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I have a half-baked still-gooey thought about this, but it's really around the time of the iphone (and the take off of the smartphone) that discoverability got

I have a half-baked still-gooey thought about this, but it's really around the time of the iphone (and the take off of the smartphone) that discoverability got thrown in the trash. Search bars instead of menus became the primary means of interaction, and ironically you can only find something with the search bar if you already know what you are looking for. Of course menus don't translate well to touch devices, and menu systems can quickly become unorganized junk drawers for functionality, but it feels like discoverability was never fully solved on touch devices.

bentcorner 6y ago
As an Android user it's also a problem here. The settings menu got a Search feature a few releases ago and its a sad concession that people have no idea where to find things in the Settings menu. And it also has the same problem you describe - you don't know how to find something unless you know what it's called. And even if you do find something, there's no breadcrumb trail to learn how to find it without using search. You have to look at what's on the current page and like some kind of reverse engineering sherlock, think about where a designer could possibly have put this page. It's insane.