A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.
Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen.
I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me.
That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.
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A little OT, but it does make me chuckle when you read this on a blog with little to no visual affordances. The title and the date are both permalinks, but there's no indication until you mouse over to check. That's fine - for the sake of cleanliness it's an acceptable trade off. And also, importantly, we've learnt that they probably are. Consistency is also important. Whether people will learn Metro successfully (statistically) etc. is yet to be seen I guess, but it's more complex than this.
I agree that it's a tradeoff.
Though one thing that differentiates them is that the systems we learnt about titles and dates being typically interactable had mouse pointers. I can't quite express why, but it feels less annoying to mouse over something and discover it's interactable (via a change in the mouse cursor) than to stab at text on the screen.
I guess one is a more passive "will this do something if I interact with it" while the other is a more proactive "I'll try to interact with this and see if it works". One results in a yes or no answer, while the other results in a failed action, which seems more frustrating to me.
That all just goes to show that, as you said, it's more complex than simply missing affordances = unusable UI.