> Even the trash can icon had to be explained before it became "intuitive".

Legend has it that the original Mac trash can icon looked a lot like a traditional British mailbox.

Non-hilarity ensued.

I might interpret "when icons carried inherent meaning" as something like, "when the physical office desk metaphor was the only game in town". I didn't get much out of the article, but I would agree that the trajectory of icon symbology is necessarily towards the more virtual and more subtle (if that's a point the author is making...).

Using the word “intuitive” is the hallmark of a mediocre interface designer.

You can’t make an “intuitive interface”. What you can make is an interface that is familiar, and consistent, which means people can reasonably anticipate what doing something they haven’t done before will do.

(Good interfaces should also allow for mistake recovery - eg by supporting universal undo - which is something everyone seems to have forgotten)

Even arrows are not uniformly perceived across cultures as showing direction (although you can safely assume most anyone who lives in 21st century globalized modern society will have learned to decode arrows fairly early in life).

The old quote goes that “the only intuitive interface is the nipple; after that it’s all learned” - but that quote was clearly by someone who was never around newborns, because lots of newborns have to be guided to breastfeeding.

I'm amused by the oil pressure gauge on my car having an icon on it instead of "oil". The icon is an outline of an ancient babylon oil lamp. As if anyone unfamiliar with 5000 year old archaeology would know what it was!

I've also seen telephone icons that are an outline of a telephone that hasn't been seen since the 1950s. An outline of a modern phone isn't very distinctive.