I want to say it was Vista, but I think you’re right, it was Win8. Whatever, it wasn’t the only driving force, there were a number of things that got me to try Apple.
Say what you will about MSFT, but in the era where they were 90+% of everyone’s computing experience they put out detailed guidelines on all this stuff. For sure 100% of 3rd party software shops didn’t follow them all perfectly, but the amount of just crazy-strange interfaces was pretty small back in the pre-internet win 95 & XP era.
The advent of browsers opened the floodgates of massive experimentation by amatuers and suddenly the UI of “your” computer & “your” software was really whatever UI their website wanted it to be. Which web-world had no tradition of following MSFT UI design guidelines.
Then came phones, the rise of late-gen Macs to mainstream, etc. UI designed to sell you stuff is very different from UI designed to help you get work done. The former is all about maximizing their goals at the expense of yours. The latter is the opposite.
'zactly.
I battle change fatigue with a little help from my open source friends. I find little apps that allow me to keep things pretty much the same regardless of what anyone else decides to do to fuck with things. If you look at my computer you wouldn’t know it’s up to the minute Win10 because I use apps like Open Shell to revert the start menu back to what I like (which, trust me, is not some bastard amalgamation of text free icons arranged in alphabetical order, like WTF is that and who thought THAT was a good idea?) and use other tweakers to give me the aero glass look I really like from previous versions. Whenever Faceplant does something numb I know in short order that the FB Purity app (that I’ve been using since it was a Greasemonkey script) will have an option to change it right back to what I prefer. People see my Faceplant page and can’t fathom why it looks so different from theirs–I refuse to see ads and I remove anything I don’t like and I prefer squared corners to stupid rounded bubble chat input areas so that’s what I have. I’ve gotten very cuddly with userchrome.css tweaks to combat the constant phonification (is TOO a word!) of Firefox–look, I have a lovely 17" screen here, I don’t WANT it to look like a dinky flat phone screen where you can only view one app at a time. I have SCREEN REAL ESTATE and I want to USE it.
So I’m basically a tech savvy Luddite using up to the minute technology to mimic past eras. Which is weird AF but it does help combat that change fatigue angle. 'Cuz once I get things set I don’t have to fuck with it much until I get a new laptop and my gods isn’t THAT fun!
I’m a young whippersnapper of 70 but my first computer was a MITS Altair 8800 I built, so, 
Actually, I’ve had an interest in computers since I was about twelve. I have told people a perfectly true statement that my first computer book had a picture of Grace Hopper in it – as an Ensign. Getting the Altair was the culmination of a dream even if I had to program it with switches and the output was blinken lights.
I bought an Android 2-in-1 tablet a couple weeks ago and it’s been a learning experience. All my smart phones have been Androids but there are enough differences between it and the tablet to throw me. For example I wanted to use a favorite photo for the wall paper and stuck the thumb drive it was on into the tablet but apparently MS’ directory structure threw it – I could not find the folder it was in. So I stick the thumb drive into a desktop and haul the photo out of the directory it was in but then find it’s too big to fit on the screen; if there’s a scaling feature for the wallpaper, I can’t find it.
It’s been a low priority so I haven’t tried tried resizing the file in Photoshop yet.
This.
Huge amounts of it come across as if, say, book publishers might decide this Tuesday *.tfel ot thgir daer dlouhs gnihtyreve taht
(*yes I know it does in Hebrew.)
And then once you’d managed to adjust your eyes to that, the next book you got your hands on read up from the bottom and then back down again on the next line.
This is complicated by the fact that what looks entirely intuitive to one person often doesn’t at all to somebody else. I now know, thanks to reading advice on this board, that three horizontal lines is known as a hamburger (doesn’t look remotely like one to me) and indicates a menu (which seems to me entirely arbitrary.) And I can learn that; just as I can learn that “. . .” means “more options”. But I have a strong suspicion that a couple of years from now I’ll be expected to learn that something else, equally arbitrary, means a menu. And in the meantime, that symbol means a menu some places, and something else means a menu somewhere else; so the fast glance for where on the page a menu might be is complicated by the fact that one doesn’t know what symbol one’s eyes are looking for.
It’s rather like being expected to learn a new language, or at least a new set of punctuation, every time you want to read a different book. Yes, the new language might let you say easily something that’s hard to say in the previous language; or it’s nice to have an interrobang. But it probably makes it harder to say something else; and why is the semicolon now three clicks away in a special characters menu? And it’s annoying to be expected to spend the time one wanted to spend doing something particular in learning how to do it instead: learning it over, and over, and over.
If that’s what you think is fun, and/or if that’s what your job is, then it’s going to look different to you. But if the computer/phone/whatever is just a tool for you that you have to use to do x, you want the thing itself – how do I put this? to be invisible, sort of? You just want it to work. You don’t want to have to learn where the brakes are in the car every time you get into a different one; you just want the car to stop when you step on them. If they’re now computer-assisted discs instead of purely mechanical drums: you still just want the car to stop when you step on them.
If it makes you feel any better, I think “hamburger” is informal, just because it needs an easy-to-say name. I’d been using that icon for a long time before I heard anyone call it “the hamburger menu”. And I think the icon is supposed to be suggestive of a list of lines of text, one above the other. It’s obviously an icon designed to work well on a little screen that is now being used on all screens.
I don’t think the problem, for me, has anything to do with the size of screen. I’d have been just as puzzled by it on a small screen, and would still have been looking for a down arrow to open a drop down menu. That I suppose isn’t more obvious, but it’s the one I’d already learned – and the one I still see a lot of places elsewhere.
ETA: but my other point about the “hamburger” was that “intuitive” isn’t the same for everybody.
Your points are well taken, but you misunderstood @puzzlegal. The “hamburger” icon was invented as a way to shoehorn a menu dropdown into a phone-sized screen.
Then later the Arbiters of Taste decided that programs on PCs or Macs should look just like apps on phones, except bigger. So the hamburger migrated from your phone to your tablet and your desktop. The size of the screen is irrelevant to how suggestive it is of a menu. And I agree with you that it isn’t suggestive at all until someone else explains it.
It’s called a hamburger 
because it vaguely resembles 2 buns with a layer of meat in between. They could have called it a sandwich 
menu or a short-stack 
menu equally well.
Time for lunch!
The reason they aren’t, and we are, is that they don’t get or have never been taught the underlying principles of the OS or the computer.
I’m 68, and I started on an LGP-21 programming in machine language, and went from there to time sharing systems like Multics, minicomputers to UNIX System V. I also taught operating systems and architecture, as well as assembly language. So I can envision the underlying implementation of this stuff.
Sometimes common interfaces can be confusing. The file interface in Word is not that much different from Windows Explorer - so my wife always gets confused about why she can’t unzip files in Word.
If everyone had some command line experience, they’d find it easier.
No problem with the new Dope interface. When I need to do something, like quote, it only took a few seconds to figure it out. My biggest complaint is how unintuitive it is to get to the last post in a thread.
And that post counts aren’t included with each post.
Display the thread. Press the “End” key.
Before I had thought about the consequences of an infinite scroll UI model I too was surprised to find live hotkeys in the UI that weren’t Ctrl- or Alt-. But if you look at it as app, not a web page, it makes sense that any of the ancillary keys on the keyboard do things, just as Home & End do things in Word, Excel, or Visual Studio.
Doesn’t it take up more space than a down arrow?
Now see, to me that is intuitive. Just click on the bottom of the slider bar.
– though come to think of it, it wouldn’t have seemed intuitive to me in, say, 2000. The reason it seems so now is that I’ve been doing that in the similar bar on the right of browser windows since 2002; though IIRC when I first started doing it there was a symbol there, which seems to have disappeared from my browsers somewhere along the line.
“Intuitive” sometimes means “the human mind works that way”; and the problem with that one is that not everyone’s works the same way. But very often “intuitive”, like “common sense”, means “something learned so long ago that the person calling it ‘intuitive’ or ‘common sense’ has forgotten that they needed to learn it.”
The what key?
(I’m on a Mac, I have no “end” key. Nor a “home” key. Same on my tiny windows box, since it has a small keyboard.)
I can click on the end of the scroll bar, but there are two of them, and it only works on one of them.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that. I associate arrows with movement on the page, not with menus.
Maybe I’ve got the wrong name for it; I see it all the time. The old boards used it – if you looked at the bar at the top of the page there was, say, Quick Links with what I’m calling a down arrow next to it; you clicked on the arrow and a list of options opened up beneath it.
And it’s very common on business sites: go to this page, say: https://gemplers.com/ and look at the bar near the top of the page just below the search box: it says “landscape and nursery” “pest” “safety” “workshop” “sprayers” and so on, and next to each of those is a down arrow; again, click on the arrow and a whole batch of options opens up in a list below the bar.
It’s probably the keyboard, not the OS: I’m on a Mac and using a Mac keyboard and I have an end key: to the right of the letters, there’s a little clump of navigation keys: page up and page down and home (top of the page) and end (bottom of the page.) If I’ve got the mouse in my hand I tend to navigate pages with the mouse, but sometimes I use the keys.
It’s funny you used that as an example, because when I open your link, I have to click the 3-lines “hamburger” menu to even get those topics you listed.
I have to click the 3-lines “hamburger” menu to even get those topics you listed.
Me, too.
And oh, you mean the “expand this item carat”. Yeah, I’ve seen that. But it’s always used next to the thing it is expanding, in my experience. Honestly, I’d be confused to just see it on it’s own. But I suppose that could have been the standard instead of three lines (that I’m pretty sure were meant to evoke a little list of text.)
That’s almost TOO intuitive; I would have assumed it would have been some kind of abstruse keyboard command- like Shift-Ctrl-PgDn or something like that, like you did.
That’s one of those things I was talking about people not knowing. They’ve literally have little triangular down arrows or downward pointing carets on drop-downs for DECADES. To me, it’s a little perplexing that people didn’t at some point in the past couple of decades, just eventually notice that, click on it, and go “Ah! That means pop the pull-down menu down.”
Yes. The point isn’t that the old-style interface used a downarrow/carat/whatever, it’s that it used words, which don’t work nearly as well on a phone screen.
err… did you read my follow-up?
I’m going to agree with others that your tone is, perhaps, more condescending than you intend it to be.