[seanwilson]

> To me, peak usability was 25 years ago, when most applications had a toolbar and a menu that followed a standard pattern.

Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.

UIs have got incrementally better in lots of ways that really add up that I don't see people mention e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided, help is integrated into the UI where you need it, inline editing vs modals, options to edit an object appear next to it (locality) rather than you having to hunt in a menu, less technical jargon where appropriate, better onboarding, better undo/redo/autosave (which avoids clunky confirmation modals).

[wvbdmp]

> Some things were good, but there were lots of problems too like features hidden behind right-clicks, not knowing if you had to double or single click, being required to read help/manuals to find features, too much jargon and technical language, and overuse of modals.

I dunno… all of these issues are still very prevalent. The one that probably disappeared the most is the right click context menu, which I would argue was actually great for discoverability. Personally, I lament its demise. Of course context menus still exist, but it used to be a pretty reliable universal convention.

[seanwilson]

Right-click is fine for power users and professional tools if there isn't a better alternative, but right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything.

Whenever I help non-tech friends with software problems, I'm always reminded most people don't feel comfortable hunting around for functionality and for sure don't try right-clicking things on the chance it might do something.

[wvbdmp]

I know what you mean, but my point is, if you have a strong convention that right click

a) never actually runs anything, so you can’t accidentally break stuff

and

b) usually shows contextually relevant actions

That makes for great discoverability, actually. Discoverabilty is mostly a measure of how confidently one can dick around without causing accidents (and being able to undo them easily).

Your point about there being to indication whether something is clickable or not applies to left clicks just as well, and this also used to be less of a problem before everyone rolled their own, usually very flat, designs. You could teach someone basic principles and they’d be widely applicable. These days you’d have to start with a full lecture on the differences between web apps and “native” apps and natively packaged web apps…

I wonder if it took the shinier, less conventional UIs to get all these “non-tech” people to use computers in the first place. A dilemma, because they would benefit from boring conventions the most.

[LoganDark]

> right-click (and long tap on mobile) is super undiscoverable because there's no indication or hint it'll do anything.

I really miss the days where it was common for tap-holding on any control to show a description of what it is. It may still be common in certain Android apps but I haven't seen it or anything like it on iOS.

[seanwilson]

> tap-holding on any control to show a description of what it is.

Hmm, haven't seen this. Where do you need that? What kind of description that wouldn't be obvious from looking at the control?

[LoganDark]

> Hmm, haven't seen this. Where do you need that? What kind of description that wouldn't be obvious from looking at the control?

I most commonly see and also appreciate being able to tap-hold on icon-only buttons to learn the text label that the icon represents. I can usually guess what most icons mean, but sometimes it's not entirely obvious.

[hulitu]

> UIs have got incrementally better ... e.g. right-clicking and double-clicking is avoided

This is like saying, that cutting someone's foot, makes him a better man.

Today UIs are crap. Why is the scrollbar so small and hidden ? What is all the unusable space in Office's 365 title bar ? Why gray on gray ?