For me the pointer hand is a little too subtle. I prefer to have the border highlighted on mouseover, which gives a strong visual indication without obscuring t

For me the pointer hand is a little too subtle. I prefer to have the border highlighted on mouseover, which gives a strong visual indication without obscuring the content. I have to agree though that modern designs, while slick, are often no more usable than designs from the 2000s. For example, take the point about vague icons near the end of the article. Even though you can often guess roughly what those icons do, that moment of uncertainty when you click them to see what happens creates a jarring user experience that could have been avoided with a few words of text. A major contributing factor to this trend in design is obviously the emphasis on mobile devices (e.g. sometimes you have to use those small icons due to limited screen sizes). It annoys me that a lot of this mobile-driven design gets copied over to the desktop even when the same constraints no longer apply. Unfortunately, this is not completely without reason. To me, words like "refresh" are less ambiguous than circular arrows, but maybe to someone who grew up using only tablets and iphones, the circular arrow is more familiar.