>They require the user to know how the machine functions.
No, they don't. That's why they worked so well and was my entire point. All people needed to know was that they wanted to go forward, backward, or stop movement in whatever music or video was playing and that's a clear metaphorical and symbolical link. Someone with no knowledge of the function could walk up to a tape recorder and infer what the symbols meant in relation to what was happening.
The hamburger menu is not even intuitively a list and there's no connection that a user presented with it would recognize it as a call for a menu/list. There are plenty of user studies that confirm this.
No, they don't. That's why they worked so well and was my entire point. All people needed to know was that they wanted to go forward, backward, or stop movement in whatever music or video was playing and that's a clear metaphorical and symbolical link. Someone with no knowledge of the function could walk up to a tape recorder and infer what the symbols meant in relation to what was happening.
The hamburger menu is not even intuitively a list and there's no connection that a user presented with it would recognize it as a call for a menu/list. There are plenty of user studies that confirm this.