alt Hacker NewsDebatable. 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.
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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.
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...
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.
> 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?