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> I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

I think it does, but for new users only. I hate playing the "is-this-a-button" on modern designs, not knowing what is clickable and what is not. Other games I hate:

- Lets find the scrollbar

- Guess which window has focus

- (Windows-only) Try to predict the application to get focus on alt-tab, then alt-tab again.

- How do I find the file that just downloaded?

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A lot of these don't need skeuomorphism to be solved. It just needs clearer designs. Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer. The same with using color to show window focus, separate distinct elements or foreground from background. Nowadays everything is just white, but this is just a product of visual design trends, not (anti)skeuomorphism.
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> they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

They started doing it on mobile in order to give more screen real estate to the content area. This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone (a 32" monitor at 1600x1200 used to be a luxury, now it's mundane). Now no one knows if there is anything "below the fold" without initiating a scroll action, which just encourages people to further only focus on the above the fold content.

Interestingly the response to that was sites adding horizontal "progress bars" across the top of the viewport to indicate how much you had read. And with application and website control of the styling and operation of these standard widgets, everyone is slightly different, which increases time to become familiar.

It's been a race to the bottom, in the name of (the subjective at best) "clean design".

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« This was then translated to desktop apps at the same time desktop screen real estate became a non-issue for everyone »

Exactly. I remember opening a Metro/TIFKAM app for the first time on my new Windows 8 connected to my new 27" QHD monitor, and then staring in bewilderment as it went fullscreen and 95 % of the screen was just monochrome with nothing on it at all.

Wtf were they thinking? That I would enjoy vanilla sauce on my roastbeef because they weren't serving strawberries yet?

Still puzzling to me how such a multi-billion $ company can fuck up so hard.

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I feel like wide screens and ultra-wide screens are massively under-utilised in UX design and there’s a lot of untapped potential there.
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> Always showing vital elements like the scrollbar isn't a skeuomorphic choice, it's always a good idea, they only started hiding them because it looked 'cleaner' to some UI designer.

There’s a lot of modern design in not happy with, but this is not personally one of them. If I can’t autohide scrollbars I try to turn them permanently off instead of permanently on. For some reason I find them very distracting, and since I anyway use a scroll wheel or trackpad or keybindings, I don’t need it to scroll. (If it’s on autohide, I use it as a progress bar when actually scrolling.).

But there’s a lot of these weird things that seemingly everyone else accepts that just really throws off my focus. Blinking text cursor is another one, I just can’t get any work done until the blinking is off. If an app or OS can’t do that, I won’t use it.

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Skeumorphism isn't necessary for consistency in user interfaces, but it generally ensures a level of consistency that is honestly hard in modern interface design.
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Absolutely. I keep falling into these traps. I just got a Mac, and it's terrible at these. It's notorious for hiding the scrollbar, but why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded? Or a screenshot I just took? I can open it, but that doesn't take me to the file location so I can actually do something with it. Although Steam is by far the worst at that.

It's almost as if we didn't learn anything about UX in the past 30 years.

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What I hate most about mac is the opinionated design. I liked it in the days of Tiger and Leopard but what I didn't like since was some designer deciding that I have to use my computer in a different way every year and forcing changes on me. Opinionated design only works when you as a user have no opinions or if you are a follower.

Personally I do have strong opinions how my computer should work and I'm not a follower. I could never work in an army and take orders either.

The problem was that early OS X used to be pretty aligned with my own opinions so I didn't notice the issues with this model. But after the Mac becoming more frustrating every year I finally dumped it and now I'm really happy with KDE which I can configure how I want.

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UX was mastered 31 years ago. The intervening years have been a nosedive.
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> why would they make it hard to find the thing I just downloaded?

In… the downloads folder? How much more obvious does the location need to be?

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What do you mean about Steam?
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Steam screenshots end up somewhere deep in the steam folder structure. Not simply in an easily accessible downloads or screenshots directory in my home dir.
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Yeah, those are all legit gripes about modern operating system UX, but none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism, and none of them couldn't be fixed with clearer design regardless of approach.
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> none of them are automatically fixed with skeuomorphism

True.

But they absolutely need to stop hiding functionality in order to present a "clean" interface.

Sure, I've seen some cluttered interfaces. I recently launched LibreOffice Calc and damn there were a lot of buttons on that toolbar (I may be using an insanely old version).

But like...disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.

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> disappearing scrollbars makes zero sense and should never have been implemented on any interface.

My biggest gripe about the disappearing scrollbars is the layout shifting that can occur when the content changes making the scrollbar necessary or not. CSS has a few options that can take care of that, but it requires some digging for someone to discover them.

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- Should there even be a scrollbar?

Many apps present content in such a way that makes it impossible to tell if there is anything more on the screen until you actually try to scroll. The home screen of the app is so clean and so fitted that there is nothing poking out from the bottom.

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oh gawd, please please please do not interpret this as pagination of windows with overflowing content!

the image carousel type dots or similar old skool pagination indicators are so much worse than a simple scroll bar.

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>Lets find the scrollbar

Related: Whoever decided to allow to websites style browser scroll bars, should have their teeth kicked in.

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> Guess which window has focus

Used to be a solved problem before some ** messed it up. I hate that game too.

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Skeuomorphism isn't the only thing we've lost, and really it's the least important. We're talking smaller ideas, like widgets that aren't just black text on a white background (or if you like dark mode, white text on a grey background), visible scrollbars, menus.
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I love knowing that a "Get-Foo" function in a library I've never before isn't going to have side-effects (unless malicious).

Conventions are great for UX.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/devel...

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That has nothing to do with discoverability. Discoverability isn't about "guessing" it's about being able to see it.

Discoverability in CLI is --help. But you can't discover you have to use --help. So CLI is always fundamentally worse than GUI.

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It helps that for most cli tools, any incorrect usage will show the usage text, including --help
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You also have to just know what program to invoke with the —help arg.

Good luck guessing ‘grep’ from first principles.

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Man -k is often good for this
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