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Been writing up some super basic notes on using “intuitive” tech for an octogenarian who has never used a touchscreen before and let me tell you, so many things people consider “intuitive” are absolutely not when you try to explain them from first principles. I think we’ve got worse at building truly intuitive interfaces in the last 20 years because no-one involved has known a time before many of these assumed behaviours existed
Old intuitive interface design was rooted in the concept of “affordance”, in that things did what they looked like they did, or felt they did when you touched them. Buttons were raised and went down, knobs turned, sliders only went back and forth. Now, nothing looks or feels like what it does; everything assumes a meta knowledge, something that is completely the opposite of intuition
Take this post. How do I know the flat icons underneath the post are buttons I can press, and yet this icon:
is not? Only because I already know the context rules. I have to know them to know what’s interactive and what’s not. The amount of pre-knowledge UIs expect these days would make UI designers of old spin in their graves
@sinbad not really, some things come naturally for humans.
If the icon is inside a user-written text, it's very likely to not be interactive.
Otherwise I could apply this to pretty much anything:
How do I know this is not a real person flipping a real table?
(° □°） ╯︵ ╯︵ ┻━┻
The context rules this universe requires would make the gods of old spin in their graves.
@dormouse759 I agree with @sinbad. Sure, all icons are digital abstractions based. The original abstractions were built upon real objects, so there was a physical ground truth representation.
Then we built a new abstraction upon that, which tidied up the rough edges.
20 years on we’re ~15 abstractions down, and the reference ground truth is probably somewhere around iteration ~10. Unless you know what that is, it’s like trying to understand French when all you know is Latin.
@bbbscarter @dormouse759 @sinbad yet little kids use phones without a problem, so surely there is some affordance? Actionable buttons are usually colored. List views with a chevron clickable. Back button obviously goes back. The picture isn’t as bad as it is painted here.
@wolfr @dormouse759 @sinbad sure, when you’re a kid everything is new and you adapt. And if you come in at iteration 10, future iterations make sense.
But it’s only *intuitive* if you know the context, which isn’t specified anywhere - which means it arguably isn’t *really* intuitive.
Example - the three line ‘hamburger’ menu. An entirely abstract icon that offers no real information, and only makes sense if you’ve used it a bunch of times.
@bbbscarter @dormouse759 @sinbad I agree the affordance is gone, but as a UI designer I surely do not miss the iOS6 era with desperate attempts to mimick the real world by throwing shadods and gradients at everything, leading to overly busy UIs
@bbbscarter @wolfr @dormouse759 @sinbad
I think a big challenge is that almost everything is a button these days.
On your post: your name, avatar, time, app, boost+retoot counts are buttons in addition to the actual toot interaction buttons. Making them all button-shaped would be a mess of shapes, but is the inconsistency limiting to the important ones better or less obvious others are clickable too? Result is a UI where you tap everywhere and see what happens, but has easy undo.
@bbbscarter @wolfr @dormouse759 @sinbad
UI designs could build "tap any text for more info but actions are button-shaped" into their design language. Not sure if it's hard to veer away from dominant Apple/Android guidelines for an individual app? Or they made different choices about that language (Tusky sometimes has button shapes).
For the hamburger: Unlike the vertical, I think the horizontal kebab version is pretty clever: it looks like an ellipsis which is a book-old indicator for "more".
@bbbscarter @wolfr @dormouse759 @sinbad
At least the proximity of the toot interaction buttons makes it clear they're tied to the post, they're icons, and there's some purpose to the lack of outlines. And you could use a lot of mastodon without ever touching them.
To me, the big sin is when UI uses solitary text buttons without any hint they're clickable. If there's only a couple ways forward, then draw attention to them! Feels more prevalent in web than apps?
@wolfr @bbbscarter @dormouse759 kids just bash everything until something happens, learning by massive amounts of trial and error. It’s nothing to do with intuitiveness
@sinbad @wolfr @dormouse759 Agreed. Also:
“Next week on ‘Old Men Shouting At Clouds’ - why DVDs are actually better than streaming”
@sinbad @wolfr @dormouse759 just realised that might have sounded rude. Just in case; I’m the old man, and I do believe DVDs are better.
@bbbscarter don’t worry, I self-identify as an old man these days (although I prefer BluRays 
)
@bbbscarter @sinbad @wolfr I am no old man, but I do shout at clouds believing that DVDs are better.