Debatable. IIRC Bell labs conducted a study of whether Unix command names should be changed to something more meaningful than cat, sed, grep etc.

They found that words that convey some meaning related to what the command does had little or no effect on the user remembering what the command does. I strongly suspect skeuomorphism similarly has no claim on functional advantage.

Discoverability is good, but it's probably got a little to do with the icon.

Re: too far - it’s interesting, because there’s two reasons skeumorphism “works” - one is because it provides visual cues for how a virtual object will behave when acted upon, which lets our brain build a quick intuitive understanding of how to interact with a foreign object that draws on all our experience outside the computer, and two is because the visual mimicry of the physical object gives our brains immediate cues to understand what it’s seeing and build that interaction model.

This one absolutely over indexes on that second principle, to a borderline cartoonish degree, but I expect the reason it’s resonating so hard is exactly what you’re indicating, that in the industry’s desire to be able to move on from the tether to the shapes of physical objects, they discarded that first principle entirely, instead of figuring out how to maintain the visual cues to form and operation in a new language.

(Here’s where I throw away all that credibility I just got from the prior two paragraphs: I actually think Liquid Glass is getting closer to a “skeumorphism without skeumorphism” than anything else I’ve seen out there.)

The UX disaster is not just about looking "clean" and "sleek". It is all about mobile. The choice between bland colored boxes, skeuomorphism and other styles is just looks, it doesn't change the fundamentals.

Here is the problem: smartphones have a small screens and are operated using fat fingers, so you need big buttons and you don't have much space, so you are very limited in the amount of stuff you can put on screen. It also means there is a lot of hidden stuff.

Now that having a mobile app, or a mobile optimized website is often a requirement, the desktop app usually follows the mobile conventions, which is not great, but better than doing it the other way. Having two entirely different apps to make the best use of the platform is possible, but it is expensive, and you want to maintain some level of consistency, so that users switching between desktop and mobile won't be lost. You probably want to maintain branding too.

To me, it is not that designers don't know how to do good UX like they did in the 90s/00s, it is that there are contradictory requirements and they have to make compromises.

> I don't know why anybody would.

Well, there's really two things going on here: consumer vs professional. Does an electrician need to "discover" the modes on her multimeter? Naw. Do I need to discover where the wiper controls are on the car I just rented? Absolutely! But I'm not a huge fan of UI fluff that helps me discover things on my work machine.

> Discoverability? Who needs it?

It wouldn't be so important if things didn't change so much over the years. The CLI has stayed fairly consistent over the past 40 or so years. Can't say the same about GUI, though.

I wouldn't have to rediscover all functionality if designers didn't shuffle things around for no reason. Though, that's mostly a Windows thing, which I have to use for work.

Do all those toggle switches and dials and sliders actually help discovery for people who grew up with iPads? Maybe their function is only obvious to us dinosaurs.

Way too far. I don't want my desktop to look like a puzzle straight out of Myst, or a reinvention of Bob.

These lessons made sense for users born before personal computers, but it's debatable if these lessons are transferable to so called "digital native" users.

Ha I feel like modern interior design and apartment design does exactly the same thing these days. Everything looks the same kind of bland.

Modern design is not synonymous to dis-empowering design.

FWIW I love modern design, and I hate all these too clever skeuomorphs. Modern design is honest to the digital medium. I find its beauty lies, not in the quirky ways it tries to mimic real textures and objects, but by how it provides usable controls and information by applying basic design elements like spacing, alignment, color, typography, discovery, layered info density, etc. well.

None of these requires skeuomorphs. It is like the difference between thinking a website is visually impressive and stunning because it uses a nice background image. That would not impress me. What would impress me are stuff like: does it have an effective information architecture, as reflected in it main menu and general link structure? Does it use a tasteful and usable color scheme? Does it have an interesting and still usable visual grouping? Etc.

I think it depends on audience. I think there is a place for the 'Microsoft Bob' s of the world. My 90+ year old grandma would probably use a computer if we sanded down all the hard edges and kept her in a box (computationally speaking). Hell my 70+ year old mother, even though she's had a computer for 35ish years prefers her ipad for just that reason (simpler than her hand-me-down macbooks i keep her supplied with).

> Discoverability? Who needs it?

Most "flat" designed modern apps fail miserably at discovery. Most hide things in hamburger menus or require weird random swipes in odd directions with zero visual indicators.