Since the early days of Macintosh/Windows, the GUI has changed in its visual appearance, user interaction, connectivity, and efficiency. The fundamental core of its design and most controls stayed the same and with the improvement of technologies today. When it was first developed into a physical product by XEROX PARC, the GUI already had structural elements, such as window, icon, and menu, and interactive elements like the scroll bar and pointer/mouse. These elements still exist today on our computer’s interface as foundational principles of interaction. The visual appearance of the GUI has drastically changed as higher resolution, multi-color display and more powerful GPUs came along. The following photo shows the appearance of the interface of an Apple LISA computer. Things like transparency and animations came along much later as the resolution when GUI was first introduced couldn’t even handle rendering fonts other than its default pixel fonts with clarity.
Credit: Ted Thai/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The user interaction also has expanded from what it used to be, that is just a keyboard and mouse, to touch screens, voice commands and gesture controls. The ability to connect to the Internet and cloud services was also an development over time which has allowed systems to access information across platforms and many other connectivity features. Last but not least, the speed of GUIs’ responsiveness has been much optimized and improved from when it was released. Based on the improvement in technologies today, things that could be improved are accessibility and sustainability. Those with disabilities does not always have full access to GUIs in ways such as navigating with mouse/touchscreen or visual impairments that limits navigation. To improve on accessibility, GUIs can improve on voice recognition accuracy and non-contact navigation. On the other hand, sustainability can be better addressed by designing systems that are more energy efficient.