I think I can see where you're coming from - and it is true that there are cases of dogmatism as a defense for just sucking at UX - but I violently disagree here.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable.
You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
> Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew how a tape deck worked, so audio apps presented as tape decks. Floppy disk as save icon, etc
Unfortunately, the passage of time is inexorable, and by the late 2000s we had a lot of users who had never actually seen a tape deck/floppy disk. And the whole skeuomorphic project came crashing down.
Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives. Still, they get it. Some icons outlive their era, some don’t.
> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked
> Did it though? Most people young today probably never pressed a physical play/pause/stop button in their lives.
It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.
This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.
> the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them
Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.
Skeuomorphism didn't fail. It feel out of fashion with designers.
We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible.
But skeuomorphic iconography works: The more detail you add to an icon, the easier it is to form mental associations with what it does - and that goes even if you don't know the original object that it's based on. Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
> Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D
I've seen an SD card icon used for a save icon before. I think conveniently the shape is similar enough to a floppy that you find it while scanning for it as well
That's one of the things that surprised me (in a positive way) about Mac OS X when I first got to use it -- it actually does indeed do lots of things in an _understandable_ and genuinely simple way. It's also clear how much work went into making the system behave in this way, it certainly wasn't an accident.
In the era of web apps and Electronification of anything I believe most of this is sadly gone, but in the older Mac OS X models you could clearly understand and see the logic behind the software and I believe it worked well for non-technical people from what I observed.
A developer sees an application as a toolkit to help them solve a problem. The more flexibility and power, the better it is. They’ve become comfortable with complex tools on the computer, over the years, because they enjoy learning about and using computers.
A nontechnical end user generally isn’t interested in operating a toolkit— they want to solve their problem, and the application claims to do that. The easier it is for them to get from problem to solution, the better.
When a developer sees a software interface, they see a palette of commands and parameters to pass to a software back end. Understanding that, and it’s implications, took years of learning and intensive usage that has blended into an imperceptible base layer of technological understanding.
To a nontechnical end user, the interface is the software. The button might as well mechanically do something. For whatever reason, often because they didn’t find it interesting, or their cognitive skillset didn’t easily adapt to it, or they just didn’t have the exposure, they didn’t learn about the basic structure of applications, and they’d be years away from understanding it enough to make decisions based on that.
Flexibility and power yields agency for technical users. It blurs obvious pathways and dampens signals for nontechnical users that just want a problem solved.
It’s difficult for experts to see things with novice eyes. That’s one of the most important things a designer can do for the software building process.
Fundamentally, interface design is a communication discipline. There’s a reason it’s a field unto itself, with its own degrees and professional organizations, and there’s a reason it’s often taught in art schools. There’s also a reason that every significant user-facing interface in your life, from your text messaging apps to the ordering kiosks in restaurants— none of which need documentation— were created by designers and not developers. Looking nice is not the point — it’s often a side effect of clear and deliberate communication, which is both difficult and important.
Good UX I believe doesn't mean that the implementation details are hidden, but conveyed in a way that is human-readable. You do not hide the machine from the man, but translate between them in a way that makes neither of them invisible.
This makes for better experiences, as reality gets bound by.. well.. reality. So you don't get these weird failure modes that live in the gap between the narrative (e.g. "everything just works") and reality (e.g. "networks are always black magic").
This is also important for the user, because by having _a_ mental model (even if it is very low-res), they gain the ability to diagnose issues themselves and not be completely helpless once the magic box breaks down. They might not know exactly what to do, but the direction is very clear.
Agency is important. A lot more important than convenience. And fake convenience through frontloading short-term rewards for long-term systemic instability.
This is where skeuomorphism used to be king before computers ate the world. In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked, so document readers presented as books. Everyone knew how a tape deck worked, so audio apps presented as tape decks. Floppy disk as save icon, etc
Unfortunately, the passage of time is inexorable, and by the late 2000s we had a lot of users who had never actually seen a tape deck/floppy disk. And the whole skeuomorphic project came crashing down.
> In the 90s everybody knew how a paper book worked
I hope that’s still the case!
It's hard to call this an example of "skeuomorphism". Those icons were introduced on physical buttons with a certain meaning that everybody had to learn. They have exactly the same meaning on software buttons; the interaction that people have with them now is the same interaction that everybody has always had with them.
This isn't a case of the software appealing to a visual metaphor that made non-metaphorical sense before the software. It was just as much of a metaphor originally as it is now. You might as well call the word "edit" a skeuomorphism in modern software because past software also had "edit" menus.
Right, that was my point. What does it matter what a diskette used to be? Unless something more obvious to convey storage/saving comes along, it’s hardly “crashing down” anytime soon.
We should distinguish between skeuomorphic interaction design and skeuomorphic iconography. Attempts at skeuomorphic interaction design did fail badly, I'll give you that. Document readers that expect you to turn the page by pulling at the edge of the page, mimicking a page turn in a physical book, they're terrible.
But skeuomorphic iconography works: The more detail you add to an icon, the easier it is to form mental associations with what it does - and that goes even if you don't know the original object that it's based on. Sure, a lot of people have never seen the floppy disk that the traditional Save icon is based on, making the icon less intuitive now than when it was designed. But what would you replace it with? Any alternative you might suggest is just going to be less recognisable.
Obviously you replace it with the three stacked cylinders that symbolize a hard drive. ;D
In the era of web apps and Electronification of anything I believe most of this is sadly gone, but in the older Mac OS X models you could clearly understand and see the logic behind the software and I believe it worked well for non-technical people from what I observed.
A nontechnical end user generally isn’t interested in operating a toolkit— they want to solve their problem, and the application claims to do that. The easier it is for them to get from problem to solution, the better.
When a developer sees a software interface, they see a palette of commands and parameters to pass to a software back end. Understanding that, and it’s implications, took years of learning and intensive usage that has blended into an imperceptible base layer of technological understanding.
To a nontechnical end user, the interface is the software. The button might as well mechanically do something. For whatever reason, often because they didn’t find it interesting, or their cognitive skillset didn’t easily adapt to it, or they just didn’t have the exposure, they didn’t learn about the basic structure of applications, and they’d be years away from understanding it enough to make decisions based on that.
Flexibility and power yields agency for technical users. It blurs obvious pathways and dampens signals for nontechnical users that just want a problem solved.
It’s difficult for experts to see things with novice eyes. That’s one of the most important things a designer can do for the software building process.
Fundamentally, interface design is a communication discipline. There’s a reason it’s a field unto itself, with its own degrees and professional organizations, and there’s a reason it’s often taught in art schools. There’s also a reason that every significant user-facing interface in your life, from your text messaging apps to the ordering kiosks in restaurants— none of which need documentation— were created by designers and not developers. Looking nice is not the point — it’s often a side effect of clear and deliberate communication, which is both difficult and important.