Comment by al_borland
7 days ago
The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.
Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.
I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.
IMHO this is precisely why clinging to old metaphors might not be optimal.
While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.
Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.
Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.
Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.
And the "upper case" vs. "lower case" distinction, even though we no longer use a printing press in which each letter is sorted into a different box, or "case", depending on if it's a capital or not.
And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.
* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.
Tsk, tsk! You're using thorn (ð) for two different 'th' sounds. Old English used 'eth' (þ) to mark both sounds but it'd be more precise to use both letters like in Icelandic, eg for the above: þings, ðe (although the vowel in 'the' is actually more of a schwa [ǝ] usually, or [i] before vowels). Also, you're still sticking to some English spelling pecularities there...
In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:
“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”
;)
Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.
Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".
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TIL upper/lower case. I always thought it was because upper case letters look taller, thus are "up" while lowercase are smaller thus "low" on the typeface line.
The benefit of skeuomorphism was that it was universal.
Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"
Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.
That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.
The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.
It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.
You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.
But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...
> Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"
> Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.
I had a discussion about this with my parents, who saw the 5" disks actually flopping back in the days, but never cared enough about computers.
They thought the floppy icon meant it was saved on their drive, when it was actually commited to the cloud service they were using. They spent a while looking around, in their Document folder, Download folder etc. and gave up after a while.
I can't remember which service they were using, but boy were they pissed.
Well, things were fine before Microsoft, Apple, and Google decided that organizing things was too much to ask of the average user, and launched into the insanity of {latest version of multi-location library} and {cloud storage that pretends it's local storage}.
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The way I've come to understand "icon" is that it's as used like "religious icon". A painting of a particular figure is not so much about that figure, but what they represent, it's somewhat abstract. The save icon isn't about the literal bit of media as what you could do with it.