I agree completely with you, and bestow upon you the title of designer. Good design includes sympathy for the user and common sense. Misconceptions about what is common sense are dispersed and corrected with user testing.
Some sort of clue would be really helpful. Advanced options can do in an options panel, but there needs to be someway to see the options panel exists.
Despite my horror and long post, I myself do use one form of invisible element in my own designs. Context menus. Right click and get tools that are relevant to what the mouse is currently above. This is a useful place to stick shortcuts for advanced users. It's not as great for things that are very rarely used. But here is the thing. Although there are definitely those who use them all the time, the hard core users, almost no normal users use them or are aware of them. In usability testing, if you ask someone to perform a task on an interface they have just seen for the first time, not even 1 in 100 will be able to do it if it depends on right clicking to find a menu item with the command. Users do not click on things they don't see. Since I use right click menus all the time it's easy to think others do as well. Well they will if they see it in a tutorial video, or someone demonstrating to them. I have had customers that have used my designs for many years and I meet them and go to demo something and when they see a right click use, invariably the response is something like "Oh, I didn't know you could do that!" Not right click, but do the hidden function. They know there is a right mouse button. They just don't use it to find contextual menus. Right click menus are there for the advanced users. So there's stuff that is faster to get to with the menu, but I try to always have another way to do the same thing. Rarely there are very advanced things. And yes I put them there to not clutter up the interface. Sometimes it is some rarely used function for which there is no obvious way to present it in a UI. It shouldn't be the only way to do anything done commonly, and probably shouldn't be the only way to do anything important. If it's something trivial and optional to use of the program, sure it can be an easter egg to be found by the hard core users.
Comments
I agree completely with you, and bestow upon you the title of designer. Good design includes sympathy for the user and common sense. Misconceptions about what is common sense are dispersed and corrected with user testing.
Some sort of clue would be really helpful. Advanced options can do in an options panel, but there needs to be someway to see the options panel exists.
Despite my horror and long post, I myself do use one form of invisible element in my own designs. Context menus. Right click and get tools that are relevant to what the mouse is currently above. This is a useful place to stick shortcuts for advanced users. It's not as great for things that are very rarely used. But here is the thing. Although there are definitely those who use them all the time, the hard core users, almost no normal users use them or are aware of them. In usability testing, if you ask someone to perform a task on an interface they have just seen for the first time, not even 1 in 100 will be able to do it if it depends on right clicking to find a menu item with the command. Users do not click on things they don't see. Since I use right click menus all the time it's easy to think others do as well. Well they will if they see it in a tutorial video, or someone demonstrating to them. I have had customers that have used my designs for many years and I meet them and go to demo something and when they see a right click use, invariably the response is something like "Oh, I didn't know you could do that!" Not right click, but do the hidden function. They know there is a right mouse button. They just don't use it to find contextual menus. Right click menus are there for the advanced users. So there's stuff that is faster to get to with the menu, but I try to always have another way to do the same thing. Rarely there are very advanced things. And yes I put them there to not clutter up the interface. Sometimes it is some rarely used function for which there is no obvious way to present it in a UI. It shouldn't be the only way to do anything done commonly, and probably shouldn't be the only way to do anything important. If it's something trivial and optional to use of the program, sure it can be an easter egg to be found by the hard core users.