Comment by Zigurd
4 days ago
Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.
> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.
I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:
- Lets find the scrollbar
- Guess which window has focus
- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.
- How do I find the file that just downloaded?
A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.
> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.
Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.
It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".
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> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.
There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).
But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.
Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.
- Should there even be a scrollbar?
Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.
oh gawd, please please please do not interpret this as pagination of windows with overflowing content!
the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.
Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.
> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism
True.
But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.
Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).
But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.
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Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.
It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.
UX was mastered 31 years ago. The intervening years have been a nosedive.
What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.
Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.
The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.
> why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded?
In… the downloads folder? How much more obvious does the location need to be?
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What do you mean about Steam?
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>Lets find the scrollbar
Related: Whoever decided to allow to websites style browser scroll bars, should have their teeth kicked in.
Dude, this is not 'Nam.
I don't want to read this on HN : flagged.
On Windows it is easy, unless an application somehow hooks into the workflow, it always goes into the order of what was used last.
> Guess which window has focus
Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.
Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.
An interesting study, will try to find it, thanks. I've been thinking about "naming things" and it seems the common idea of "good naming" is pretty superficial. I myself would point to MOV in assembly, which is actually COPY, but this never was an issue.
What actually matters is that:
- Names express not only differences, but also similarities.
- Names cannot be totally random; they must have certain pre-baked relations vaguely similar to their relations in the model. But they do not need to be too good. Invented or repurposed names in moderations are perfectly fine.
- The most important thing in naming is the overall consistency. But when the system changes you need more names and the consistency suffers. After a few rounds it gets too bad and you need to redo the whole system. This us why naming is hard.
- Certain physical properties matter, such as equal length.
- Names are very similar to pictograms or hieroglyphs.
>command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.
Not sure you picked the best examples. But trying to think of examples where the name is not related to the function ... ag, unless you're the sort of person to use ag, has an obscure name.
> But trying to think of examples where the name is not related to the function
Git?
Nope. Throw a Southern US accent on "get"
"I needda git it from the repo"
cat is just catenate.
I love knowing that a "Get-Foo" function in a library I've never before isn't going to have side-effects (unless malicious).
Conventions are great for UX.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel...
My experience is that 'ls' and the like are fine once you've used them a few times. 'list-files' would just be more typing, and even with tab completion there's probably other things to list so muscle memory would end up at [l] [tab] [f] [tab] or something like that.
The one that constantly trips me up is 'which' vs 'where' but that's for a different reason.
('Get-ChildItem' is an abomination.)
At least dir is aliased to Get-ChildItem nowadays, so it's less typing
As well as 'ls'.
That has nothing to do with discoverability. Discoverability isn't about "guessing" it's about being able to see it.
Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.
It helps that for most cli tools, any incorrect usage will show the usage text, including --help
> Discoverability in CLI is --help.
Unless it’s one of those programs that are like “unrecognized option --help, use -h to see help”.
If --help even lists everything. man [whatever] might contain more options. And both may leave out critical information.
You also have to just know what program to invoke with the —help arg.
Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.
Man -k is often good for this