Although Windows XP was marketed as intuitive and user-friendly, the next generation of the Windows operating system boasted a completely redesigned and much buzzed-about interface, overhauling everything from language to iconography to navigation. Some attributes remained, while others disappeared, creating a new environment of changed meanings and renegotiating the relationship between the operating system and its user.

Regardless of version, Windows operating systems—and most examples in the Graphical User Interface (GUI) genre—share standard elements that serve to represent the inner workings of the system to the user through semiotic functions. These elements can be grouped into categories of windows, menus, controls, and icons, as well as the natural language and stylistic treatments that appear throughout the interface. By examining differences between the top-level signifiers for Windows XP and Windows Vista, their paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions, and the codes and myths they activate, we can deconstruct how the discourse between Microsoft’s operating system (addresser) and its target users (addressee) has evolved.

The default visual style for XP’s interface is named Luna, the Latin word for moon. The term connotes discovery and exploration, the realization of a goal that is both significant and attainable, though not without the assistance of technology and the funding of a massive organization. The moon is at once far-off and familiar; mysterious and mundane. It brings to mind all the lore and legend surrounding its nightly vigil over the ages, culminating in its conquest in the 1969 moon landing. Users are meant to associate their exploration of Windows XP with this achievement: yes, it’s a monumental goal, but you can do it, as others have done before you, with our help. The “XP” portion of the product name refers to the abbreviation for experience in gaming culture, which quantifies a player’s experience based on the difficulty and amount of interactions, travel, and victories achieved in a videogame. Typically, a certain threshold of XP is required to progress to the next level.

On the other hand, Vista’s interface, Aero, is the Greek-derived prefix for air, as in aerospace. This field of technology is familiar and accessible to anyone that can afford air travel; namely, the middle-to-upper income bracket that comprises the product’s target demographic. “Aero” is also a publicized acronym that stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reliable and Open. By using an acronym for its user interface—a mnemonic device typical of internal value statements or management concepts—Microsoft exposes the qualities that the product aims to impress upon its customers. This branding tactic also implies corporate transparency, a practice that has become a much more sought-after indicator of an organization’s credibility in the post-Enron world. The “Vista” in this release of Windows translates to “view,” a term that connotes both the noun, as well as the verb. We can take in the view from a window; we can view information in a system.

The interface and brand names of each of these OS versions encompass the myths and meanings activated by the signs comprising their respective virtual environments. From icons of globes and suburban houses, to job titles like “Information Architect,” to web terms such as “navigation,” geographic and architectural metaphors have become entrenched in interface-driven technology. In their essay Computers and Telepresence: A Ghost in the Machine?, Westerman and Skalski propose that this common comparison “suggests that people are experiencing these virtual environments as actual environments and thus, experiencing a high level of physical presence” (65). Logging in to Windows XP for the first time, the default theme greets you with an idyllic backdrop: a vibrant outdoor setting of rolling green hills and intensely blue skies. The grass is perfectly manicured as far as the eye can see, indicating that this is not the kind of remote and rugged landscape one might marvel at in National Geographic, but a well-tended sprawl of land. This scene is undoubtedly a place; a suburban park, perhaps, that a middle-class North American adult might feel nostalgic towards. The suburban syntagm even includes a conventional pet: when conducting searches, a friendly golden Labrador retriever (the Windows Search Companion) appears and performs system commands like tricks, communicating the system’s responses in friendly speech bubbles. This constructed experience denotes exploration in a safe environment, guided by one’s [talking] dog, where everything is familiar and non-threatening. This follows Westerman & Skalski’s argument that virtual places that resemble actual places “increase the chance of activating mental models, or cognitive representations of entities, situations, and events in real and imagined worlds” (73). The signs in Windows XP that invoke the real-world experiences serve to transfer onto the system the same trusting attitudes people have towards, for instance, their loyal pet dog and neighbourhood park.

Beyond the signs that reproduce already-learned environments, other features that make up the Windows XP interface call to mind familiar modes of learning. The most prevalent features of the Windows XP default interface—the Start button, taskbar, window borders, and window controls (i.e. minimize, restore down, and close)—are decked-out in vibrant, primary tones of green, blue and red: three out of five of the official Windows brand colours. With rounded edges, low colour modulation, and white labeling, the overall effect is reminiscent of plastic toys for toddlers that have some kind of educational purpose, like a toy telephone made by Fisher Price. Just as the distinctly coloured parts help children to distinguish between their respective functions, the XP colour scheme invokes clear social conventions such as green for “go” (Start menu) and red for “stop” (close window) and uses high-contrast colours to ensure the prominence of these functions.

Similarly, the syntax used in labels for specific locations orients the addressee towards the areas that are “safe” to explore. Although all information comprising and stored on a your computer is technically available for you to access and change, there are some areas that could adversely impact the system’s normal operations, if tinkered with by an inexperienced user. Windows XP deters such a user from inadvertently harming their own computer by creating a binary opposition between the presence and the absence of the first-person possessive. Preferred entry points into system directories are identified as My Documents, My Computer, and My Network Places. This explicit designation of ownership assures the user that these areas can be safely explored, while at the same time implying that items not following this naming convention are to be avoided. For instance, areas such as “Control Panel” seem to be intended for someone other than the interface’s apparent addressee, since they fall outside the paradigm of what is “mine”. This labelling approach also runs parallel to children’s products that often employ the first-person possessive (e.g. toys such as “My Little Pony” and countless book titles beginning with “My First…”). These products tap into the need for pedagogical tools to help toddlers grasp the concept of ownership (and progress past the “Mine!” phase of development); Windows XP invokes the same teaching model to instil knowledge in the new user of which locations he is meant to frequent and which locations are intended for a user with a higher level of expertise.

The colourful interface, instructive labels, and friendly mascot of Windows XP are elementary for a reason. Luna was designed to be didactic: a training system to attract late (i.e. non-technical) adopters and familiarize them with the basic functionality of the Windows Operating System, while at the same time making Windows the fundamental means to accomplishing social, entertainment and productivity goals in their day-to-day lives. The addressee—a novice user who is unexposed to the GUI genre and its discourse—begins to realize the affordances of the interface: a term appropriated by Donald Norman “to describe the perceived function of an object, based on our cultural understanding of that object…through repeated exposure and use” (Silver, 37).

The Aero interface takes a sharp departure from Luna’s aesthetic, replacing brightly coloured plastic coating with glass. Clever animation and rendering effects simulate the reflectiveness and translucency of the material, attributes captured in the “reflective” and “open” components of the Aero acronym. Whereas XP’s plastic surfaces encourage new users to play and learn in a formerly intimidating environment, Aero’s glass-like panes invoke the qualities of physical glass: easily damaged and potentially damaging, when mishandled. According to Karsten Harries in The Ethical Function of Architecture, “Re-presentation lets materials speak.

The importance of that [rhetorical] function becomes apparent when we consider the variety of materials…Different materials are differently affected by the passage of time, they speak of different attitudes to time…” (195). If Windows XP’s Luna was a plastic toy, symbolizing childhood, Windows Vista’s Aero is a glass oeuvre, heralding adulthood. Following this metaphorical transition into adulthood, the Aero interface discards many of the relatable signifiers that would have become familiar to us in XP, including our canine search companion. Instead of sunny pastures and cumulus clouds, the first thing we notice is light. Not coming from any identifiable source, but present just about everywhere, from the refracted beams of green and blue light in the crystalline background image, to the glowing response of any interactive element over which the mouse hovers. Shadow, light’s counterpart, is also faithfully rendered, and when one window is placed over another, we can appreciate the high modality as one window’s translucency allows us to see the indistinct contents of the one behind it. Here, this combination of signifiers denotes a material, rather than a place or time: glass. Even the instantly recognizable sound themes of Windows XP—brief melodies to cue important modes such as start-up, errors, and shut down—have been replaced with far less noticeable, tinkling sounds: atmospheric as a glass wind chime rustled by a faint breeze.

The prevalence of glass is a metonym for its most commonly known use: windows, the brand’s literal referent. The visual and auditory sense of being surrounded by windows invokes the paradigm of architectural structures, situating the user within one. Removed from the context of the Windows interface, being placed in such a mysterious structure would be disconcerting. However, based on the didactic nature of the Windows XP interface, the newly constructed addressee of the Windows Vista interface is savvy enough to navigate the system without much guidance. Features that would have been considered static signs in Windows XP are dynamic in the Aero interface. Control buttons on most toolbars become infused with light as a mouse passes over them, and minimized windows even reveal thumbnail previews of their current content. The system has become so responsive that it now reacts to a user’s very intention to do something, communicating that it’s ready to perform the task being contemplated and elevating the user’s decision-making process to a new level of importance.

Aero’s elegant controls, fragile textures, and self-effacing natural language suggest that Vista’s users, familiarized with Windows through their XP experience, can now be entrusted with the system’s more sophisticated—and hence, more sensitive—functionality. This discontinuation of the childhood myth makes way for a set of more physical metaphors that place the user within the structure and draw on architectural principles of form and function. Here, the ideas that justify and moderate methods of fenestration in a building are transferred to the user experience. Christopher Alexander, a prominent architectural theorist, proposes that windows have several functions: they establish a visible connection to rooms and passages, allowing occupants to “grasp the overall arrangement of a building” (A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, Alexander, 898); they provide “a relationship to the outside and at the same time give a sense of enclosure” (1110); and create dimension by framing, which “increases the view, increases its intensity, increases its variety, even increases the number of views we seem to see…it is the multitude of frames which makes the view “ (1109). Just as in architecture, the windows used to peer into system locations offer a multi-faceted view of their details. Metadata, hidden in a tab within the file properties in XP, is immediately available and editable; thumbnails and file information, mutually exclusive in prior versions, comfortably coexist. Referentially, a higher density of content is being exposed at the surface than ever before, showing a change in the expressive function of the interface: the addressee is now someone who values multiple dimensions of detail, rather than someone who would be intimidated by it.

Other metalingual cues serve to decrease the perceived mediation of the system in the user’s experience. The first-person possessive on common destinations are retired, and there is no difference in ownership between “Computer” and “Control Panel”. This makes for a flattened array of equally acceptable options for the user to expore, and eliminates the overt opposition between “us” and “them”, as well as the intrinsic hierarchy of knowledge and power. The natural language used in system alerts and instructions is also less intrusive, per the Windows style guide released with the launch of Vista: “Avoid the extremes of the ‘machine’ voice (where the speaker is removed from the language) and the ‘sales rep’ voice (where the writing tries to sell us something, to cajole us, to cheer us up, to gloss over everything as ‘simple’)”. Along with the elimination of the anthropomorphized search companion, the addresser constructed by Vista is self-effacing and neutral, thereby empowering the addressee. This diminished mediation between the system and the user reflects the embodiment of the Windows discourse: the addressee in this exchange has already learned its affordances and practices and interacts with them naturally. Like the invisible membrane between outside and in that is achieved with glass windows, Aero disguises mediation with its form and empowers us through its function. We are largely unaware of the existence of the window while taking in the view, because we are reproducing the discourse of our experience with Windows XP. The transition from Windows XP to Windows Vista is a reflection of naturalization. While the Windows XP interface offers signs that invoke real-world references, the Windows Vista connotes those signs introduced in Windows XP. The constructed addressee has evolved from being merely a user, to a Windows User.

Alexander, Christopher, Sara Ishikawa, and Murray Silverstein. A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. New York: Oxford UP, 1977. Print.

Allchin, Jim. “The Sounds of Windows Vista.” The Windows Vista Team Blog. Microsoft Corporation, 9 Nov. 2006. Web. 31 Apr. 2011.

Bracken, Cheryl Campanella., and Paul D. Skalski. “Computers and Telepresence: A Ghost in the Machine?” Immersed in Media: Telepresence in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.

Harries, Karsten. The Ethical Function of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1997. Print.

“A History of Windows – Microsoft Windows.” Microsoft Windows. Microsoft Corporation. Web. 31 July 2011.

Silver, Marc. Exploring Interface Design. Clifton Park, NY: Thomson/Delmar Learning, 2005. Print.