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Comment by chaoticmass | Hacker News Reader

Being born in 1985 and having grown up with home computers, starting with the IBM PC jr and BASIC, through to a 386 with QBasic, and then a Pentium with Visual Basic, this essay resonates with me a lot.

It's not just the actual knowledge I picked up which has served me well, but also gaining a general intuition about how computers work. Probably most important of all though is learning how to learn. It's this skill that I am sure I will rely on most over time as my esoteric knowledge becomes more and more irrelevant.

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Earlier versions of Windows and like programs used to be far more discoverable. Self documenting.

The menu system could be intuitively accessed by a mouse, without learning anything specific.

It was common for Alt + Underlined menu letter to Open that menu directly. Underlined letters IN the menu items would quick-select an item from that menu. Items that were expected to be commonly used, that had direct keyboard shortcuts, told the end user the shortcut.

The design was simple, categorized, and discoverable. Self documenting end user education.

Now we have ribbons... useless ribbons that make everything slower.

Honestly, the ribbon wasn't too bad. Was was missing was letting the user know that alt was available and usable. If the guidelines were followed as they are in office and explorer, pressing alt puts the quick access letter next to all the available items.

What has really killed discoverability, are "over to show" buttons, and the hamburger. Both attempts to save screen space and present a "clean" albeit abridged view of what a user could do from an interface at a glance.

We've gained a lot, but also lost a lot, from going from mouse+keyboard to touch screen only. There's no more hover to discover, or an ALT key to hold to guide us as to what we can do and what does what. Gestures feel like magic spells that are great if you know them, but completely hidden if you don't. Not everything in the early days was obvious or intuitive, but at least we had more clues to guide us, and failing that, a manual to reference.

Microsoft, IBM, and others did huge amounts of user testing and research to get those early UI conventions you mention, and it served quite well. I lament that it has fallen out of favor.

I’ll add that for casual usage, the iOS ecosystem has been very enjoyable to use after I’ve gotten over the initial shock and have learned some tricks. Many tasks feel very natural and easy for every day usage. When I need to get some serious work done though I am much more productive with a keyboard and mouse. I have an iPad Mini 6 that I put into a case which gives me a usable keyboard and trackpad, and for me it has turned the iPad into a killer small portable device that gives me a nice blend of casual consumption device plus a real productivity device.

Yeah that intuition is invaluable. It's what makes us the family "computer guy/girl", and is why we can help someone who uses some piece of software every day, that we have never seen before, figure out how to do some thing they want to do.

I try to tell people this, when I help them - I don't know everything about every piece of software, I just have a sense of what the operation they want to do will probably be like, and the confidence to poke around until I find it because I also have a sense of what is likely to be a destructive operation.

Tech Support Cheat Sheet: https://xkcd.com/627/

As is often the case, the mouseover text on that XKCD just makes the comic!

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