> A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. Edit: FTR, this comment is kind of hyperbolic. I do not think I can outsmart all UX de

> A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. Edit: FTR, this comment is kind of hyperbolic. I do not think I can outsmart all UX designers alone or that all UX designers are dumb or that those who designed Ribbon are dumb. I'm just pointing out that 1. I think there was a golden age of discoverability in UX where everything could be discovered and 2. It is over now. Unless I misunderstand something here this should be plain demonstrably wrong (and note for context that I'm not exactly a Windows and Office enthusiast, quite the contrary): In Microsoft Office (and a good number of other application) everything was available through the menus. Toolbar buttons were just shortcuts fot the more important ones. Then "UX" happened on Windows and today we've suffered through - Office automatically hiding half the menus (late pre-Ribbon) - early (but released, not Beta) Ribbon versions where File and Save was hidden behind a round flag that turned out to be a button. - now: Ribbon is actually usable. Nice looking, still less predictable and more visual noise in addition to the leftmost menu (File...?) behaving in a (weirdly IMO) different way. - now: menus are gone in many applications. I belive Chrome is the culprit here. Designers like Chrome it seems and for a number of UX-designers the idea seems to be that whatever Chrome and Mac OS does has to be copied across OS and domain boundaries. If it wasn't clear: UX on Windows used to be great. The OS was closed, slow, annoyingly limited etc, the UI was kind of ugly and business-focused but the UX was discoverable and usable. What should have been done? I don't know but here are a couple of ideas: - search in menus (as implemented in IDE settings, Visual Studio palette etc)? - add fallback with synonyms and slight fuzzing to the search index so you get can the correct tool even if you misspelled it or if you are stuck on a Norwegian or French version. - make enthusiastic videos about how it is best (I'm only half joking here, it seems to have worked for the vim crowd, - a number of people spend weeks learning a decades old editor whos discoverability is so bad no one knows how to even exit it the first time they open it.)