19 ms·

Undiscoverable UI Madness

242 points by pcr910303 7y ago

ericlewis 7y ago
I did not know holding option in a right click menu had so many useful features! Also, on command clicking the title bar to go a folder above: my memory is probably failing me but I seem to recall when this was announced there was an arrow or some such, or highlighting.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  In Finder there are different options depending on whether you hold option and then right click, or right click and then press option. Edit: Finder is... not great. But I don't want Apple to touch it, because they'll Photo-ize it and it will go from being not great to being terrible.
- whalesalad 7y ago
  Holding option and clicking on a lot of things will unlock advanced entries. For instance, hold option and click your WiFi button in the top menubar to see advanced WiFi stats like channel, speed, etc... same goes for Bluetooth device menu and others.
  - Ididntdothis 7y ago
    Nice! I have used MacOS for years and had no idea that this exists. Tooltips would be perfect use for this. Hover over the Wifi icon and the tooltip tells you that option will show you more.
- rubyn00bie 7y ago
  It works on almost any menu; not just right click context menu. XCode for example, is much more useful when you realize you learn that half of the menu options you really want are hidden by holding down the option key. The WiFi icon has an insane amount of information if you option click it for example... (most of the system ones do) Holding option in menus, settings, or while clicking the status bar is easily the most underused and under-documented feature of MacOS... (maybe after removing annoying shit with launchctrl). Edit: totally didn't see the two other posts with exactly the same tip, ha. Maybe not so underused -_-;
  - ericlewis 7y ago
    I have seen it on the system bar, very useful there.
- masswerk 7y ago
  On command clickng the window title: this feature has been around since classic Mac OS (I believe, it had been introduced in one of the many iterations of System 7) – there was definitely no indicator or hint. But the functionality was about the same as the location drop-down at top center of the file dialogs and was anchored in about the same position. It may have been one of the first hidden features, apart from the easter egg in the Finder's about box.
cryo 7y ago
Good test and I think the results would also apply for most people dealing with Finder. I'd like to add that the right click context menu on any file or folder is huge, I can't imagine that from the 20 entries (on my machine) more than 4 are used by 95% of all users. So here is a poll: What are the entries you use commonly from the context menu and more interesting which of them haven't you used once?
- armagon 7y ago
  I frequently use a couple of services on the menu to diff two files (but most people don't have the diffing tool installed). "Open", "Open With", I use frequently. "Compress", "Rename" and "Get Info" come in handy now and then. I've never used (before now, to see what it did) "Make Alias", "Share", or "Use Groups". Not sure I've ever used "Duplicate".
transreal 7y ago
Good post - these features are quite undiscoverable, and I only figured them out because I did them accidentally one day or someone showed me. Someone at Apple made the determination that "looking simpler" was more important that UX discoverability, and so hid some features under Ctrl/Command clicks. A worse offender is "Command+Shift+." for showing hidden files - they don't even have a menu item anywhere for it, it's either you know that hidden files is a thing or you don't, and there's no way to discover it by clicking around and paying attention. While I still prefer macOS to Windows, I agree that Apple could do a bit more to make these hidden features more exposable. E.g. why not let a click on the folder name show you the folder path, why require a "Command"?
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seems a colossal waste of energy to first implement them but then making it very hard to find them. On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.
  - madeofpalk 7y ago
    Is that a macOS thing, or just a conceptual problem with keyboard shortcuts? IMHO macOS does a pretty decent job of discoverability for shortcuts as they’ll be listed there in the menu. edit: originally I doubted whether Windows does this or not. It does! Somehow I missed this despite using Windows every day...
    - noisem4ker 7y ago
      Windows programs absolutely do show shortcut keys in their menus. http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html This is in addition to access keys (also explained in the document above), underlined letters you can type to instantly navigate the menus and select even the items for which no shortcut is defined.
ebg13 7y ago
Years ago Macs used to all come with a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts and other hints. Before that there was a guide program with every Mac showing how to interact with the OS. Now you get nothing, nada, bubkes.
- applecrazy 7y ago
  https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac Something similar to this actually loads up in Safari when you log into your Mac for the first time.
jvagner 7y ago
That's how you turn on DND... Frustratingly, if you "x" all the notifications, there's still no hint that you can scroll to see night shift & DND toggles. I still have to think really hard every time I want to move my cursor to the beginning or end of an edit line on OS X.
- tobr 7y ago
  You can also option+click the notification center icon in the menu bar.
  - jvagner 7y ago
    Take my money. All of it.
  - avip 7y ago
    That's it. I give up programming and going back to Barista.
- samatman 7y ago
  Really? Cmd left and right are built into my muscle memory at this point. I'm pretty good with vim but not a day goes by that I don't try this by accident and end up in the next terminal over...
- cannam 7y ago
  > That's how you turn on DND... For anyone else who wondered what DND stood for: it's "Do Not Disturb". Now that I know that, I see there is a subthread about it elsewhere in this HN page - but I couldn't find an expansion when searching either this HN thread or the linked article for the string "DND". Had to go and follow the instructions on a Mac, to find out what it was that lay hidden in the Notifications window.
mehrdadn 7y ago
A few days ago I discovered I could rotate PDF pages in Chrome's PDF viewer with Ctrl+[]... by pressing it by accident. How the heck anyone was supposed to know that, I have no clue.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  I once rotated the screen on my Dell laptop by accident and couldn't figured out how to get it back to normal. Took almost a day.
- int_19h 7y ago
  By right-clicking the document, and seeing "Rotate clockwise" and "Rotate counterclockwise" in the context menu, along with their corresponding shortcuts? That's actually a good example of a traditional UI that is designed around a few basic patterns (right click -> context menu, here) that enable discoverability.
gburdell3 7y ago
I love using MacOS now that I'm used to it, but it really is a disaster from a basic UX point of view. Even just installing applications on MacOS is wacky, and it makes me wonder how Macs got their reputation of being easier to use than Windows computers.
- robocat 7y ago
  Off-topic, but is it really common to confuse the difference between UX and UI? (I think "love using MacOS" implies good UX, and doesn't imply a UX "disaster": maybe I'm wrong or I'm misreading the comment?). Professionally, I can't see how I could ever use "UX" without being confusing, either because I'm using the concept poorly or because I'd expect my audience to misunderstand my meaning. Disclaimer: I've spent years working on UI (even developing controls, caring deeply about usability) but I've never spent much time specifically working on UX.
  - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
    i've taken three university courses on user interface design and human-computer interactions. i still don't know the difference between UI and UX except in a vague sense.
    - AlanYx 7y ago
      You're not alone. Authors in the field aren't always consistent either, to the point where people have written academic papers trying to sort through the various definitions of what "UX" is, trying to give it some kind of clear scope, e.g. [1]. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221518375_Understanding_scoping_and_defining_user_experience_A_survey_approach https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221518375_Understan...
    - Someone 7y ago
      A good UI makes you get things done easily. A good UX makes you feel good doing things, even though you may not get anything done. Confusion arises because, typically, not getting things done makes you feel bad.
erling 7y ago
IMO Apple has really lost its way in terms of genuinely good UX. The UI might be “pretty” but in terms of actual usability it’s gotten just frustrating at this point. The amount of complexity they require from their users now, memorizing swipe gestures, complex keyboard shortcuts, and strange incarnations is just sad. Good design is simple!
- snowwrestler 7y ago
  None of that is required! In fact this article begins with people who are happily using MacOS despite not knowing all the features. Truly simple design would not have these features at all; that’s where Mac started. The mouse had one button, period. There was no contextual click option at all. And MacOS can still be used productively that way today. Adding power features without disturbing the original usability is strictly positive IMO. It’s incredibly easy to pick a power feature and demonstrate that some users don’t know it. The more capable a system is, the more likely this becomes. Might as well write an article demonstrating that some users don’t know how to use Terminal, so obviously Mac must have slipped in usability since the original Mac did not have a CLI.
  - wackget 7y ago
    Having visible scrollbars is not a power feature. Crippling a system because you don't want to ruin your "minimalist" aesthetic is always a bad choice.
- Tehdasi 7y ago
  These things have been in Apple ever since the original Macintosh. In that case it was 'one mouse button, so simple'. Except to make the system usable as other systems with multiple button mice, they added a whole load of keyboard shortcuts mimiced how the multibutton mice worked, which ended up being far more complicated than just adding another button to the mouse.
  - hhas01 7y ago
    Citation for that? I’m fairly sure they got rid of all those other buttons because for the majority of customers they created more confusion than power back then. Also, speaking as a power user who’s also a southpaw, I’ve got more than a few choice words for many of the multibutton mice I’ve had to use over the years. Apple’s late ADB mice were lovely in the hand and completely unprejudiced.
LeanderK 7y ago
I don't get why there's not continuous validation from apple for UX. Can't they just pay random users to do some tasks and continuously monitor whether they are able to do it? Something like: how satisfied are you with x,y,z and then let them try to do task 1, task 2, task 3. Just track these metrics and try to improve the UI according to this. It seems like the designers just live in a bubble without feedback from the users, this seems especially crucial during and after a redesign. Maybe a small popup in apples own apps, like music. Something like: Want to use apple music for free for one month? Just answer these short questions and complete a few tasks! These things don't need to take longer than 10 minutes. Even a small sample size could provide meaningful and statistically significant results.
tobr 7y ago
As I’m not much of an iPad user, I’m not sure how well I’ve understood the recent onslaught of criticism it has seen, but I thought it was more about gestures that are hard to execute even if you know them, and UI modes that you accidentally can get yourself into with no clear way to exit? Most of these examples seem like things that are nice to be able to do if you know about them, easy to execute, but not much of a problem if you are oblivious to them?
Wowfunhappy 7y ago
A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons, much less remember what they mean. So you have to pick which actions are most important, and make those easy to discover. QuickLook is a wholly essential feature. So is navigating up a level—it's very useful in some instances, but the back button does the same thing 90% of the time. For the rest, what matters most is that the actions are never activated accidentally†. This last point is, IMO, where iPadOS fails the most. * However: it is worth noting how far the Mac has fallen in the past decade. Snow Leopard had persistent scrollbars, that were big and blue so you couldn't miss them. Finder's toolbar had a button for activating QuickLook. And of course, the notification center didn't exist yet. There's a pattern behind all these changes. Scrollbars were modified to match iOS. The QuickLook icon was removed to make room for a share button that mimics iOS. The design of notification center was basically ripped from iOS wholesale. So yes, I agree that iOS has UI problems. —————————— † Unless the user can instantly parse how they accidentally triggered the action. If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic. ‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.
- pjc50 7y ago
  > You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons There's a reason people pay lots of money for Bloomberg terminals, with their zillion labeled physical keys. > If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic. On the other hand, if there's no other way for people to discover them than accident ..
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    > There's a reason people pay lots of money for Bloomberg terminals, with their zillion labeled physical keys. And a reason that type of design is only used in specialized, targeted scenarios. They have their place for sure, but it's pretty narrow. > On the other hand, if there's no other way for people to discover them than accident .. If it's a nonessential feature, I don't think that's a problem. You're allowing people to learn the system at a gradual pace. The best interfaces are ones which are accessible to newcomers, but slowly train you to become a power user just via incidental use. OS X used to be very, very good at this, and still does an above average job in many respects.
robenkleene 7y ago
The difference between macOS and iOS isn't about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there's no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession. macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple's provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn't bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much effort, it's exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user. I'll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate. [0]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ [1]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html
- robenkleene 7y ago
  I'll add the best thing Apple could do to fix iPadOS is make the developers working on it bootstrap[0] it. E.g., by running some version of Xcode on it (or CLI tools until they have Xcode working). Those developer would then fix it right up. I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it's a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is the task for computers, everything else stems from it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
  - zer00eyz 7y ago
preferenca 7y ago
The party line at Apple is that right click (and everything in there) is for power users only, and that you should be able to do everything a user reasonably needs with only one button. I think this is a reasonable approach, but it seems that it's breaking peoples' ability to transition from user to power user. The other Finder issues, however... well, it's become clear that Finder has become simpler and simpler in an attempt to make the computers more accessible. Did you know: you can turn scrolbars on by default? A lot of common macos/finder complaints can be addressed by toggling settings, but it'd be nice if there was a single "pro mode" button, or something.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  As a “pro”, I’d like scrollbars to be off by default, thank you very much.
- robertoandred 7y ago
  Pretty presumptive to assume all "pros" would want scrollbars turned on and all non-"props" would want them turned off. UIs are complex and can't serve the needs of every kind of user by default. That's why there are options.
pedrokost 7y ago
I have been observing something similar recently, but related to other technologies. People claiming they are good at Excel, but can't do a vlookup or a pivot table. People using 5% of the power of an IDE. People not realizing that if they are able to use a web-based tool at work, they could (probably) also access it remotely. And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week. We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently. Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things. It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.
- Smoosh 7y ago
  I think part of this was that in the past, computers and software were new and novel. People had no comparative experience, so training had to be provided to fully explain what you could do & how you could do it. Compare to today where most people "learn" by immersion - you have to use Google Docs or Excel for your school work, so you adsorb just enough to get your work done without really understanding the fundamentals or the more complex or non-obvious features, since you weren't taught systematically or comprehensively. Then you "know" Excel, or Word well enough to get by - but don't know that you are barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities, or don't realize that being more competent with the tool will make you more capable and productive. And thus the motivation/opportunity isn't there to invest that time and effort.
- hhas01 7y ago
  The obvious observation about Excel: spreadsheets are a highly specialized expert tool for highly specialized expert users (accountants). Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable parallel calculations, but rather for ad-hoc ersatz databases. Of course, said users are rarely any better at designing and using databases than they are at bookkeeping.
jml7c5 7y ago
It's a shame there's no standard contextual key one can hold that overlays all the keyboard shortcuts, swipes, clicks, scrolls, etc that are available in the currently displayed UI. Ideally, every window that has hidden UI stuff would have a little indicator in the corner that means "hey, there's something weird you can do here, hold down the 'explain-o-tron 3000 key' to get a hint". While one can argue that UIs should be immediately understandable, it doesn't seem possible to pull off such a feat in many cases. Keyboard shortcuts are particularly problematic, as an always-visible list would take up too much space in most cases.
- dEnigma 7y ago
  What I like about GNOME apps is that they usually have a "Keyboard Shortcuts" entry in their hamburger menu, which shows you all, or at least the most important, shortcuts you can use in the app. On the other hand it took me a bit to first find this option because it is hidden in the aforementioned hamburger menu.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  iPadOS has this to some extent: holding down command will show all the active keyboard shortcuts.
  - ttepasse 7y ago
    MacOS had it years before the iPad in the form of a great 3rd party application: https://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/ https://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/
    - darkFunction 7y ago
      Oh my god thank you
- pjc50 7y ago
  Windows used to be very systematic about putting an underscore on letters that could be used with alt accelerator key; but this seems to have been phased out. I think the only thing I've seen with a "hold key for instructions on everything" was strategy game Rise of Nations.
avip 7y ago
He didn't make it to the final question: how would you re-find an open window of some app and bring it to front as active window?
- Smoosh 7y ago
  https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204100 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204100
_bxg1 7y ago
Some of these are esoteric keyboard shortcuts for things that are possible to do in a less-undiscoverable way. Others, like right-clicking on the trackpad and scrolling without a visible scroll bar very quickly become second-nature when you start using a Mac, because it's impossible to navigate otherwise. Only the "Open With" case is really valid, because even the non-keyboard way of doing it (again, not mentioned in the article) is really fairly esoteric: [right-click] > "Get Info" > [select application for this file] > "Change All..." to apply to all files with this extension.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
proc0 7y ago
The single click mouse is the dumbest peripheral to have ever been invented, and I'm literally using right now (at work). They say less is more but this unnecessarily forces you to use a keyboard, and at times I've had to unplug the keyboard just to find myself in bad situation needing to right click.
- timw4mail 7y ago
  The one button mouse came from the era of classic Mac OS, which had few contextual menus, and didn't really need the second button. Once OS X came around, the one button mouse made a lot less sense, though the transparent ones were even sort of cool.
- valine 7y ago
  The magic mouse can right click without a keyboard, you click with your finger on the top right corner of the mouse. The top of the mouse is a touch surface so it knows when your finger is on the left or right side.
- dmart 7y ago
  Pretty sure clicking on the right-side of the mouse has activated secondary click by default all the way back to the Mighty Mouse (2005), no? Even if not, it's one checkbox to enable it. You don't need a keyboard to right-click, that's absurd.
  - proc0 7y ago
    Not this one. It does have a pseudo touchpad on top to use certain gesture commands but sacrifices the second click. Maybe the decision was to prioritize the touchpad on top, but alas bad decision although not unusable.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - snowwrestler 7y ago
      Every Apple mouse sold for at least the last 5 years can do a right click. You may have to configure it.
timw4mail 7y ago
It is interesting how newer interfaces tend to be seen as worse. (Windows 9x/XP vs Windows 8/8.1/10 or Mac OS current version vs previous version) On the other hand, there is no reason that desktop websites should have navigation hidden under a menu. Now let me waste 10 minutes trying to find out how to show "My Computer" on the Desktop in Windows 10...
chaoticmass 7y ago
I have been saying for years (since OS 9) that Apple UIs are nowhere near as intuitive as their reputation would have you believe. The worst part is, because Apple does this bad stuff, everyone else thinks it must be a good idea and copies it.
city41 7y ago
It wasn't always like this. MacOS about circa system 7 through 9 were excellent UX-wise. OSX has been a slow, gradual degradation of UX over the past decade or so.
addicted44 7y ago
The author is conflating discoverability of features, with discoverability of different ways to activate certain features. So, for example, everyone knew how to view a PDF. It's just that the author disallowed the most discoverable method. They all knew how to right click, in the most discoverable way (trackpad), it's just that the author insisted they use the magic mouse instead, or know about ctrl+click which no one ever uses. That the magic mouse is a usability disaster is a whole other issue, but that's unrelated to OS X. I havent used OSX in a bit, but the default app thing should be something that you can do through settings (at least Windows 10 makes it very easily discoverable that way). Apple, however, has always done a terrible job with default apps (for example, requiring users to change their default Browser, Mail app, etc through Safari, Mail.app and so on). The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac. So are the invisible scroll bars. Mac OS X's scroll bars used to be easily visible (and more functional, because it immediately gave you an idea of the size of the view as well as allowed you to click anywhere on the bar and jump there directly). Fundamentally, OS X has well described, discoverable and recommended UI patterns that cover all these cases. iOS and iPad OS don't. It's unfortunate that Apple has decided the HIG isn't needed anymore, but that's more of an Apple thing, than an OS X capability thing.
- jborichevskiy 7y ago
  > The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac. > unnecessarily Why do you think it's unnecessary? I don't think I could function without it. Granted, I wish it had scheduling, partial whitelisting, notification collection, and whatnot but at least the basic functionality is there. Also, if you find yourself sharing your screen, just option+click the Notification center in the top right to enable Do Not Disturb mode.
  - untog 7y ago
    I think the OP is talking specifically about the way you activate Do Not Disturb.
- Geee 7y ago
Shank 7y ago
The common element in design trends is to minimize analogies that were previously made really obvious because users already know them by now. This has resulted in a constant iterative design that's led to the flattening and hiding of every major UI element. It's not because of malice or anything, it's just that for designers who already know and are familiar with the system, it's redundant to keep displaying things users already know. In general, it's fine for users that are already familiar with the system. If you've been using macOS since it was Mac OS X (or even earlier), and you used every version from then to now, then the system is probably totally obvious. The catch is that we stopped "teaching" users things from scratch. So there's a ton of users who feel like the current user interfaces are totally obvious, while users who are just now entering an ecosystem find themselves completely lost. I've advocated for this a lot privately, but I think it needs to be said more prominently: interfaces need to grow with the users on an individual level. Maybe you want to reach some kind of eden where no control is highlighted and the entire interface is flat -- so be it. Just make sure that you start users off with a very 3D interface with obvious affordances before you start changing things up. Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but it's basically the only way to teach a brand new user how to use a computer system from scratch. I help my mom and grandparents out all the time when it comes to technology. They aren't dumb. They just don't follow every design change, take every OS update, or buy new devices every year. They know how to close windows, resize windows, and deal with windows. But when the iPad ships things like three and four finger gesture systems that have no obvious way to discover them, of course they look clueless. Similarly, when a button doesn't look like a button (but it did in three design languages ago and has just slowly removed all of the button-like features), they don't know that it's a button. Again, it's not their fault: they just haven't followed every iteration of the design language to know why or how things have changed. The key UI element that Superhuman gets right that everyone talks about is its ridiculous obsession with teaching keyboard shortcuts. Every time you click a button instead of using a shortcut, the confirmation tells you "yes, that worked, but also here's the keyboard shortcut to do it faster next time." Maybe something like this would help? Whatever the case may be, users who don't know things make the industry look inscrutable and unfriendly. Heck, it makes people leave platforms because they think they're unfriendly, when they've actually just been optimizing away all of the affordances.
nihonde 7y ago
The Finder in particular has been neglected for so long. Many of these “features” are artifacts that are indicative of a long-standing need to rethink the Mac OS user’s relationship to the file system. The problem is that Apple’s instinct is to eliminate complexity, which is why iOS lacked any file system in user space until the Files app was added as a kind of begrudging concession.
gumby 7y ago
I've been a (generally) happy Mac user for more than 25 years, but I am still of the opinion that the command line is more discoverable. At least man -k will surface all sorts of commands whose own man pages may suggest other search keys. The mac's "Help" menu bar item is much less useful in this regard (of course it will surface menu commands and highlight them when you mouse over the response). And even then it is mostly only an interface to the menu bar options themselves -- vague questions like "how do I X", much less "click on a pixel in you image to Y" are pretty much unanswerable through this interface. And despite what I said about man -k, let's not get into the parlous state of Apple's man files.
StavrosK 7y ago
The hidden scrollbar trend is maddening to me, why hide such an important element? I just tried one of the latest Ubuntu Unity/Gnome/whatever it is versions (I normally use XUbuntu) and saw that the scrollbars are hidden there too, which is crazy. How is the user supposed to know whether they can scroll?
- thewebcount 7y ago
  For what it's worth you can turn them on permanently in the System Prefs under "General" > "Show Scroll Bars".
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    That's very useful, thanks!
- flobosg 7y ago
  In GTK3 apps, at least some time ago, dashed lines would show up at the borders as scrolling indicators.
  - jhasse 7y ago
    Ubuntu's theme disables this :(
rileytg 7y ago
> Apple’s mouse only has a single click. it has way more than just single click...
brianpgordon 7y ago
A couple more really odious offenders in MacOS- 1. Needing to hold the option key when right-clicking in order to even see an option for moving a copied item. I don't mind the use of copy->move instead of Windows's cut->paste but why does it have to be hidden? This is surely one of the basic operations you want to perform in a file manager! 2. Needing to right click and select "open" in order to run an unsigned app for the first time. This is a counter-intuitive and pointless ritual - there should be no difference between double-clicking and selecting "open" from the context menu. If Apple wants to ban unsigned apps they should just do it, instead of hiding a workaround behind a trivial trick that the unsophisticated users Apple is ostensibly trying to protect can easily discover by accident.
- zapzupnz 7y ago
  As for 1, I imagine it's because Apple doesn't want the destructive actions front-and-centre. Not only that, but macOS has always encouraged/preferred the drag-and-drop pattern for file management — it might be something with which you or others agree but that's the paradigm they're backing, for better or worse. Copying-and-moving might be a basic operation if it's something to which you're accustomed, but it's such second nature for me, and I'm sure others, to just open a new Finder window or drag to a Stack. I agree with 2. The way they do it now is far too heavy handed; give us a prompt to choose to run the app for the first time, possibly with an administrator password prompt. I haven't really had a problem with Apple introducing restrictions with Gatekeeper but that one is simply annoying.
bangonkeyboard 7y ago
This post requires that users ignore the most prominent and longstanding discoverability feature of the Mac: the omnipresent top menubar. 1. Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. This bit of bad UI was imported from iOS. Unlike iOS, it can still be turned off: Click the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars. 2. File menu -> Quick Look. 3. Every action in that context menu is available in the File menu. 3a. Holding the Option key works in the File menu as well, but this change can also be made from File menu -> Get Info -> Open with. 4. This actually bad UI was, again, taken from iOS. 5. Go menu -> Enclosing Folder. Nearly every example is solvable with single clicks in the always-visible, literally spelled-out menubar, as they have been for 30+ years. They are therefore eminently discoverable, contingent on a user giving a thought to trying in the first place to discover them. The one or two examples where this is not true are direct iOS tack-ons that do not respect the platform. What this post is doing is mendaciously pretending that power-user shortcuts, some more or less discoverable than others, are the only way to perform these operations which can actually be accomplished by reading and clicking. The attempt to equate the Mac's discoverability with iOS fails once that is pointed out, since in the latter those mystery-meat gestures truly are the only way to execute them.
- em-bee 7y ago
  and yet, the users tested didn't use the menu to solve the tasks but gave up, so the original point still stands.
  - bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    Maybe they gave up because the question was phrased as “do you know how to do this” and not “I’ll give you $100 if you can do this”
    - btschaegg 7y ago
      I'd say that is intentional, though. The second phrasing won't give you any good results if you're trying to determine the usability of a UI design. Normal users do not hunt for hidden options the moment they encounter a use case for them. In fact, most would probably assume the feature isn't there even if they realized they had a need for a somewhat generic functionality such as moving to ../ If you offer someone money for finding out about something they don't know about, you change their motivation, which is thus completely different from what they encounter in their day to day use of that software. And the latter is the thing you want to improve in the end.
bobblywobbles 7y ago
This is the reason why I prefer Windows, but of course I grew up in Windows and use it daily. It doesn't help all the icons for command, option and ctrl are all these hyroglyphs.
coleifer 7y ago
Apple fanbois? More like fapple manbois, amirite? Use Linux.
Exuma 7y ago
I knew all these pats self on back
derefr 7y ago
> and telling them that they could by hitting Cmd+up arrow ... was deemed the most hidden thing thus far. That's one of the oldest and most uniform/predictable ones, though—Cmd+up means "navigate out"; Cmd+down means "navigate in" (which translates to "open" for documents and "launch" for apps.) It perfectly lines up with movement within the (implicit) tree that backs the spatial-navigation metaphor. When Safari was introduced, we also gained Cmd+[ to universally mean "navigate Back" and Cmd+] to mean "navigate Forward." These tend to be recapitulated lately by left/right swipe gestures, but not all the time. You can't swipe in Preferences.app, but you can Cmd+[. (And you can Cmd+up, too!)
cyberferret 7y ago
Decades long user of Apple devices, and a long time developer, and I learned a few things from that article. Have designers lost sight of the fact that 99% of people use their eyes when working with an interface? You cannot simply hide the simplest visual cues and expect people to find out about them accidentally, or via a video or article like this. My biggest gripe at the moment is the photo sharing option in the latest iOS. The 'Copy' or 'Send To' options used to be immediately in front of you as buttons. Now, they are hidden below a 'swipe up' menu that resides off screen. There is not even the simplest hint that you can swipe up, and it took me literally weeks of using the new iOS update to discover that purely by accident. Why not have the visual clue by having the top bit of the first menu option just showing at the bottom of the screen? That at least gives me as the user looking at the screen the idea that "Hey, there's something that goes off screen here - maybe I can swipe up a little to see it better...Ooooh - there is a whole menu hidden down there!". UI/UX Designers - STOP designing screens that look cool on your Dribbble, UpLabs and Behance portfolios and start designing screens that give people hints as to how the interface is to be used. Please.
- mceachen 7y ago
  I'm with you, as far as wanting visual affordances for functionality, but I think it's a generational thing. Teenagers have no problem navigating Snapchat, and it allows for gross gestures like a swipe, which can be faster to apply than looking and aiming for an icon.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  In addition to having buttons halfway off the screen, the share sheet could at least have a scroll bar like every other scrolling view.
ctruelson 7y ago
I created this to help discover shortcuts: https://twitter.com/randomshortcuts https://twitter.com/randomshortcuts And https://www.randomshortcuts.com https://www.randomshortcuts.com
mmis1000 7y ago
As a user mostly use windows. I always find the ui discoverable of mac problematic. I really have no idea why do they like to hide most used things like move file, show hidden under keyboard shortcuts and don't have a option to force them permanently show up. As in windows, they are either already show up or exist in some obvious item like `setting` and you can toggle things here. You rarely need google to find out what's going on. But has in mac you need to press random keys here and there is no obvious visual indications that you can do so. I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Or they simply not?
- kccqzy 7y ago
  > I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Before Google existed, software came with manuals. You buy software in a fancy box, but within the box there's not just a CD/floppy disks, there's also a large tome of written material teaching you how to use it. You would sit down, read through it, and learn to use the software. It is more of a testament to humanity's decreasing attention span that users now demand UIs to be discoverable without reading anything. Take a look at someone's discovery of the original Macintosh user manual: http://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-the-original-macintosh-user-manual/ http://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-th...
newscracker 7y ago
If there’s one area where macOS has lagged behind Windows for decades, it’s in making all menu items accessible using the keyboard by default (not forcing the user to go to Settings and setup a shortcut, which is very nice). In Windows, pressing Alt and then the underlined character in a menu name and then a submenu name would be the easiest way to get to things without even knowing any other shortcuts. On the Mac, many menu items don’t have shortcuts attached to them. To get to the menu bar using the keyboard, you have to hit Cmd+F2 and then use arrow keys to navigate — it’s useful when you can’t use the mouse or trackpad, but it’s highly inefficient. I’ll list just one example of not having default keys for menu options. In Preview, you can adjust the size of an image from a menu option. But that specific menu option, among others, does not have any shortcut. If you need to access it via the keyboard, your choices are to use Cmd+F2 and then crawl around or go to Settings and setup a shortcut for it (playing around to avoid conflicts with any system wide shortcuts).
- eps 7y ago
  Windows doesn't assign accelerators to all menu items, a programmer who writes the program does. If you don't take care of this, explicitly, there'll be no accelerators. There's plenty of programs that are like that.
  - newscracker 7y ago
    Late reply. I know that developers assign the specific key for each option on Windows, but the fact is that if you take a bunch of commonly used Windows programs and compare them with a bunch of commonly used Mac programs, you'd find the Windows ones a lot easier to use with a keyboard. I have been using both Windows and macOS (and its earlier versions) everyday for a long time, and I see the keyboard accessibility as a comparative deficiency on macOS (though I like how easy it is to assign custom shortcuts from System Preferences).
  - innocenat 7y ago
    I remember back then accelerators setting were highlighted in all programming books I have read.
icehawk 7y ago
While here, I right clicked on a PNG file and asked how to make that file type always open on Photoshop instead of Preview. None knew you had to hold Option while using the “open in” option. Probably because there's a selection drop down and a big button in the Get Info window with a label that tells you it does this exact thing
nkkollaw 7y ago
macOS is bad in terms of discoverability, but iOS or whatever they call it nowadays is ridiculous. I have a brand-new iPhone I bought for testing websites, and I use a beat-up Motorola just because iOS is so frustrating to use. Apple needs some design lessons, Microsoft has been doing such a great job with Surface devices that if they could make Windows just a tiny bit better people I bet a huge percentage will switch.
anonsivalley652 7y ago
I've been using macOS for about 10 years after 20 on the nameless platform. 1. Get KeyCue or something like it that tells you (almost) every keyboard shortcut within any application by using the accessibility API. 2. Turn on that accessibility mode option where it makes it possible to cursor through multiple-choice modal dialogs. 3. What I find maddening is AppleScript. It's incredibly powerful except for three deficiencies a) an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs b) the lack of complete AppleScript documentation c) they fired the AppleScript guy. You could do a lot in it if you only knew the syntax and how to call things. AppleScript needs a minor UI overall to show what possible keywords, operators, nouns or verbs could be used during contextual code-completion. 4. macOS (and iOS/iPadOS) support most *NIX Ctrl- shortcuts within text fields. Ctrl-k to kill to EOL, Ctrl-a go to beginning, Ctrl-e go to EOL, etc. 5. Assign keyboard shortcuts to speed-up common actions (both system-wide and within particular apps) that don't have hotkeys by default, like Command-Shift-, to open Settings. 6. Get BlueToggle & AirToggle to bounce BT and WiFi. Bonus for iPad/iOS: use the triple-click accessibility feature set to only the Magnifier (with no zooming) with the darkening filter to get a darker display at night.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs Script Editor, press ⇧⌘O, then click on the app you care about.
  - hhas01 7y ago
    That’s static documentation, aka “AppleScript dictionaries”, which isn’t quite the same thing as true introspection. In combination with Script Debugger’s live object model browser it’s pretty powerful, but also all the more frustrating as you run into common limitations: missing or incompete details, ambiguous definitions, incorrect information, and so on. Unfortunately the original designers left Apple before the whole system was adequately specced and documented or thoroughly field-trialed, leaving both app developers and users to make blind guesses as to how things should work, and duct-tape over the shortcomings as best they can.
- 7y ago
wyqydsyq 7y ago
> None of this is meant to say macOS is garbage or anything like that. I think an OS as prolific as macOS having such shit UX kind of implies it is garbage though. The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. Basic native UI interfaces still completely lack keyboard controls. Window snapping is still non-existent. I understand Apple strive to be different, but lacking these basic features (among many others) makes macOS have an arguably inferior workflow to Windows or Linux/BSD DEs. Excluding these things are not unique and quirky subjective design choices Apple can continue get away with. They are baseline expectations for a workstation computing environment to meet, which macOS does not. The way I see it, macOS is increasingly falling behind in UX. Not only have Apple failed to make their own improvements and innovations; they've failed to keep pace with Microsoft and the Open Source community. Posted from my 2019 MacBook Pro
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. ⌥⌘P > The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Use keyboard navigation to move between controls > Window snapping is still non-existent. Not completely: you can do two windows side-by-side, and resizing windows now makes them snap to each other and edges.
  - wyqydsyq 7y ago
    > ⌥⌘P Those are breadcrumbs, not an address bar. Note the fact you cannot type or paste a path into it, as is a core feature in practically every file manager in every other OS. There is no apparent difference to breaking this convention, beyond impairing users' workflows. Finder also has the "Go to" dialogue, but again, it is a functionally inferior solution. There is absolutely no good reason for these design choices other than to "be different for the sake of it" at the expense of good UX
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      How is "Go to Folder" worse? Finder just splits the two actions up…
mirap 7y ago
A "research" with only 3 users? Meh.
beders 7y ago
Speaking of undiscoverable: "Tap all the things, slide all the things' is now the de-facto modus operandi for figuring out how to use mobile apps. It feels like we made a huge step backwards in UX and are leaving behind generations of users.
thdrdt 7y ago
I've been using Mac OS, Windows and Linux (multiple distros) for over 20 years. To me Mac OS always had the worst UI experience. I can understand why people like it: it is clean and looks good. But clean and good looks doesn't make it good. Windows has been good on average. On Linux it depends on the distro and the version of the distro a lot. Overall I think Ubuntu has the best UI experience at the moment.
why-oh-why 7y ago
Here's the thing: you can't have 1000 "discoverable" actions, there's no place for it. Correction: you do have 1000 discoverable actions, but you discover them in the menu bar. What you found out with this article is that users are bad at knowing things, because there are too many things to know. I know all of those actions and their keyboard shortcuts, but I still have to occasionally "google it." Either you have iOS 1.0 where everything is clear and easy to do — because there's very little to do — or macOS, where each app has dozens of features but can only surface some of them. This is non-news.

242 points by pcr910303 7y ago

I did not know holding option in a right click menu had so many useful features! Also, on command clicking the title bar to go a folder above: my memory is probably failing me but I seem to recall when this was announced there was an arrow or some such, or highlighting.

TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
In Finder there are different options depending on whether you hold option and then right click, or right click and then press option. Edit: Finder is... not great. But I don't want Apple to touch it, because they'll Photo-ize it and it will go from being not great to being terrible.
whalesalad 7y ago
Holding option and clicking on a lot of things will unlock advanced entries. For instance, hold option and click your WiFi button in the top menubar to see advanced WiFi stats like channel, speed, etc... same goes for Bluetooth device menu and others.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Nice! I have used MacOS for years and had no idea that this exists. Tooltips would be perfect use for this. Hover over the Wifi icon and the tooltip tells you that option will show you more.
rubyn00bie 7y ago
It works on almost any menu; not just right click context menu. XCode for example, is much more useful when you realize you learn that half of the menu options you really want are hidden by holding down the option key. The WiFi icon has an insane amount of information if you option click it for example... (most of the system ones do) Holding option in menus, settings, or while clicking the status bar is easily the most underused and under-documented feature of MacOS... (maybe after removing annoying shit with launchctrl). Edit: totally didn't see the two other posts with exactly the same tip, ha. Maybe not so underused -_-;
- ericlewis 7y ago
  I have seen it on the system bar, very useful there.
masswerk 7y ago
On command clickng the window title: this feature has been around since classic Mac OS (I believe, it had been introduced in one of the many iterations of System 7) – there was definitely no indicator or hint. But the functionality was about the same as the location drop-down at top center of the file dialogs and was anchored in about the same position. It may have been one of the first hidden features, apart from the easter egg in the Finder's about box.

cryo 7y ago

Good test and I think the results would also apply for most people dealing with Finder. I'd like to add that the right click context menu on any file or folder is huge, I can't imagine that from the 20 entries (on my machine) more than 4 are used by 95% of all users. So here is a poll: What are the entries you use commonly from the context menu and more interesting which of them haven't you used once?

armagon 7y ago
I frequently use a couple of services on the menu to diff two files (but most people don't have the diffing tool installed). "Open", "Open With", I use frequently. "Compress", "Rename" and "Get Info" come in handy now and then. I've never used (before now, to see what it did) "Make Alias", "Share", or "Use Groups". Not sure I've ever used "Duplicate".

transreal 7y ago

Good post - these features are quite undiscoverable, and I only figured them out because I did them accidentally one day or someone showed me. Someone at Apple made the determination that "looking simpler" was more important that UX discoverability, and so hid some features under Ctrl/Command clicks. A worse offender is "Command+Shift+." for showing hidden files - they don't even have a menu item anywhere for it, it's either you know that hidden files is a thing or you don't, and there's no way to discover it by clicking around and paying attention. While I still prefer macOS to Windows, I agree that Apple could do a bit more to make these hidden features more exposable. E.g. why not let a click on the folder name show you the folder path, why require a "Command"?

Ididntdothis 7y ago
That's one thing that baffles me about MacOS. There is a lot of powerful stuff hidden behind keyboard shortcuts but there is almost no way to find them. It seems a colossal waste of energy to first implement them but then making it very hard to find them. On iPadOS it's very similar. Sometimes I get two apps on the screen by accident but I have no idea how I did it and there is no way to find out how to do it if you don't do an online search. Good old drop down menus were actually good for something.
- madeofpalk 7y ago
  Is that a macOS thing, or just a conceptual problem with keyboard shortcuts? IMHO macOS does a pretty decent job of discoverability for shortcuts as they’ll be listed there in the menu. edit: originally I doubted whether Windows does this or not. It does! Somehow I missed this despite using Windows every day...
  - noisem4ker 7y ago
    Windows programs absolutely do show shortcut keys in their menus. http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html http://homepage.eircom.net/~pcengineers/kbguide.html This is in addition to access keys (also explained in the document above), underlined letters you can type to instantly navigate the menus and select even the items for which no shortcut is defined.

ebg13 7y ago

Years ago Macs used to all come with a cheatsheet of keyboard shortcuts and other hints. Before that there was a guide program with every Mac showing how to interact with the OS. Now you get nothing, nada, bubkes.

applecrazy 7y ago
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac Something similar to this actually loads up in Safari when you log into your Mac for the first time.

jvagner 7y ago

That's how you turn on DND... Frustratingly, if you "x" all the notifications, there's still no hint that you can scroll to see night shift & DND toggles. I still have to think really hard every time I want to move my cursor to the beginning or end of an edit line on OS X.

tobr 7y ago
You can also option+click the notification center icon in the menu bar.
- jvagner 7y ago
  Take my money. All of it.
- avip 7y ago
  That's it. I give up programming and going back to Barista.
samatman 7y ago
Really? Cmd left and right are built into my muscle memory at this point. I'm pretty good with vim but not a day goes by that I don't try this by accident and end up in the next terminal over...
cannam 7y ago
> That's how you turn on DND... For anyone else who wondered what DND stood for: it's "Do Not Disturb". Now that I know that, I see there is a subthread about it elsewhere in this HN page - but I couldn't find an expansion when searching either this HN thread or the linked article for the string "DND". Had to go and follow the instructions on a Mac, to find out what it was that lay hidden in the Notifications window.

mehrdadn 7y ago

A few days ago I discovered I could rotate PDF pages in Chrome's PDF viewer with Ctrl+[]... by pressing it by accident. How the heck anyone was supposed to know that, I have no clue.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I once rotated the screen on my Dell laptop by accident and couldn't figured out how to get it back to normal. Took almost a day.
int_19h 7y ago
By right-clicking the document, and seeing "Rotate clockwise" and "Rotate counterclockwise" in the context menu, along with their corresponding shortcuts? That's actually a good example of a traditional UI that is designed around a few basic patterns (right click -> context menu, here) that enable discoverability.

gburdell3 7y ago

I love using MacOS now that I'm used to it, but it really is a disaster from a basic UX point of view. Even just installing applications on MacOS is wacky, and it makes me wonder how Macs got their reputation of being easier to use than Windows computers.

robocat 7y ago
Off-topic, but is it really common to confuse the difference between UX and UI? (I think "love using MacOS" implies good UX, and doesn't imply a UX "disaster": maybe I'm wrong or I'm misreading the comment?). Professionally, I can't see how I could ever use "UX" without being confusing, either because I'm using the concept poorly or because I'd expect my audience to misunderstand my meaning. Disclaimer: I've spent years working on UI (even developing controls, caring deeply about usability) but I've never spent much time specifically working on UX.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  i've taken three university courses on user interface design and human-computer interactions. i still don't know the difference between UI and UX except in a vague sense.
  - AlanYx 7y ago
    You're not alone. Authors in the field aren't always consistent either, to the point where people have written academic papers trying to sort through the various definitions of what "UX" is, trying to give it some kind of clear scope, e.g. [1]. [1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221518375_Understanding_scoping_and_defining_user_experience_A_survey_approach https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221518375_Understan...
  - Someone 7y ago
    A good UI makes you get things done easily. A good UX makes you feel good doing things, even though you may not get anything done. Confusion arises because, typically, not getting things done makes you feel bad.

erling 7y ago

IMO Apple has really lost its way in terms of genuinely good UX. The UI might be “pretty” but in terms of actual usability it’s gotten just frustrating at this point. The amount of complexity they require from their users now, memorizing swipe gestures, complex keyboard shortcuts, and strange incarnations is just sad. Good design is simple!

snowwrestler 7y ago
None of that is required! In fact this article begins with people who are happily using MacOS despite not knowing all the features. Truly simple design would not have these features at all; that’s where Mac started. The mouse had one button, period. There was no contextual click option at all. And MacOS can still be used productively that way today. Adding power features without disturbing the original usability is strictly positive IMO. It’s incredibly easy to pick a power feature and demonstrate that some users don’t know it. The more capable a system is, the more likely this becomes. Might as well write an article demonstrating that some users don’t know how to use Terminal, so obviously Mac must have slipped in usability since the original Mac did not have a CLI.
- wackget 7y ago
  Having visible scrollbars is not a power feature. Crippling a system because you don't want to ruin your "minimalist" aesthetic is always a bad choice.
Tehdasi 7y ago
These things have been in Apple ever since the original Macintosh. In that case it was 'one mouse button, so simple'. Except to make the system usable as other systems with multiple button mice, they added a whole load of keyboard shortcuts mimiced how the multibutton mice worked, which ended up being far more complicated than just adding another button to the mouse.
- hhas01 7y ago
  Citation for that? I’m fairly sure they got rid of all those other buttons because for the majority of customers they created more confusion than power back then. Also, speaking as a power user who’s also a southpaw, I’ve got more than a few choice words for many of the multibutton mice I’ve had to use over the years. Apple’s late ADB mice were lovely in the hand and completely unprejudiced.

LeanderK 7y ago

I don't get why there's not continuous validation from apple for UX. Can't they just pay random users to do some tasks and continuously monitor whether they are able to do it? Something like: how satisfied are you with x,y,z and then let them try to do task 1, task 2, task 3. Just track these metrics and try to improve the UI according to this. It seems like the designers just live in a bubble without feedback from the users, this seems especially crucial during and after a redesign. Maybe a small popup in apples own apps, like music. Something like: Want to use apple music for free for one month? Just answer these short questions and complete a few tasks! These things don't need to take longer than 10 minutes. Even a small sample size could provide meaningful and statistically significant results.

tobr 7y ago

As I’m not much of an iPad user, I’m not sure how well I’ve understood the recent onslaught of criticism it has seen, but I thought it was more about gestures that are hard to execute even if you know them, and UI modes that you accidentally can get yourself into with no clear way to exit? Most of these examples seem like things that are nice to be able to do if you know about them, easy to execute, but not much of a problem if you are oblivious to them?

Wowfunhappy 7y ago

A good UI can only ever have a limited number of discoverable actions. You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons, much less remember what they mean. So you have to pick which actions are most important, and make those easy to discover. QuickLook is a wholly essential feature. So is navigating up a level—it's very useful in some instances, but the back button does the same thing 90% of the time. For the rest, what matters most is that the actions are never activated accidentally†. This last point is, IMO, where iPadOS fails the most. * However: it is worth noting how far the Mac has fallen in the past decade. Snow Leopard had persistent scrollbars, that were big and blue so you couldn't miss them. Finder's toolbar had a button for activating QuickLook. And of course, the notification center didn't exist yet. There's a pattern behind all these changes. Scrollbars were modified to match iOS. The QuickLook icon was removed to make room for a share button that mimics iOS. The design of notification center was basically ripped from iOS wholesale. So yes, I agree that iOS has UI problems. —————————— † Unless the user can instantly parse how they accidentally triggered the action. If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic. ‡ It's still there, but disabled by default. So in terms of discoverability, it might as well not exist.

pjc50 7y ago
> You can try to make a button for everything, but no one is going to try all the buttons There's a reason people pay lots of money for Bloomberg terminals, with their zillion labeled physical keys. > If you can turn the accident into a learning experience, that's fantastic. On the other hand, if there's no other way for people to discover them than accident ..
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  > There's a reason people pay lots of money for Bloomberg terminals, with their zillion labeled physical keys. And a reason that type of design is only used in specialized, targeted scenarios. They have their place for sure, but it's pretty narrow. > On the other hand, if there's no other way for people to discover them than accident .. If it's a nonessential feature, I don't think that's a problem. You're allowing people to learn the system at a gradual pace. The best interfaces are ones which are accessible to newcomers, but slowly train you to become a power user just via incidental use. OS X used to be very, very good at this, and still does an above average job in many respects.

robenkleene 7y ago

The difference between macOS and iOS isn't about discoverability (although, in one important area macOS far more discoverable that iOS: multi-tasking). The problem with iPadOS is that since all the expert controls are hidden, and there's no such thing as shortcuts or right-clicking on iPadOS, it means doing anything useful with iPadOS requires using many slow gestures in succession. macOS, with a combination of Bash, AppleScripts, and system-wide third-party utilities like Keyboard Maestro and LaunchBar, provides extraordinarily efficient ways to do powerful things, whereas doing anything on iPadOS is like being stuck in quicksand. Just the minutia of navigating the OS with only Apple's provided gestures is so slow and clumsy that I wouldn't bother to do anything complicated with it. It just takes so much effort, it's exhausting. So neither OS is great at discoverability, but only one OS can be used efficiently by a proficient user. I'll say it again and again: The measure of a platform is not how easy it is to use for it's weakest users, it's what it's more proficient users are able to accomplish with it. Until Apple takes proficient users seriously, iPadOS will be nothing but a side dish, because no one will use it to make anything that anyone else would ever want to emulate. [0]: https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ [1]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html

robenkleene 7y ago
I'll add the best thing Apple could do to fix iPadOS is make the developers working on it bootstrap[0] it. E.g., by running some version of Xcode on it (or CLI tools until they have Xcode working). Those developer would then fix it right up. I contend that iPadOS is so sluggish to use because it's a compile target from a real machine that developers respect and work on, not a machine that those developers take seriously itself. That Apple is pushing a platform so hard that their own developers would never use for their work is everything you need to know about using an iPad for productivity. Sure, there are other tasks you can use a computer for besides programming, but sorry, programming is the task for computers, everything else stems from it. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)
- zer00eyz 7y ago

preferenca 7y ago

The party line at Apple is that right click (and everything in there) is for power users only, and that you should be able to do everything a user reasonably needs with only one button. I think this is a reasonable approach, but it seems that it's breaking peoples' ability to transition from user to power user. The other Finder issues, however... well, it's become clear that Finder has become simpler and simpler in an attempt to make the computers more accessible. Did you know: you can turn scrolbars on by default? A lot of common macos/finder complaints can be addressed by toggling settings, but it'd be nice if there was a single "pro mode" button, or something.

saagarjha 7y ago
As a “pro”, I’d like scrollbars to be off by default, thank you very much.
robertoandred 7y ago
Pretty presumptive to assume all "pros" would want scrollbars turned on and all non-"props" would want them turned off. UIs are complex and can't serve the needs of every kind of user by default. That's why there are options.

pedrokost 7y ago

I have been observing something similar recently, but related to other technologies. People claiming they are good at Excel, but can't do a vlookup or a pivot table. People using 5% of the power of an IDE. People not realizing that if they are able to use a web-based tool at work, they could (probably) also access it remotely. And these are just the things I have noticed in the past week. We utilize just a tiny percentage of options that are available to us, barely enough to get the basics of out tasks done. But we are completely oblivious that there are probably better/hidden/power tools available in the software we are already using that could help us achieve our tasks much more efficiently. Interestingly, most people probably don't care about it, or are so oblivious of their lack of knowledge that they don't even search for better ways to do things. It's hard to blame thought. Improving this state requires a mentality of continuous active learning, where you don't just wait for someone to show you how to do your task better, but to constantly expand your knowledge into areas you don't even think you need to improve. However, most of us usually have "better things to do" than reading software manuals.

Smoosh 7y ago
I think part of this was that in the past, computers and software were new and novel. People had no comparative experience, so training had to be provided to fully explain what you could do & how you could do it. Compare to today where most people "learn" by immersion - you have to use Google Docs or Excel for your school work, so you adsorb just enough to get your work done without really understanding the fundamentals or the more complex or non-obvious features, since you weren't taught systematically or comprehensively. Then you "know" Excel, or Word well enough to get by - but don't know that you are barely scratching the surface of it's capabilities, or don't realize that being more competent with the tool will make you more capable and productive. And thus the motivation/opportunity isn't there to invest that time and effort.
hhas01 7y ago
The obvious observation about Excel: spreadsheets are a highly specialized expert tool for highly specialized expert users (accountants). Most Excel users aren’t; and most don’t even use it for its designed purpose, i.e. user-programmable parallel calculations, but rather for ad-hoc ersatz databases. Of course, said users are rarely any better at designing and using databases than they are at bookkeeping.

jml7c5 7y ago

It's a shame there's no standard contextual key one can hold that overlays all the keyboard shortcuts, swipes, clicks, scrolls, etc that are available in the currently displayed UI. Ideally, every window that has hidden UI stuff would have a little indicator in the corner that means "hey, there's something weird you can do here, hold down the 'explain-o-tron 3000 key' to get a hint". While one can argue that UIs should be immediately understandable, it doesn't seem possible to pull off such a feat in many cases. Keyboard shortcuts are particularly problematic, as an always-visible list would take up too much space in most cases.

dEnigma 7y ago
What I like about GNOME apps is that they usually have a "Keyboard Shortcuts" entry in their hamburger menu, which shows you all, or at least the most important, shortcuts you can use in the app. On the other hand it took me a bit to first find this option because it is hidden in the aforementioned hamburger menu.
saagarjha 7y ago
iPadOS has this to some extent: holding down command will show all the active keyboard shortcuts.
- ttepasse 7y ago
  MacOS had it years before the iPad in the form of a great 3rd party application: https://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/ https://mediaatelier.com/CheatSheet/
  - darkFunction 7y ago
    Oh my god thank you
pjc50 7y ago
Windows used to be very systematic about putting an underscore on letters that could be used with alt accelerator key; but this seems to have been phased out. I think the only thing I've seen with a "hold key for instructions on everything" was strategy game Rise of Nations.

avip 7y ago

He didn't make it to the final question: how would you re-find an open window of some app and bring it to front as active window?

Smoosh 7y ago
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204100 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204100

_bxg1 7y ago

Some of these are esoteric keyboard shortcuts for things that are possible to do in a less-undiscoverable way. Others, like right-clicking on the trackpad and scrolling without a visible scroll bar very quickly become second-nature when you start using a Mac, because it's impossible to navigate otherwise. Only the "Open With" case is really valid, because even the non-keyboard way of doing it (again, not mentioned in the article) is really fairly esoteric: [right-click] > "Get Info" > [select application for this file] > "Change All..." to apply to all files with this extension.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

proc0 7y ago

The single click mouse is the dumbest peripheral to have ever been invented, and I'm literally using right now (at work). They say less is more but this unnecessarily forces you to use a keyboard, and at times I've had to unplug the keyboard just to find myself in bad situation needing to right click.

timw4mail 7y ago
The one button mouse came from the era of classic Mac OS, which had few contextual menus, and didn't really need the second button. Once OS X came around, the one button mouse made a lot less sense, though the transparent ones were even sort of cool.
valine 7y ago
The magic mouse can right click without a keyboard, you click with your finger on the top right corner of the mouse. The top of the mouse is a touch surface so it knows when your finger is on the left or right side.
dmart 7y ago
Pretty sure clicking on the right-side of the mouse has activated secondary click by default all the way back to the Mighty Mouse (2005), no? Even if not, it's one checkbox to enable it. You don't need a keyboard to right-click, that's absurd.
- proc0 7y ago
  Not this one. It does have a pseudo touchpad on top to use certain gesture commands but sacrifices the second click. Maybe the decision was to prioritize the touchpad on top, but alas bad decision although not unusable.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - snowwrestler 7y ago
    Every Apple mouse sold for at least the last 5 years can do a right click. You may have to configure it.

timw4mail 7y ago

It is interesting how newer interfaces tend to be seen as worse. (Windows 9x/XP vs Windows 8/8.1/10 or Mac OS current version vs previous version) On the other hand, there is no reason that desktop websites should have navigation hidden under a menu. Now let me waste 10 minutes trying to find out how to show "My Computer" on the Desktop in Windows 10...

chaoticmass 7y ago

I have been saying for years (since OS 9) that Apple UIs are nowhere near as intuitive as their reputation would have you believe. The worst part is, because Apple does this bad stuff, everyone else thinks it must be a good idea and copies it.

city41 7y ago

It wasn't always like this. MacOS about circa system 7 through 9 were excellent UX-wise. OSX has been a slow, gradual degradation of UX over the past decade or so.

addicted44 7y ago

The author is conflating discoverability of features, with discoverability of different ways to activate certain features. So, for example, everyone knew how to view a PDF. It's just that the author disallowed the most discoverable method. They all knew how to right click, in the most discoverable way (trackpad), it's just that the author insisted they use the magic mouse instead, or know about ctrl+click which no one ever uses. That the magic mouse is a usability disaster is a whole other issue, but that's unrelated to OS X. I havent used OSX in a bit, but the default app thing should be something that you can do through settings (at least Windows 10 makes it very easily discoverable that way). Apple, however, has always done a terrible job with default apps (for example, requiring users to change their default Browser, Mail app, etc through Safari, Mail.app and so on). The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac. So are the invisible scroll bars. Mac OS X's scroll bars used to be easily visible (and more functional, because it immediately gave you an idea of the size of the view as well as allowed you to click anywhere on the bar and jump there directly). Fundamentally, OS X has well described, discoverable and recommended UI patterns that cover all these cases. iOS and iPad OS don't. It's unfortunate that Apple has decided the HIG isn't needed anymore, but that's more of an Apple thing, than an OS X capability thing.

jborichevskiy 7y ago
> The Do Not disturb thing is ironically an iOS UI pattern that Apple has completely unnecessarily brought to the mac. > unnecessarily Why do you think it's unnecessary? I don't think I could function without it. Granted, I wish it had scheduling, partial whitelisting, notification collection, and whatnot but at least the basic functionality is there. Also, if you find yourself sharing your screen, just option+click the Notification center in the top right to enable Do Not Disturb mode.
- untog 7y ago
  I think the OP is talking specifically about the way you activate Do Not Disturb.
Geee 7y ago

Shank 7y ago

The common element in design trends is to minimize analogies that were previously made really obvious because users already know them by now. This has resulted in a constant iterative design that's led to the flattening and hiding of every major UI element. It's not because of malice or anything, it's just that for designers who already know and are familiar with the system, it's redundant to keep displaying things users already know. In general, it's fine for users that are already familiar with the system. If you've been using macOS since it was Mac OS X (or even earlier), and you used every version from then to now, then the system is probably totally obvious. The catch is that we stopped "teaching" users things from scratch. So there's a ton of users who feel like the current user interfaces are totally obvious, while users who are just now entering an ecosystem find themselves completely lost. I've advocated for this a lot privately, but I think it needs to be said more prominently: interfaces need to grow with the users on an individual level. Maybe you want to reach some kind of eden where no control is highlighted and the entire interface is flat -- so be it. Just make sure that you start users off with a very 3D interface with obvious affordances before you start changing things up. Maybe this sounds ridiculous, but it's basically the only way to teach a brand new user how to use a computer system from scratch. I help my mom and grandparents out all the time when it comes to technology. They aren't dumb. They just don't follow every design change, take every OS update, or buy new devices every year. They know how to close windows, resize windows, and deal with windows. But when the iPad ships things like three and four finger gesture systems that have no obvious way to discover them, of course they look clueless. Similarly, when a button doesn't look like a button (but it did in three design languages ago and has just slowly removed all of the button-like features), they don't know that it's a button. Again, it's not their fault: they just haven't followed every iteration of the design language to know why or how things have changed. The key UI element that Superhuman gets right that everyone talks about is its ridiculous obsession with teaching keyboard shortcuts. Every time you click a button instead of using a shortcut, the confirmation tells you "yes, that worked, but also here's the keyboard shortcut to do it faster next time." Maybe something like this would help? Whatever the case may be, users who don't know things make the industry look inscrutable and unfriendly. Heck, it makes people leave platforms because they think they're unfriendly, when they've actually just been optimizing away all of the affordances.

nihonde 7y ago

The Finder in particular has been neglected for so long. Many of these “features” are artifacts that are indicative of a long-standing need to rethink the Mac OS user’s relationship to the file system. The problem is that Apple’s instinct is to eliminate complexity, which is why iOS lacked any file system in user space until the Files app was added as a kind of begrudging concession.

gumby 7y ago

I've been a (generally) happy Mac user for more than 25 years, but I am still of the opinion that the command line is more discoverable. At least man -k will surface all sorts of commands whose own man pages may suggest other search keys. The mac's "Help" menu bar item is much less useful in this regard (of course it will surface menu commands and highlight them when you mouse over the response). And even then it is mostly only an interface to the menu bar options themselves -- vague questions like "how do I X", much less "click on a pixel in you image to Y" are pretty much unanswerable through this interface. And despite what I said about man -k, let's not get into the parlous state of Apple's man files.

StavrosK 7y ago

The hidden scrollbar trend is maddening to me, why hide such an important element? I just tried one of the latest Ubuntu Unity/Gnome/whatever it is versions (I normally use XUbuntu) and saw that the scrollbars are hidden there too, which is crazy. How is the user supposed to know whether they can scroll?

thewebcount 7y ago
For what it's worth you can turn them on permanently in the System Prefs under "General" > "Show Scroll Bars".
- StavrosK 7y ago
  That's very useful, thanks!
flobosg 7y ago
In GTK3 apps, at least some time ago, dashed lines would show up at the borders as scrolling indicators.
- jhasse 7y ago
  Ubuntu's theme disables this :(

rileytg 7y ago

> Apple’s mouse only has a single click. it has way more than just single click...

brianpgordon 7y ago

A couple more really odious offenders in MacOS- 1. Needing to hold the option key when right-clicking in order to even see an option for moving a copied item. I don't mind the use of copy->move instead of Windows's cut->paste but why does it have to be hidden? This is surely one of the basic operations you want to perform in a file manager! 2. Needing to right click and select "open" in order to run an unsigned app for the first time. This is a counter-intuitive and pointless ritual - there should be no difference between double-clicking and selecting "open" from the context menu. If Apple wants to ban unsigned apps they should just do it, instead of hiding a workaround behind a trivial trick that the unsophisticated users Apple is ostensibly trying to protect can easily discover by accident.

zapzupnz 7y ago
As for 1, I imagine it's because Apple doesn't want the destructive actions front-and-centre. Not only that, but macOS has always encouraged/preferred the drag-and-drop pattern for file management — it might be something with which you or others agree but that's the paradigm they're backing, for better or worse. Copying-and-moving might be a basic operation if it's something to which you're accustomed, but it's such second nature for me, and I'm sure others, to just open a new Finder window or drag to a Stack. I agree with 2. The way they do it now is far too heavy handed; give us a prompt to choose to run the app for the first time, possibly with an administrator password prompt. I haven't really had a problem with Apple introducing restrictions with Gatekeeper but that one is simply annoying.

bangonkeyboard 7y ago

This post requires that users ignore the most prominent and longstanding discoverability feature of the Mac: the omnipresent top menubar. 1. Scrollable windows flash their scrollbars when focused. This bit of bad UI was imported from iOS. Unlike iOS, it can still be turned off: Click the Apple menu -> System Preferences -> General -> Show scroll bars. 2. File menu -> Quick Look. 3. Every action in that context menu is available in the File menu. 3a. Holding the Option key works in the File menu as well, but this change can also be made from File menu -> Get Info -> Open with. 4. This actually bad UI was, again, taken from iOS. 5. Go menu -> Enclosing Folder. Nearly every example is solvable with single clicks in the always-visible, literally spelled-out menubar, as they have been for 30+ years. They are therefore eminently discoverable, contingent on a user giving a thought to trying in the first place to discover them. The one or two examples where this is not true are direct iOS tack-ons that do not respect the platform. What this post is doing is mendaciously pretending that power-user shortcuts, some more or less discoverable than others, are the only way to perform these operations which can actually be accomplished by reading and clicking. The attempt to equate the Mac's discoverability with iOS fails once that is pointed out, since in the latter those mystery-meat gestures truly are the only way to execute them.

em-bee 7y ago
and yet, the users tested didn't use the menu to solve the tasks but gave up, so the original point still stands.
- bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
  Maybe they gave up because the question was phrased as “do you know how to do this” and not “I’ll give you $100 if you can do this”
  - btschaegg 7y ago
    I'd say that is intentional, though. The second phrasing won't give you any good results if you're trying to determine the usability of a UI design. Normal users do not hunt for hidden options the moment they encounter a use case for them. In fact, most would probably assume the feature isn't there even if they realized they had a need for a somewhat generic functionality such as moving to ../ If you offer someone money for finding out about something they don't know about, you change their motivation, which is thus completely different from what they encounter in their day to day use of that software. And the latter is the thing you want to improve in the end.

bobblywobbles 7y ago

This is the reason why I prefer Windows, but of course I grew up in Windows and use it daily. It doesn't help all the icons for command, option and ctrl are all these hyroglyphs.

coleifer 7y ago

Apple fanbois? More like fapple manbois, amirite? Use Linux.

Exuma 7y ago

I knew all these pats self on back

derefr 7y ago

> and telling them that they could by hitting Cmd+up arrow ... was deemed the most hidden thing thus far. That's one of the oldest and most uniform/predictable ones, though—Cmd+up means "navigate out"; Cmd+down means "navigate in" (which translates to "open" for documents and "launch" for apps.) It perfectly lines up with movement within the (implicit) tree that backs the spatial-navigation metaphor. When Safari was introduced, we also gained Cmd+[ to universally mean "navigate Back" and Cmd+] to mean "navigate Forward." These tend to be recapitulated lately by left/right swipe gestures, but not all the time. You can't swipe in Preferences.app, but you can Cmd+[. (And you can Cmd+up, too!)

cyberferret 7y ago

Decades long user of Apple devices, and a long time developer, and I learned a few things from that article. Have designers lost sight of the fact that 99% of people use their eyes when working with an interface? You cannot simply hide the simplest visual cues and expect people to find out about them accidentally, or via a video or article like this. My biggest gripe at the moment is the photo sharing option in the latest iOS. The 'Copy' or 'Send To' options used to be immediately in front of you as buttons. Now, they are hidden below a 'swipe up' menu that resides off screen. There is not even the simplest hint that you can swipe up, and it took me literally weeks of using the new iOS update to discover that purely by accident. Why not have the visual clue by having the top bit of the first menu option just showing at the bottom of the screen? That at least gives me as the user looking at the screen the idea that "Hey, there's something that goes off screen here - maybe I can swipe up a little to see it better...Ooooh - there is a whole menu hidden down there!". UI/UX Designers - STOP designing screens that look cool on your Dribbble, UpLabs and Behance portfolios and start designing screens that give people hints as to how the interface is to be used. Please.

mceachen 7y ago
I'm with you, as far as wanting visual affordances for functionality, but I think it's a generational thing. Teenagers have no problem navigating Snapchat, and it allows for gross gestures like a swipe, which can be faster to apply than looking and aiming for an icon.
bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
In addition to having buttons halfway off the screen, the share sheet could at least have a scroll bar like every other scrolling view.

ctruelson 7y ago

I created this to help discover shortcuts: https://twitter.com/randomshortcuts https://twitter.com/randomshortcuts And https://www.randomshortcuts.com https://www.randomshortcuts.com

mmis1000 7y ago

As a user mostly use windows. I always find the ui discoverable of mac problematic. I really have no idea why do they like to hide most used things like move file, show hidden under keyboard shortcuts and don't have a option to force them permanently show up. As in windows, they are either already show up or exist in some obvious item like `setting` and you can toggle things here. You rarely need google to find out what's going on. But has in mac you need to press random keys here and there is no obvious visual indications that you can do so. I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Or they simply not?

kccqzy 7y ago
> I really curious about how mac user before google exists find them out. Before Google existed, software came with manuals. You buy software in a fancy box, but within the box there's not just a CD/floppy disks, there's also a large tome of written material teaching you how to use it. You would sit down, read through it, and learn to use the software. It is more of a testament to humanity's decreasing attention span that users now demand UIs to be discoverable without reading anything. Take a look at someone's discovery of the original Macintosh user manual: http://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-the-original-macintosh-user-manual/ http://www.peterme.com/2007/08/27/thoughts-on-and-pics-of-th...

newscracker 7y ago

If there’s one area where macOS has lagged behind Windows for decades, it’s in making all menu items accessible using the keyboard by default (not forcing the user to go to Settings and setup a shortcut, which is very nice). In Windows, pressing Alt and then the underlined character in a menu name and then a submenu name would be the easiest way to get to things without even knowing any other shortcuts. On the Mac, many menu items don’t have shortcuts attached to them. To get to the menu bar using the keyboard, you have to hit Cmd+F2 and then use arrow keys to navigate — it’s useful when you can’t use the mouse or trackpad, but it’s highly inefficient. I’ll list just one example of not having default keys for menu options. In Preview, you can adjust the size of an image from a menu option. But that specific menu option, among others, does not have any shortcut. If you need to access it via the keyboard, your choices are to use Cmd+F2 and then crawl around or go to Settings and setup a shortcut for it (playing around to avoid conflicts with any system wide shortcuts).

eps 7y ago
Windows doesn't assign accelerators to all menu items, a programmer who writes the program does. If you don't take care of this, explicitly, there'll be no accelerators. There's plenty of programs that are like that.
- newscracker 7y ago
  Late reply. I know that developers assign the specific key for each option on Windows, but the fact is that if you take a bunch of commonly used Windows programs and compare them with a bunch of commonly used Mac programs, you'd find the Windows ones a lot easier to use with a keyboard. I have been using both Windows and macOS (and its earlier versions) everyday for a long time, and I see the keyboard accessibility as a comparative deficiency on macOS (though I like how easy it is to assign custom shortcuts from System Preferences).
- innocenat 7y ago
  I remember back then accelerators setting were highlighted in all programming books I have read.

icehawk 7y ago

While here, I right clicked on a PNG file and asked how to make that file type always open on Photoshop instead of Preview. None knew you had to hold Option while using the “open in” option. Probably because there's a selection drop down and a big button in the Get Info window with a label that tells you it does this exact thing

nkkollaw 7y ago

macOS is bad in terms of discoverability, but iOS or whatever they call it nowadays is ridiculous. I have a brand-new iPhone I bought for testing websites, and I use a beat-up Motorola just because iOS is so frustrating to use. Apple needs some design lessons, Microsoft has been doing such a great job with Surface devices that if they could make Windows just a tiny bit better people I bet a huge percentage will switch.

anonsivalley652 7y ago

I've been using macOS for about 10 years after 20 on the nameless platform. 1. Get KeyCue or something like it that tells you (almost) every keyboard shortcut within any application by using the accessibility API. 2. Turn on that accessibility mode option where it makes it possible to cursor through multiple-choice modal dialogs. 3. What I find maddening is AppleScript. It's incredibly powerful except for three deficiencies a) an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs b) the lack of complete AppleScript documentation c) they fired the AppleScript guy. You could do a lot in it if you only knew the syntax and how to call things. AppleScript needs a minor UI overall to show what possible keywords, operators, nouns or verbs could be used during contextual code-completion. 4. macOS (and iOS/iPadOS) support most *NIX Ctrl- shortcuts within text fields. Ctrl-k to kill to EOL, Ctrl-a go to beginning, Ctrl-e go to EOL, etc. 5. Assign keyboard shortcuts to speed-up common actions (both system-wide and within particular apps) that don't have hotkeys by default, like Command-Shift-, to open Settings. 6. Get BlueToggle & AirToggle to bounce BT and WiFi. Bonus for iPad/iOS: use the triple-click accessibility feature set to only the Magnifier (with no zooming) with the darkening filter to get a darker display at night.

saagarjha 7y ago
> an inability to introspect applications to find their nouns and verbs Script Editor, press ⇧⌘O, then click on the app you care about.
- hhas01 7y ago
  That’s static documentation, aka “AppleScript dictionaries”, which isn’t quite the same thing as true introspection. In combination with Script Debugger’s live object model browser it’s pretty powerful, but also all the more frustrating as you run into common limitations: missing or incompete details, ambiguous definitions, incorrect information, and so on. Unfortunately the original designers left Apple before the whole system was adequately specced and documented or thoroughly field-trialed, leaving both app developers and users to make blind guesses as to how things should work, and duct-tape over the shortcomings as best they can.
7y ago

wyqydsyq 7y ago

> None of this is meant to say macOS is garbage or anything like that. I think an OS as prolific as macOS having such shit UX kind of implies it is garbage though. The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. Basic native UI interfaces still completely lack keyboard controls. Window snapping is still non-existent. I understand Apple strive to be different, but lacking these basic features (among many others) makes macOS have an arguably inferior workflow to Windows or Linux/BSD DEs. Excluding these things are not unique and quirky subjective design choices Apple can continue get away with. They are baseline expectations for a workstation computing environment to meet, which macOS does not. The way I see it, macOS is increasingly falling behind in UX. Not only have Apple failed to make their own improvements and innovations; they've failed to keep pace with Microsoft and the Open Source community. Posted from my 2019 MacBook Pro

saagarjha 7y ago
> The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. ⌥⌘P > The year is 2020 and macOS still doesn't have a location/address bar in Finder. System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > Use keyboard navigation to move between controls > Window snapping is still non-existent. Not completely: you can do two windows side-by-side, and resizing windows now makes them snap to each other and edges.
- wyqydsyq 7y ago
  > ⌥⌘P Those are breadcrumbs, not an address bar. Note the fact you cannot type or paste a path into it, as is a core feature in practically every file manager in every other OS. There is no apparent difference to breaking this convention, beyond impairing users' workflows. Finder also has the "Go to" dialogue, but again, it is a functionally inferior solution. There is absolutely no good reason for these design choices other than to "be different for the sake of it" at the expense of good UX
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    How is "Go to Folder" worse? Finder just splits the two actions up…

mirap 7y ago

A "research" with only 3 users? Meh.

beders 7y ago

Speaking of undiscoverable: "Tap all the things, slide all the things' is now the de-facto modus operandi for figuring out how to use mobile apps. It feels like we made a huge step backwards in UX and are leaving behind generations of users.

thdrdt 7y ago

I've been using Mac OS, Windows and Linux (multiple distros) for over 20 years. To me Mac OS always had the worst UI experience. I can understand why people like it: it is clean and looks good. But clean and good looks doesn't make it good. Windows has been good on average. On Linux it depends on the distro and the version of the distro a lot. Overall I think Ubuntu has the best UI experience at the moment.

why-oh-why 7y ago

Here's the thing: you can't have 1000 "discoverable" actions, there's no place for it. Correction: you do have 1000 discoverable actions, but you discover them in the menu bar. What you found out with this article is that users are bad at knowing things, because there are too many things to know. I know all of those actions and their keyboard shortcuts, but I still have to occasionally "google it." Either you have iOS 1.0 where everything is clear and easy to do — because there's very little to do — or macOS, where each app has dozens of features but can only surface some of them. This is non-news.