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Comment by nycticorax | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing of calling controls "chrome" is basically a metaphor gone horribly awry. The term was coined in the 1990s because (at least on Windows) the "content" usually had a white background, and the controls usually had a gray background. But of course the use of the word "chrome" inevitably implies that this stuff (the controls) are like the chrome on a car: nonfunctional, inessential visual frippery. And so UI chrome must be bad, and something to eliminate. But of course this is nutty: The UI controls are what you use to manipulate the content! It's like calling the steering wheel and the pedals in a car "chrome" and deciding you need to deemphasize them so that the driver can 'focus on the road' or something. The controls are important! They are how you drive the car!

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Not to mention that the actual controls in a car (from gearshift to button to change the brightness on the on-board display to 'open garage door' button of a built in radio wave thing) are never called chrome for fairly obvious reasons.

However, jargon words are just jargon words. There really are only two options:

1. Police them ruthlessly. Even if the word would only cause confusion in the amateur / casual observer, they must be eliminated anyway. I venture that this means almost all jargon words must be turned into words totally devoid of meaning. Jargon is useful - nobody wants to spend the same 3 paragraphs to convey a complex but very common concept - they invent a word for it. So, are we ready for the 'floobargle' and the 'glorpnitz'?

2. Just let them be, and instead police the idea that words that are jargon imply anything at all. Police the idea that their plain english dictionary definition holds any relevance beyond being a memento for what the jargon word is truly meant to convey.

In other words: The problem lies with those who realise 'chrome' is a jargon term and then kneejerk into '... it is frippery' anyway. That's stupid. Those who do that should be ridiculed.

I think that's the only way partly because that feels right and because I think it would lead to eliminated of jargon (bad endresult) or always ending up with jargon that is just a random word that has no meaning at all and wasn't in any dictionary.

No, it's the only feasible way, because of pragmatic reasons: Changing existing jargon? Hoo boy. That is extremely difficult.

For some reason UI taste influencers have outsized influence within companies. IMO it's because they have the ear of execs who react viscerally to eye candy - as we all do - but lack understanding of basic usability principles.

As an exec sitting there frustrated by the slow pace of software development, at least you can always yell at the UI guy and demand changes that your gut tells you "look cool", and you can be an active, though uninformed particpant in sessions with design mockups.

Car UIs are a great case in point. People have been yelling for years at the poor usability of touchscreens in cars as opposed to discrete buttons/controls. Yet the enshittification of car UIs continues unchecked. My ioniq 5 has multiple touch panels and buttons, yet something as simple as directing air flow to the dash vents requires me to prod at a tiny touch area and look at a separate tiny display area well away from the touch control to see what I managed to select. It is 10 times worse than an old school rotary dial that I could operate instantly by touch alone. My workaround now is to prod the control, wait for 5 seconds to see if I feel air start flowing, and if not, prod the control and wait again.

Peak usability of most computer UIs was back in the 90s when simple (to use) but deep and powerful hierarchical menus were uniformly placed at the top of the page, and right clicking on objects in the UI opened context-sensitive popup hierarchical menus.

For cars it was in the 2000s before touch screens.

My 2018 RAV4 has physical buttons, and the touchscreen is only used for the backup camera, and the audio system and phone (their own UI for contacts, calls, etc. and not something like CarPlay).

I'm hoping whatever model I replace it with will have physical controls too.

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