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Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had

Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it. Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it. I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it. Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think: 1. They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it. 2. They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten). For the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". While early versions of this same design were pretty large and could be considered intrusive, I think users are familiar enough with the "tactile" touchscreen elements that we could develop a smaller version to use for these things. --- Your point in general still stands, though. Apple has become more and more egregious about this over time. Things used to be very discoverable, and now there's tons of hidden functionality in most of their apps (both mobile and desktop). I think they've succumbed to more feature creep over the past couple of decades than they want to admit.

saagarjha 6y ago
Back when search bars were table view headers, you had to do non-trivial work to hide them by default (which Apple did anyways, because Apple). With iOS 11 search controllers can integrate directly into the navigation bar, and in that case the search bar will be collapsed by default.
- marv3lls 6y ago
  Integrate directly? Like is there a magnifying glass icon or ANYTHING to make it discoverable? Or do I just have to guess I should scroll up in i.e. Settings? cough Thanks, Apple.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Settings uses this API, so whatever it's doing.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time: (I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.) As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0]. Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English. -- [0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.
- fludlight 6y ago
  Emacs user for 20+ years here. I have written a nontrivial amount of elisp. I like emacs; and, yet, I still sometimes get confused by the difference between a window, a frame, and a buffer. Sometimes I encounter a phrase like “frame buffer” and just ignore it to avoid going down that rabbit hole again.
- DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
  Ah, I see. That's a fair point! I hadn't considered the difficulty of language choice when it comes to non-US computer users. Thank you for sharing your experience! But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it. But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.

saagarjha 6y ago

Back when search bars were table view headers, you had to do non-trivial work to hide them by default (which Apple did anyways, because Apple). With iOS 11 search controllers can integrate directly into the navigation bar, and in that case the search bar will be collapsed by default.

marv3lls 6y ago
Integrate directly? Like is there a magnifying glass icon or ANYTHING to make it discoverable? Or do I just have to guess I should scroll up in i.e. Settings? cough Thanks, Apple.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  Settings uses this API, so whatever it's doing.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance I honestly never bought that, because I've never seen it in practice. Personal observation / anecdote time: (I'll hesitantly be generalizing from myself & people I knew as a kid/teenager to entirety of my generation of non-English-speaking countries, but I feel it's justified.) As a kid first discovering computers, I never got the connection between various skeuomorphic terms and their meatspace counterparts. Half of the time, I wouldn't even know what the word referred to outside computers! E.g. I was a proficient Windows user before I figured out that "desktop" is the top of your desk (or, in Polish, "pulpit" is something a very old school desk would have). I didn't know until many years later that "icons" are religious pictures. Or take window - the only connection between GUI windows (one or more rectangular frames in which an application is contained) and real windows (a rectangular frame you can see some part of the outside through, and that parents regularly ask you to clean) is the "rectangular frame" part. Might as well have called it a "frame"[0]. Point being: myself, and my family and friends, and (almost) everyone I came to physically know in my country - we've learned all these terms, in Polish and English, without understanding the skeuomorphism. We grokked the concepts through interaction and explanation of what happens on a computer ("programs draw stuff in 'windows', 'windows' can be resized, closed, etc..."). The terms could've been entirely invented words (like "foobar") for all they were worth - hell, they often enough were, from the POV of someone who sees an English word without knowing English. -- [0] - And in fact it's how Lisp world referred to it before computers were available to general population. Emacs still retaining the nomenclature, which leads to no end of confusion for 21st century users.

fludlight 6y ago
Emacs user for 20+ years here. I have written a nontrivial amount of elisp. I like emacs; and, yet, I still sometimes get confused by the difference between a window, a frame, and a buffer. Sometimes I encounter a phrase like “frame buffer” and just ignore it to avoid going down that rabbit hole again.
DonaldPShimoda 6y ago
Ah, I see. That's a fair point! I hadn't considered the difficulty of language choice when it comes to non-US computer users. Thank you for sharing your experience! But I should clarify that I wasn't even thinking about terminology when I mentioned skeuomorphic design. I meant things like how the "trash" on the desktop looked like a physical trash can, how the "save" button looked like a floppy disk, how the calendar app was meant to look like a physical calendar, etc. The system was designed (visually, I should say) to remind people of their physical offices so they could more easily interact with a computer when they had no prior context for it. But over time, we have moved away from these physical allusions because people have simply become familiar with computers.