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Blue95: a desktop for your childhood home's computer room

(github.com)
567 points elvis70 | 2 comments | 30 Mar 25 15:30 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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metadat ◴[30 Mar 25 16:14 UTC] No.43525239[source]▶
This looks nice and easy to use.

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

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voidfunc ◴[30 Mar 25 16:25 UTC] No.43525330[source]▶
I got in an argument with an accessibility engineer about this recently...

The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

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burnte ◴[30 Mar 25 18:53 UTC] No.43526522[source]▶
> The whole UI as branding thing has utterly killed usability.

This is caused by a change in who is hired as UI/UX developers. In days past it was HCI experts and engineers, now it's graphic designers. "Pretty" is the order of the day, not "useful". "There are too many menu items" is now answered with "So let's hide them" when it used to be "How can we organize them in the UI us a simple, discoverable manner?" But then that "overflow" menu (really? Needed menu commands are now OVERFLOW?) gets crowded so they start just removing features so the UI is nice.

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1. girvo ◴[30 Mar 25 22:29 UTC] No.43528367{3}[source]▶
Having worked with amazing HCI experts over the years, you've hit the nail on the head. It's wild how much design is done for designs sake at my work, with nary a nod to HCI given. The a11y team try to patch over it as best as possible, but we end up with a mess, and I'm treated like a pariah for pushing back on some of it
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2. burnte ◴[31 Mar 25 20:35 UTC] No.43539646[source]▶
I'm glad to hear my suspicions and impressions are accurate. I have a number of friends who have gone into UI over the past 20 years and while they're all very smart people, In my opinion exactly 1 of them has what it takes to work in UI/UX. The rest are mediocre graphic designers with average to no training in graphic design, and zero experience in anything technical. Only one knew what Fitts law was, or what HCI meant, or what GUI meant