Hacker News Reader

Comment by wavemode | Hacker News Reader

> A lot of those real world objects no longer exists, or are less frequently used than their counterparts, so I sort of see why moving away from that design language makes sense

This reasoning never made a ton of sense to me. Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

If you give someone young and tech savvy a digital UI, they will figure out how to use it. It's precisely the oldest and least tech savvy users for whom interface design is most important, as they are more like to get frustrated and quit your app. Why optimize for the young, then?

(I mean, it's a rhetorical question, as I already know the answer - the designers creating the interfaces are themselves young and tech savvy gen-Z'ers.)

View on HN

> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

We have volume sliders rather than knobs, because that's easier on a touch interface. I get your point, but does the button need to look like the button on the radio in our grandfathers car from 1960? Probably not. I was thinking more in terms of filling cabinets, floppies as save icons or even the phone as the receiver on a rotary phone. Would it be easier to set a timer on your phone if the UI looked like a kitchen egg timer? Having the email icon be a letter doesn't even make sense anymore. My kid has sent one letter ever and all the mailboxes will be removed next year. How does having a letter as an icon going to provide any meaningful frame of reference when we daily receive more email than we do actual letters in a year, or two, or three?

I understand the concept that objects like letters are no longer used very much. My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon, and what tangible benefit does it bring, given that people are already used to letter icons, and aren't going to be used to your new icon. Tangible benefit meaning "users will be able to use this interface more easily".

Usually the reasoning just stops at "but nobody sends letters anymore!" without going a step further and justifying why that even matters.

> My question is, what icon do you use instead of a letter icon

That is a good question. The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent, and I'd argue that it almost doesn't work. Technically it could be anything and we'd over time agree that "This thing means share".

We're still at a point where many still understand the references, but over time something like the letter in email icons, just becomes cargo cult. Perhaps you're right, it doesn't matter, as long as we agree what the icons mean.

The "share" icon e.g. is something that has no real world equivalent

The New York Times uses a box wrapped up in a bow.

I can't link to it because it's rendered as an in-line SVG, but this is HN, so picture this in your mind:

  <svg aria-hidden="true" width="19" height="19" viewBox="0 0 19 19"><path d="M18.04 5.293h-2.725c.286-.34.493-.74.606-1.17a2.875 2.875 0 0 0-.333-2.322A2.906 2.906 0 0 0 13.64.48a3.31 3.31 0 0 0-2.372.464 3.775 3.775 0 0 0-1.534 2.483l-.141.797-.142-.847A3.745 3.745 0 0 0 7.927.923 3.31 3.31 0 0 0 5.555.459 2.907 2.907 0 0 0 3.607 1.78a2.877 2.877 0 0 0-.333 2.321c.117.429.324.828.606 1.171H1.155a.767.767 0 0 0-.757.757v3.674a.767.767 0 0 0 .757.757h.424v7.53A1.01 1.01 0 0 0 2.588 19h14.13a1.01 1.01 0 0 0 1.01-.959v-7.56h.424a.758.758 0 0 0 .757-.757V6.05a.759.759 0 0 0-.868-.757Zm-7.196-1.625a2.665 2.665 0 0 1 1.01-1.736 2.24 2.24 0 0 1 1.574-.313 1.817 1.817 0 0 1 1.211.818 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202 1.453 2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838 1.191h-3.431l.272-1.413ZM4.576 2.386a1.837 1.837 0 0 1 1.221-.817 2.23 2.23 0 0 1 1.565.313 2.624 2.624 0 0 1 1.01 1.736l.242 1.453H5.182a2.2 2.2 0 0 1-.838-1.19 1.857 1.857 0 0 1 .202-1.495h.03ZM1.548 6.424h7.54V9.39h-7.58l.04-2.967Zm1.181 4.128h6.359v7.287H2.729v-7.287Zm13.777 7.287h-6.348v-7.307h6.348v7.307Zm1.181-8.468h-7.53V6.404h7.53V9.37Z" fill="#121212" fill-rule="nonzero"></path></svg>

I don't even see the SVG anymore, I just see blonde, brunette, gift box with a bow.

The classic example is the save icon being a floppy disk. Older people understand the history, and young people figure it out, even if they don’t know the history.

Computers are full of these things though. The Shift key is a reference back to how typewriters worked. We didn’t change the name of the key, because nothing physically shifts anymore. Most don’t know what it means historically, but they still know what it does on their computer.

I’ll all for bringing skeuomorphism back.

And the "upper case" vs. "lower case" distinction, even though we no longer use a printing press in which each letter is sorted into a different box, or "case", depending on if it's a capital or not.

And we kept the letter "c", even though in English this is always* either pronounced like "k" or like "s", or the "ch" digraph. But sutsh ðings go in sykles, and one day ðe English language will be simplified.

* Saying "always" is a risk on a forum like this, no doubt there's an example I've not thought of.

TIL upper/lower case. I always thought it was because upper case letters look taller, thus are "up" while lowercase are smaller thus "low" on the typeface line.

Tsk, tsk! You're using thorn (ð) for two different 'th' sounds. Old English used 'eth' (þ) to mark both sounds but it'd be more precise to use both letters like in Icelandic, eg for the above: þings, ðe (although the vowel in 'the' is actually more of a schwa [ǝ] usually, or [i] before vowels). Also, you're still sticking to some English spelling pecularities there...

In a fictitious modern, phonology-based spelling system, you could write the above something like:

“Bat sač þings gou in sajkls, änd wan dej ðí Ingliš längwidž wil bí simplifajd.”

;)

Interesting, in my accent the "th" in "the" and the "th" in "things" sound the same.

Accents do make spelling reform difficult. For example, some of the people who grew up 5 miles from me (they were Cosham/Portsmouth, I was south Havant) pronounced both these "th"s as… I don't know the linguistic symbol, but something like a "v" or an "f".

Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.

No worries :)

Other than the specific location and the social category of "upper-middle-class", I don't know how to describe my accent. People at school thought I was posh, but I never saw myself that way.

Now I live in Berlin, so I might have started picking up a bit of a German accent (and perhaps an ESL accent if there is such a thing).

The benefit of skeuomorphism was that it was universal.

Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"

Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

That universality across apps for basic functionality was the biggest feature: it didn't matter if I knew what a disk was or not, because I knew the disk-shaped thing meant save in every app.

The original modern sin of UX was having the hubris to ditch universality because they believed whatever batshit they dreamed up was better enough to justify doing so.

It wasn't. Arguably, it couldn't ever be.

You could come up with a unique wiz-bang UX for something that's objectively 25% better than skeuomorphism, and it still wouldn't be a net improvement. Because no user cares about one specific app enough to train on it.

But building a hammer that looks like every other hammer doesn't get you on the cover of design/UX magazines...

The way I've come to understand "icon" is that it's as used like "religious icon". A painting of a particular figure is not so much about that figure, but what they represent, it's somewhat abstract. The save icon isn't about the literal bit of media as what you could do with it.

> Everyone decided that "save" = "disk"

> Maybe a different looking disk, but still a disk.

I had a discussion about this with my parents, who saw the 5" disks actually flopping back in the days, but never cared enough about computers.

They thought the floppy icon meant it was saved on their drive, when it was actually commited to the cloud service they were using. They spent a while looking around, in their Document folder, Download folder etc. and gave up after a while.

I can't remember which service they were using, but boy were they pissed.

Well, things were fine before Microsoft, Apple, and Google decided that organizing things was too much to ask of the average user, and launched into the insanity of {latest version of multi-location library} and {cloud storage that pretends it's local storage}.

Adobe does the same, most businesses that can afford it will try going that route, as it means user lock-in and more subscription money down the road.

This reminds me of the Figma rant on how you can't do presentations offline even if you save your slides to disk, that's where the whole industry is trending.

IMHO this is precisely why clinging to old metaphors might not be optimal.

While the Shift key keeps some resemblance of the original object behavior, a shortcut like Cmd + Shift V makes no sense in the metaphor.

Same way holding Shift while selecting objects in the finder, or arrowing around breaks the mental image. In many ways, the Command key's higher abstraction makes it easier for newcomers to grasp that it just does magical things.

Cmd + S saving the document needs no additional lore or image of a past clunky machine would had somehow reacted in a Rube Goldberg way.

Interfaces should be simple to use for simple tasks anyway, getting rid of semantic noise is IMHO a better way.

> Gen Z don't use devices with knobs and buttons anymore, therefore we should all design our interface elements to look like nothing in particular?

Knobs work as a tactile interface that require two fingers minimum to rotate predictably. With digital screens we lost the tactile element, and mandated a new one finger (thumb) minimum. Interfaces had to adapt, which is why knobs were replaced with sliders. Changes like this happened all over the place; not because of "gen-Z", but because they were the most effective solution for the platform.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com