User Interface design in 3.46.1 is a usability regression
The new user interface design in version 3.46.1 has major usability problems due to the removal of icon labels, and repositioning of important functions into the title bar. Users don't speak icons and 95% won't understand them. Labeling them with languages users do understand improves cognitive ease and usability since people don't have to spend energy trying to translate ambiguous icons. See:
- Yes, icons need text labels
- The Importance Of Labels
- The best icon is a text label
- Icon usability
- Do icons need labels?
- The Obvious UI is Often the Best UI
- Introduction to Mystery Meat Navigation
Also see:
- The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
- The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.
It's much better to have an "Easy to Learn" user interface by default and allow advanced users to customize the interface to their specific use case scenarios in order to improve efficiency. Default should be easy for the majority of users though in order to reduce the barrier to entry and this new interface is the opposite of that.