[logicallee]

oh. I though it meant "settings" and every time I see both the hamburger icon (that we're discussing) and the gears icon (a common icon for settings, preferences, configuration) I get confused as to how I'm supposed to guess where you've put what I want.

[psykovsky]

Just click around until you find what you need. You even get to know the entire app if you do that. You're not going to blast a nuke or kill someone by clicking, after all.

[DanBC]

There's often no, or poorly implemented, undo on mobile so you risk data loss or mass-communicating something wanted to keep private or screwing up some setting and no way to retrieve it.

And it's not just "click the visible elements until you achieve the disired result", it's touch visible and invisible elements, combined with all the differen touch-gestures you know, in the hope that you'll get what you want, but possibly not.

[logicallee]

This is actually how I always pictured the technology of the future. (Same as when I think about the interface from Minority Report - i.e. Tom Cruise is just gesturing around aimlessly, not able to actually do what he's trying to.)

Who would have thought that when it came to mobile tech, we actually WOULDN'T have figured it out! Just click around and hope you don't destroy anything. It actually is just like it looks in scifi films :)

[DanBC]

Someone needs to redub that Minority Report scene with error messages and frustrated tom cruise unable to achieve anything.

Or the star trek computer mis-hearing what everyone says.

[psykovsky]

I would dare to say those incidents you describe happen because people click mindlessly instead of reading. Clicking around is not clicking mindlesly. You can read what the stuff says. And you, in last case, read the instructions manual. Or maybe that should be the first thing to do and us humans have always been doing things the wrong way.

[DanBC]

Reading? Reading what? Look at modern apps like, eg snapchat. What's to read? Snapchat has six icons on the screen. Which one do you tap to get to a help menu? The menu icon? No. The square thing? No. The snapchat ghost? No. Oh, actually, yes, because you also need to click the settings gear icon, and scroll down a whole page and select support.

There isn't anything to read.

[psykovsky]

There's always something to read. I don't know what else to tell you. I also don't think it's unreasonable to ask someone to learn how to handle a shovel before starting the digging.