
The goal in 1995 might be "The user can launch the text editor, add three lines to a file, and save it from a fresh booted desktop within 2 minutes".
The goal in 2015 might be "we can get them from a bare desktop to signing up for a value-add service within 2 minutes"
I'd actually be interested if there's a lot of "regression testing" for usability-- if they re-run old tests on new user cohorts or if they assume "we solved XYZ UI problem in 1999" and don't revisit it in spite of changes around the problem.
- With a full set of metrics, we're now designing toward the bottom half of the bell curve, ie, towards the users who struggle the most. Rather than building UIs which are very good, but must be learned, we're now building UIs which must suit the weakest users. This might seem like a good thing, but it's really not. It's a race to the bottom, and robs those novice users from ever having the chance of becoming experts.
- Worse, because UIs must always serve the interests of the bottom of the bell curve, this actually is why we have constant UI churn. What's worse than a bad UI? 1,000 bad UIs which each change every 1-6 months. No one can really learn the UIs if they're always churning, and the metrics and the novice users falsely encourage teams to constantly churn their UIs.
I strongly believe that you'd see better UIs either with far fewer metrics, or with products that have smaller, expert-level user bases.
But product managers inside the large corporations can't get promoted for merely maintaining the status quo. So they push for "reimagining" projects, like Google's "Material Screw You" UI.
And we get a constant treadmill of UI updates that don't really make anything better.
1. Which design is most effective at steering the most users to the most lucrative actions
2. What looks good in screenshots, presentations, and marketing
The rest is tertiary or an afterthought at best. Lots of modern UI is actually pretty awful for those mentioned bottom of the bell curve users and not much better for anybody else in terms of being easy to use or serving the user’s needs.
Proper use of analytics might be of assistance here, but those are also primarily used to figure out the most profitable usage patterns, not what makes a program more pleasant or to easy to use. They’re also often twisted or misused to justify whatever course of action the PM in question wants to take, which is often to degrade the user experience in some way.