It’s great for learning. But the different panels and varied icons, make it annoying to scan and find things…
compared to the traditional nested toolbar with consistent sized icons and labels
Humans need some variety to make sense of their environments. Imagine if every tool in a toolbox was the same shape and size and color, or if every room and hallway in a building had the same plan and decor. It would be a lot harder to find what you’re looking for.
This puts everything in the same place, every time I want to use it. Under CUA, it was a basic tenet - don't move things around or hide them. Menus used to provide this, now nothing really does - everything wants to subtly (or not so subtly) shift the controls you are provided based on context, which means it always requires some mental processing until/unless you learn state+position.
The exception to this (for me) is the context menu, which you will assume by default only presents contextually relevant options.
We've arrived at "recognition vs. recall" and "a sense of place".
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/recognition-and-recall/
I've struggled to enumerate the spectrum from one to the other as I've worked through the impact of GPT on my work over the past year. What the author describe here is a great attempt at getting to the core concepts:
* mixing and matching aspects of GUI and CLI in a single unified interface
The key, to me, is that when designs combine elements of recognition vs. recall, those designs need to link the CLI and GUI in bi-directional ways such that direct manipulation of GUI objects impact model queries with near zero latency in the CLI while query and manipulation of the models in the CLI show changes in GUI "at once". Direct manipulation matters in both directions owing to perception.
Of course, I'm probably describing ancient history in terms of Logo or Borland's early attempts at bi-directional tooling, but I think a tip of the hat and a little retro-computing software is not a bad way to approach the problem.
It has the exact opposite effect for me. It makes the whole thing harder to navigate and even more difficult to find the exact thing you're looking for. It increases the cognitive load required to do anything except the most common actions significantly.
It just feels like a visual representation of keyboard shortcuts. Spend enough time in an application and you learn how to get to stuff efficiently, but it doesn't help you if you just want the basics.