Microsoft's UI designers used to be useful. The Windows UI design got better by leaps and bounds at first, was at its peak between Windows 95 and Windows 2000, and has been getting worse ever since. The problem is now that the field has matured, there's a lot less that needs to be changed, so they've started to change things that were fine the way they were to justify not being downsized.
I've been working on a project recently that involves running Win95 in a VM and it's almost shocking how nice the UX feels compared to the Win11 host surrounding it. Consistent, clean, legible - nothing hidden, very little extraneous animation or visual flash. Even the battleship gray is nicer than I remember. Nostalgia goggles for sure, but...
Not to pile on trashing the Windows 11 UI, but my first experience with it was actually watching a not-very-technical person attempt to restore a mistakenly deleted file by opening the trash can. The Windows Explorer app showed them a very large, obvious trash can icon, which they proceeded to click to open. It failed to open, so they clicked again...and again...not realizing that each time they clicked it, they were actually deleting an item they had selected. To add insult to injury, I don't believe the icon had a tooltip.
The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target. I do not miss those at all.
> The one improvement modern Windows has over Windows from the 90s is the lack of those godawful cascading menus that would disappear off the screen the second you even slightly missed a hover target.
To be clear, I'm not saying that Microsoft hasn't improved any UI since Windows 2000, just that overall, they've made more stuff worse than they've improved since then.
