Comment by spr93

So true. Today I must explain to my mother that she needs to press a flat picture (not a button) of three horizontal bars in order to pull up a command list. The list won't be sorted by category, but by a designer or developer's perception of which commands are most used.

In the mid 90s, I could walk my 80-something-year-old grandfather through WordPerfect with ease: "File does basic file operations, like save or print. Edit is for editing, like copying and pasting."

Menu bars work because they're a great feature-discovery tool when done right--with verbs that describe the commands, and with functions grouped by category.

"Modern" UIs don't. Try to explain it: "So, the lines are called a hamburger menu, they're supposed to look like a list of commands. And you can press it, even though it's completely flat. Then you need read the list until you find the command you want."

The Mac GUI's great innovation was combining intuitive visual cues with an consistent, unintrusive, and always-on system for feature discovery (the menu bar).