This is the foundation of my primary complaint with Apple's interfaces: by constantly assuming that you don't know how to use a computer, they make it impossible to learn. We here are all fine with our OSX boxes, because we already know how to use computers, but there are millions of people out there that started knowing nothing and have ended up knowing nothing.
Is it a bad thing if you don't need to know anything?
The article's comment about the Ribbon in Office/Windows 8 "assuming [you] don't know how to use a menu, a key command, or a honest-to-goodness toolbar" is silly. Menus and toolbars make things more hidden, more modal, less discoverable, and key commands are still there. What's the problem?
If the point of design is to reduce the total number of clicks required to get to your goal, reduce the total amount of clutter and get as many useful elements in front of the user when they need it (without hunting/searching through menus and help files) than I think Ribbon is fantastic. Of course, it takes adjusting to, if all you're used to is hunting through menus.
If the point of design is to make you feel intellectual and special because you know how to use this set of tools and there's no tutorial, than why are you using a GUI at all?
He constantly expresses his love for Windows 95 and older Mac distributions.
One has to wonder why he didn't just profess his undying love for command line operating systems. No animations, no curved edges, no tutorials, no help.
Just you and the computer.
I'm chalking this up to: "GET OFF MAH LAWN"
(How dare my calendar look like a real calendar! This is a computer, dammit, I expect black screen terminal and green letters!)
Just an FYI - when someone says "intuitive" in relation to user interface they usually mean "discoverable".
GUI's are usually somewhat discoverable (you can fiddle around and often figure something out) whereas a CLI tends to require study before it is useful (and thus why things like very well written manpages with examples are great).
The better a GUI is at allowing the user to make assumptions that are accurate is the closest I think you can get to "intuitive". That's the product of a lot of good design decisions.
The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned. We should be making it easy for the users to learn, rather than forcing them into a stilted, toy-like environment.
Anyone who believes that the nipple is an intuitive interface and doesn't require learning time has never been with a mother trying to breastfeed a newborn in its first weeks of life.
There is no such thing as an intuitive interface, only some that are easier to learn than others.
Online user interfaces are intuitive when they match well with the offline interfaces you're already familiar with, so no additional learning is necessary.
This is why buttons look like buttons, and change appearance when pressed. This is why things that are above other things have drop shadows.
You might be smart and experienced enough not to need such 'toy-like' visual cues, but computers aren't just for you.
How do you go from being a "normal" to being an expert? Learning. It's much, much harder to do that on one of today's macs. Of course, if you're suggesting that we don't need experts, that's something else entirely.
