The other important thing is learning to fit into the conventions of the platform: for example, Cocoa apps on Mac all inherit a bunch of consistent behaviors.
The other way around is yeah, hostile. But of course it looks sleek and minimalistic!
On the early iPhones, they had to figure out how to move icons around. Their answer was, hold one of the icons down until they all start wiggling, that means you've entered the "rearrange icons" mode... Geezus christ, how intuitive. Having a button on screen, which when pressed offers a description of the mode you've entered would be user-friendly, but I get the lack of appeal, for me it would feel so clunky and like it's UI design from the 80's.
Being a modal editor probably makes removing all persistent chrome more feasible.
"Another example is the absurd application of icons. An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages."
I don’t have time to learn the tool. I want to use the tool immediately. Otherwise, I’m moving on.
Configurable options are certainly a good approach for those that know the tool well, but the default state shouldn’t require “learning.”
There is a tradeoff between efficiency and learnability, in some cases learning the tool pays off.
https://statetechmagazine.com/article/2013/08/visual-history...
Look at the image of 2.0. There is permanent screen space dedicated to:
- Open
- Print
- Save
- Cut
- Copy
- Paste
I'm guessing you know the shortcuts for these. You learned the tool.But by taking up so much space, these are given the same visual hierarchy as the entirety of the word 'Wikimedia'!
>Configurable options are certainly a good approach for those that know the tool well, but the default state shouldn’t require “learning.”
In practice, IME, this just means there being combinatorially many more configurations of the software and anything outside the default ends up clashing with the rest of the software and its development.