I know what you mean, but my point is, if you have a strong convention that right click
a) never actually runs anything, so you can’t accidentally break stuff
and
b) usually shows contextually relevant actions
That makes for great discoverability, actually. Discoverabilty is mostly a measure of how confidently one can dick around without causing accidents (and being able to undo them easily).
Your point about there being to indication whether something is clickable or not applies to left clicks just as well, and this also used to be less of a problem before everyone rolled their own, usually very flat, designs. You could teach someone basic principles and they’d be widely applicable. These days you’d have to start with a full lecture on the differences between web apps and “native” apps and natively packaged web apps…
I wonder if it took the shinier, less conventional UIs to get all these “non-tech” people to use computers in the first place. A dilemma, because they would benefit from boring conventions the most.
a) never actually runs anything, so you can’t accidentally break stuff
and
b) usually shows contextually relevant actions
That makes for great discoverability, actually. Discoverabilty is mostly a measure of how confidently one can dick around without causing accidents (and being able to undo them easily).
Your point about there being to indication whether something is clickable or not applies to left clicks just as well, and this also used to be less of a problem before everyone rolled their own, usually very flat, designs. You could teach someone basic principles and they’d be widely applicable. These days you’d have to start with a full lecture on the differences between web apps and “native” apps and natively packaged web apps…
I wonder if it took the shinier, less conventional UIs to get all these “non-tech” people to use computers in the first place. A dilemma, because they would benefit from boring conventions the most.