Former Microsoft exec explain how a behavioral psychologist utilized Fitts’s law to place the Windows 95 Start button in the bottom-left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts's_law
Fitts’s law (also known as Fitts’ law) is a predictive model of human movement primarily used in human–computer interaction and ergonomics. The law predicts that the time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the ratio between the distance to the target and the width of the target.[1] Fitts’s law is used to model the act of pointing, either by physically touching an object with a hand or finger, or virtually, by pointing to an object on a computer monitor using a pointing device.
Corners have an infinite area and are the quickest to hit.
Now, Win11 (by default) puts the start menu in a variable location, so it’s both slower to interact with (more precision required) and prone to errors (misclicks).
I know from a technical standpoint, W95 was really, really shaky. But for me it was my first OS, and I think it still did a ton of stuff right.
Tada.wav
I basically never click the GUI start button any more, just press the Windows/Command key and type what I need
I love that any time someone talks about how to make a UI faster or better it reverts to the keyboard. Eventually we end up back on the terminal to launch programs, including GUI ones.
Imo the ideal is a good GUI with good keyboard shortcuts. Like if you don’t remember exactly how a program is named/spelled, you’ll probably do some sort of search or autocomplete, both of which can be done in either GUI or CLI, but the GUI can show colourful icons with each match while the CLI needs to do a bunch more work to do so (and starts blurring the line between GUI and CLI if it does). Those icons make it a lot easier to find the one you’re looking for, as well as reduce ambiguity when you want to play games on a system that also manages the steam valves for the locomotive you got bored of driving.
just press the Windows/Command key and type what I need
Which on Windows 11 may or may not actually return anything remotely close to what you want.
Worked great on Windows Vista/7.
This smells apocryphal to me. Very apocryphal.
Like you don’t need a behavioral psychologist to explain why people are going to prefer putting menunthingies out of the way.
Even back before a mouse, graphical applications (like q-basic) would place their menuthingies at the top, in a header. They had already established a pattern we still largely follow today- the most general menu category goes to the right, the most specific to the left.-
File is stuff relating to the document- opening, closing, savoring; document wide settings, etc, where help is… uh… extremely specific and almost never used.
So you already have this pattern in UC design; applications are already following it because it makes sense. So now, your devs need to place another menu bar somewhere, and they place it at the bottom, so it’d out of the way of everything else, and they follow the pattern.
oh. and NeXTSTEP’s came out in '88…
I remember working with a friend and his dad to build a large shed. Because my geometry, trig, and calculus teachers were always drilling into me how eminently PRACTICAL these maths were, I thought all my training would come in handy, but every time I sat down to do a calculation, my friend and his dad would just arrange a few boards a certain way, mark one of them, and be on their way, their problem solved perfectly within their required tolerance.
Abstract thinking is often more trouble than its worth.
Aligning boards like that is kind of a form of abstract thinking. Less than using math though of course.
I wouldn’t be so sure. Fitts’s law is well-known and could easily have been in the right state for this story to be true at the time. I remember learning specifically about how it applies to the corners of ths screen in a Human-Computer Interaction class once.
Fitt’s law being true or well known, and explaining why it works doesn’t mean they hired a behavioral psychologist.
This is like saying an architect hired physicist to explain why arches work; when everyone already knows that they work.
With the other UIs, like Mac’s next step and dock; they saw the same basic concept and had the ability to see real world feedback from that, no behavioral psychologist needed.
Hmm, true
oh. and NeXTSTEP’s came out in '88…
And the apple menu was already in the top left before windows 95.
They corrected it in Windows 98, though, and extended the invisible, active target zone of the Start button to the outer 1-pixel boundary of the screen.
Is this actually true? I seem to remember once trying it on Windows 2000 and there it didn’t extend all the way to the edge.
Yes they had the same fuckup in the XP jellybean start button, which was later fixed.
I have to use Mac’s for work now and I will never understand how in 2026, they still insist on having both a dock and a system menu bar.
Like guys, it’s 2026, you can do all the OS stuff in one space, and leave the rest of the screen open for application stuff.
Have they fixed the full screen blocking important buttons already?
Or are users still using floating screens everywhere because that is the only way to use them effectively?
Nope, they have not. It’s honestly a terrible OS.
I hide all that stuff and just use keyboard shortcuts. (I also use a MacBook for work like you)
it turned out that subject was a propulsion engineer at Boeing.
That explains it.
Oh, and unless my left hand is broken, I can use the keyboard for things in most major OSs much easier and faster than dragging the mouse alllll the way to the bottom left to hopefully find the correct part to click on.
Windows peaked at 3.1
Although corners have infinite access, I doubt anyone is using mouse anymore to open start menu
Current fastest pipeline is Press Win button - start typing what you need
And it is convenient for eyes when menu is in the center.
Have you never worked in an office?
At least 95% of users use their cursor to open start.
The majority rarely use their keyboard for anything other than typing sentences.
I am not talking about these people. They are not bothered or affected by UX microoptinizations of having infinite speed access areas.
Judging by how my original comment is downvoted, I for sure hit something in those who are bothered and who for some unknown for me reason are still using mouse to open Start menu, so it is important for them to have it on the left.
It is literally the same as with pineapple pizza. Internet told them to hate it, so they do, lol.
