Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users. And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc."). Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism.
Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. (I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.)Īs a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. > so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Your point in general still stands, though. While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).įor the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.Ģ. Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:ġ. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it. I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it. Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. You need to guess their initial meaning, and translate badly in conversations, like recently with my mom: "press the rectangle with four arrows pointing out of it" (fullscreen or whatever it was). Second, icons are something which is wrong. Hidden menus, press-and-hold, and so on is secondary. My one year old is discovering that sliding fingers across a screen, touching and pinching (the three basics) does stuff. I think there's one thing platforms in general got very right: simple touch controls. Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well.
Whenever I use my wife's iPhone or Mac for a couple of minutes, I get frustrated because everything is all over the place, none of the apps work well together, and everything is hidden.īack on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. I was planning to reply to your parent comment that discoverability has always been an issue for me when I work with Apple devices.