What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

Among tech and design folks of a certain vintage, there is a fondness for the design language used by Windows from Windows 95 to Windows 2000.

While you could argue that this is mere nostalgia, I've always thought there is more to it than that. The Windows 95 UI was famously the result of comprehensive UX studies and careful design. While Microsoft has always been Microsoft—a company defined by a lack of care in everything it puts out into the world—the developers and designers who worked on early versions of Windows really did care about what they were building.

movq writes about what made the Windows 2000 UI great. Things that stood out to me:

• The Start menu (in my opinion, this is the greatest idea in the design of desktop operating systems).
• Icons are colored and have unique shapes, making them easy to identify at a glance.
• All interactive elements share visual similarities.
• The color palette consists of sharply contrasting colors, making it easy to distinguish between different parts of the UI.
• Scrollbars are always visible.
• Options dialogs across the OS have a similar layout, with options grouped into tabs and the same Apply/Ok/Cancel buttons at the bottom of the dialogs.
• UI controls that are part of the same logical group are contained inside clearly demarcated frames.

Incidentally, some of the things that made the Windows 2000 UI great were also the things that made Apple's Platinum and Aqua design languages great. We lost our way somewhere in the 2010s with Apple's "flat design" and Microsoft's Metro, with the rest of the industry following suit soon after.

Today, many of our desktop UIs have no distinction between interactive and non-interactive elements, use color palettes that are just different shades of gray, give all icons the same silhouette by putting them in squircle jail, and make scrollbars nearly inaccessible by autohiding them at every opportunity.

movq ends with:

Preach.