alt Hacker NewsThis is what happens when "designers" who are nothing more than artists take control of UI decisions. They want things to look "clean" at the expense of discoverability and forget that affordances make people learn.
Contrast this with something like an airplane cockpit, which while full of controls and assuming expert knowledge, still has them all labeled.
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I still don't understand why desktop OSes now have mobile style taskbar icons that are twice as large as they need to be, grouped together so you need to hover to see which instance of what is what, and then click again to switch to the one you actually want if you can even figure out what it even is with just a thumbnail without any labels. All terminal windows look the fucking same!
Win NT-Vista style, aka the way web browsers show tabs with an icon + label is peak desktop UX for context switching and nobody can convince me otherwise. GNOME can't even render taskbars that way.
The "clean aesthetic at all costs" mindset has definitely gone too far
Next you’ll be complaining that the taps in your house don’t have a label telling you that they need to be twisted and in what direction.
Phones aren’t 747’s, and guess what every normal person that goes into an airplane cockpit who isn’t a pilot is so overwhelmed by all the controls they wouldn’t know what anything did.
Interface designers know what they’re doing. They know what’s intuitive and what isn’t, and they’ve refined down to an art how to contain a complicated feature set in a relatively simple form factor.
The irony of people here with no design training that they could do a better job than any “so called designer” shows incredible levels of egotism and disrespect to a mature field of study.
Also demonstrably, people use their phones really quite well with very little training, that’s a modern miracle.
Stop shaking your fist at a cloud.
Most people are intimidated by airplane cockpits. I think you’re right that specialists in certain situations where they’re familiar have much higher tolerance for visual density because, to them, it isn’t dense, it’s meaningful.
Most people for most situations, using most phone apps, do not have that familiarity. Mobile design has to simultaneously provide a lot of power and progressively disclose it such that it keeps users at or just past their optimal level of comfort, and that involves tradeoffs to hide some things and expose others at different levels of depth.
So while I agree that a lot of mobile design, and OS design in particular, pulls back way too far on providing affordances for actions, I would not use an airplane cockpit as a good guide, unless you’re also talking about a specialist tool.