[kingstnap]

It's something extremely pervasive in modern design language.

It actually infuriates me to no end. There are many many many instances where you should use numbers but we get vague bullshit descriptions instead.

My classic example is that Samsung phones show charging as Slow, Fast, Very fast, Super fast charging. They could just use watts like a sane person. Internally of course everything is actually watts and various apps exist to report it.

Another example is my car shows motor power/regen as a vertical blue segmented bar. I'm not sure what the segments are supposed to represent but I believe its something like 4kW or something. If you poke around you can actually see the real kW number but the dash just has the bar.

Another is WiFi signal strength which the bars really mean nothing. My router reports a much more useful dBm measurement.

Thank god that there are lots of legacy cases that existed before the iPhone-ized design language started taking over and are sticky and hard to undo.

I can totally imagine my car reporting tire pressure as low or high or some nonsense or similarly I'm sure the designers at YouTube are foaming at the mouth to remove the actual pixel measurements from video resolutions.

[rdiddly]

It's all rather dumb, but your examples are really counterexamples, because a watt is sadly not something most people understand. One would at minimum need to have passed a physics class, and even that doesn't necessarily leave a person with an intuitive, visceral understanding of what a watt is, feels like, can do. I appreciate my older Samsung phone that just converts it into expected time until full charge. That's the number that matters to me anyway, and I can make my own value judgment about how "super" the fastness is. But I do agree with your point and would be pissed if they dumbed it down to Later, Soon, Very Soon and Super Soon.

Speaking of time and timestamps, which I would've thought were straightforward, I get irked to see them dumbed-down to "ago" values e.g. an IM sent "10 minutes ago" or worse "a day ago." Like what time of day, a day ago?

[201984]

Most people can understand "bigger number better". They don't need the full theoretical derivation of the watt as a unit of power for that.

[Izkata]

And just through exposure over time they'd learn "my phone usually charges around X" and be able to see if their new cable is actually charging faster or not.

[baobun]

In US, washing machines have "cold", "warm", "hot" settings. In Europe, you have a temperature knob "30C", "40C", "60C".

Like you, I don't buy the argument that people are actually too dumb to deal with the latter or are allergic to numbers. People get used to and make use of numbers in context naturally if you expose them.

[bananaflag]

I have a machine which has cold/warm/hot because it doesn't heat water by itself, it just takes whatever hot water there exists in the house (and "warm" means 50% hot water and 50% cold).

[baobun]

Practical.

I still think anyone who grew up with such a machine would be able to graduate to a numerical temp knob without having a visceral reaction over the numbers every time they do laundry.