My parents never had any problem understanding where they can click on Windows 3.11. They never could understand how to interact with DOS GUIs.
Nowadays they have decades of experience with computers. They still can't predict what part of a web-site they can interact with, but they have memorized all the actions they can make on the phone apps they use.
Let’s look at the very website we on. Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link? Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
> Would you prefer for every clickable element here to be a button? Or even underlined as a link?
Yes.
> Do you ever get confused navigating this website?
No, because I've been browsing the web for a while and know that every website does things their own way.
Given it’s a website mostly for experienced computer people who, like you, don’t really need those visual cues, don’t you think adding them would be superfluous?
No.
It's a website for experienced computer people, and I appreciate its minimalist aesthetic, but that doesn't mean there's not enormous room for improvement.
I have recently discovered a config option "Underline all links" in Firefox, and it's really nice, actually.
Now that you've said it, I think PG would have designed a better site if he didn't hide the underlines.
But also, it wouldn't get any worse if the same design was kept and the underlines were enabled. And it would improve the usability for first-time users, but the nature of HN is that those are always very few.
Wouldn't hurt if interactive elements didn't require me to zoom in order to interact with them on mobile.
I live in regular fear that my fingertip will hit the wrong up/down icon.
I often forget you can click on the timestamp. In fact for years I didn't know how to flag comments because of this.
My mother learned BASIC in college (not at all proficiently though), searched the web before the era of Google to learn about my sister's medical condition, and has used technology to enhance her teaching (when it actually helps) whenever she can, including trying to learn OBS during COVID to better teach remote classes, but when Windows Vista came around, she had to ask "What do I do?" to open her program.
Because Microsoft, after spending millions to recognize that labeling the button "Start" was brilliant, removed that label.
There was no justification for abandoning the millions of dollars of research that multiple computer companies produced for good UI design decades ago.
It was all just thrown away because some design asshole somewhere wanted to swing their dick around.
Millions of the same people who had no issue migrating from Windows 3.1 to Windows 2000 systems have been fucked over. People who knew how to use computers were given a huge middle finger at everything they learned. They were handed a system that was objectively harder to use than the previous one.
For some "designers" wet dreams.
People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.
Clear buttons with obvious intent have been replaced with a goddamned inscrutable "Hamburger" menu. Decades old metaphors and systems that made sense to people who were born before computers were abandoned. Reliable and predictable functions that you could trust across applications have been eschewed in favor of hacked together javascript trash that screws up basic things like scrolling and copy/paste and drag and drop. Even though such functionality is often provided directly by the browser, they override it and fuck it up.
And people call these idiots "The best of the best"
Hear hear. That was has been thoroughly lost.
> People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.
I've run into a lot of "UI designers" that were just graphic designers that lucked out getting a job in a software company. They design and compose the UI for static screenshots like they would do a 2D graphic composition. Far too often they'd hand off Photoshop PSDs they would expect a developer to turn into an actual UI. They don't follow a HIG document or respond to any pushback with "you have to know when to break the rules" (they do not know when to break the rules). A good UI designer is worth their weight in gold. In my experience most are worth their weight in very low grade playground sand.