3 ms·

> swipe-sideways on SMS WHAT?!

strogonoff 6y ago
Once you discover once that swiping sideways on a message reveals metadata, you notice that this is transferrable to most messengers on iOS (all I use). The first time I discovered that was by accident while playing with the device. I notice that I pretty much never use this feature.
- myself248 6y ago
  Point is, you shouldn't have to "discover" anything about an interface. If it's hidden from the user, it's an easter-egg that should be nothing more than amusing, but useful functionality should never be deliberately kept from the user. I use it all the time. I work off-shift so most of the messages I receive were sent quite a while ago, and pending when I wake up and grab my device. Knowing when they were sent is a very important bit of context.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    If you spell everything out all the time, you will have laughable information density and hurt your user’s productivity. I would strongly object to that. It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store. FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.) That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.

Once you discover once that swiping sideways on a message reveals metadata, you notice that this is transferrable to most messengers on iOS (all I use). The first time I discovered that was by accident while playing with the device. I notice that I pretty much never use this feature.

myself248 6y ago
Point is, you shouldn't have to "discover" anything about an interface. If it's hidden from the user, it's an easter-egg that should be nothing more than amusing, but useful functionality should never be deliberately kept from the user. I use it all the time. I work off-shift so most of the messages I receive were sent quite a while ago, and pending when I wake up and grab my device. Knowing when they were sent is a very important bit of context.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  If you spell everything out all the time, you will have laughable information density and hurt your user’s productivity. I would strongly object to that. It seems natural to spend a little time exploring the interface of an extremely complicated instrument that is an integral part of your daily life, reading Tips, etc. That also means if this device is not exactly that heavily used (say you have assistants for that), you are spared of wasting your cognition cycles on simply being aware about all the features it has in store. FWIW search field in Apple’s own apps like Settings mentioned upthread is revealed to me every time I scroll from the bottom back up to the top of the list due to inertia, I don’t know if they changed it recently or not. (Other apps often make a mess of the same UI pattern. In WhatsApp it is much more difficult to discover, requiring to really pull down and wait to see Archived Chats, and meanwhile Search field is just there wasting screen space despite being used once every few months.) That said, I don’t have a strong opinion about message timestamps in particular—I believe there are ways of showing them smartly if you haven’t used your phone for a while and missed a bunch of messages without overloading the UI for people like me who couldn’t really care less about that (RIP my IRL social life as of late). Perhaps Messages could use more attention from a good product designer.