Agreed. Steve Jobs once expounded the notion of 'discoverability' with the Macintosh UI - in particular the use of drop-down menus - which was a response to the keyboard shortcut-heavy applications of the IBM ecosystem.
A lot has changed since then. GUIs are standard, touch-based 'appliances' like the iPad are the norm, and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to (a big issue back in the 80s and 90s that drove efforts of approachability you saw in the Macintosh and Windows 95). Despite this, I think there's still a timeless usability lesson in that early approach. Gestures, it could be argued, are just another form of the IBM keyboard shortcut.
It feels like the OS vendors pulled the rug out from under us. There used to be reliable well-researched style guides. They moved slowly, to the point where the pack-in software from Windows 1.0 looks pretty much sane in Windows 2000, or 1984 Mac software on OS 9 looks reasonable.
At some point, they decided to toss all that out the window for aesthetics and shininess.
I feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides, because they'd need to make sure it still looks and works fine when the user is running a theme that makes everything look like a particularly ugly Enlightenment theme.
> feel like this could have been done much better by making theming a first-class citizen. Sure, put a pretty theme on by default, but let the user make every button look like a football and have the text blue-on-purpole if they want. If anything, this would further encourage developers to stick to established conventions and style guides
This was very much the case for Classic Windows themes. Everything could have been set to any colour, font, style. Dare I say, it was more customisable for end users than any Linux UI today.
> and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to ...
Including current UX people. They are young enough, digital-native enough to take things for granted ...
... whereas people originally building the interfaces from the "golden age" mentioned upthread could not assume anything, having to build, research, and test everything from scratch.-
A lot has changed since then. GUIs are standard, touch-based 'appliances' like the iPad are the norm, and there are fewer people for whom computing is totally new to (a big issue back in the 80s and 90s that drove efforts of approachability you saw in the Macintosh and Windows 95). Despite this, I think there's still a timeless usability lesson in that early approach. Gestures, it could be argued, are just another form of the IBM keyboard shortcut.