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The actions listed in the article are fairly non-essential, but many fundamental iOS functions also have discoverability issues, as well as some head-scratching

by nfw2 4y ago

The actions listed in the article are fairly non-essential, but many fundamental iOS functions also have discoverability issues, as well as some head-scratching design choices. For example: - seeing notifications requires swiping down specifically from the top left - turning on the flashlight requires swiping down specifically from the top right. Swiping down from top left also gets you a flashlight button, but it is not actionable. The flashlight button on the home screen is also not actionable. - universal search requires swiping to the left of the app pages. Swiping past the right end of the app pages also gets you a search bar, but it will only show you apps - Seeing your open apps requires swiping up slowly from the bottom of the page. - turning the phone off requires holding two unrelated buttons Mobile UX generally is heavily-dependent on gestures, which inherently creates discoverability challenges, but it seems like Apple goes out of its way to hide every basic function behind a very specific swipe. It makes me wonder if they intentionally design their products to be exclusively usable by tech-savvy people. Another possible explanation is that design requires users to develop muscle memory over time that will improve experience in the long run and makes competitors feel unnatural.

fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
> The flashlight button on the home screen is also not actionable. The button is actionable, it just takes a long press to avoid accidental activation.
- romwell 4y ago
  Great, add that to the list of undiscoverable and incoherent design choices in the OP's comment.
  - mobiledev2014 4y ago
    As you hold your finger down the button grows. The designers considered that to be an affordance, whether successful or not (the swiping between tabs mentioned in the OP also has a fairly obvious affordance IMO) The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)
    - romwell 4y ago
      >As you hold your finger down the button grows. ...like no other button ever does. This only makes it worse. Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen. But growing a button? Amazing.
      - sanitycheck 4y ago
        Truly brilliant. On a touch UI, the visual feedback is on the thing your finger is currently obscuring! I've seen this sort of long-press safety feature a couple of times, and elsewhere it's been accompanied by a helpful message which appears if I try to short-press the button. Why does the flashlight button need the safety feature anyway? It's not a self-destruct button, if I turn it on I can turn it off again with no ill effects. That was a rhetorical question, nobody knows why.
        sbuk 4y ago
        So you don't turn it on accidently and burn out the lamp/burn through the battery. It's really not that hard or obscure. Tap and hold has been a 'thing' for a long time. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Literally everyone I know personally groks this particular feature. It's not nearly as unintuative as you attempt to make out.
        sanitycheck 4y ago
        I'm not making a mountain out of anything, I'm drive-by commenting on a particularly amusing Apple UI feature I wasn't previously aware of. Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect, and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works. Apple's design approach has been totally _un_intuitive to me for at least 20 years, and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.
mmiyer 4y ago
All those flashlight buttons are actionable, you just need to press and hold. I suppose this proves a point about discoverability.
ceeplusplus 4y ago
I think many of these are inherently poweruser features though. Most non tech-savvy people will rarely have to turn off their phone or clear their open apps (really if the memory eviction system is good this shouldn't even be a concern). Some of the other stuff you mentioned is discoverable in my opinion. Swiping down from home gives you a search bar. Notifications being accessible by swiping down from the left is admittedly not as good as swiping down from the top bar in the older iPhones, but I think still more discoverable than the Windows notification system that requires you to click a button.
- layer8 4y ago
  From time to time you need to reboot the phone to get some nonworking app or system function unstuck. I regularly have to guide family members to reboot their phone or tablet, and have to google each time which button combination has to be pressed on the particular iPhone or iPad model.
- nfw2 4y ago
  Turning off the phone is useful if you are low on power and don't have a way to charge. I do this sometimes when traveling or in the city. When I go through open apps, it is usually to get back to something I was doing, rather than to clear it. Finding what you were just looking at 2 seconds ago shouldn't be considered a power user feature.
dagmx 4y ago
Did you perhaps skip the on-boarding process? A lot of what you mention has been part of the Getting to know your iPhone on-boarding since they were introduced on the iPhone X. Specifically where to pull down from and pull up from. I’m not sure what you mean by the flashlight not being actionable. Notification shade/Lock Screen buttons are long press actions to prevent accidental activation. On iOS 16 there’s now a button on the launcher to invoke search in case people want to avoid swiping You say they design their products to be used by tech savvy people but gestural design is designed to become intuitive after the first tutorial. Indeed the only people I know who struggle with it are tech savvy people who skip the on-boarding. In much the same way that people who think they’re handy disregard ikea instructions etc Here’s a talk on the thought process behind a lot of their “fluid” design https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/803 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/803
- nfw2 4y ago
  I am not talking about myself personally. Users like my mom, who have trouble navigating AirBnb, are going to have trouble remembering 8 different swipe actions, even if they go through a tutorial. A designer needs to anticipate users skipping tutorials or just forgetting them. A tutorial is not an alternative to usable design.
  - dagmx 4y ago
    You’re now conflating usability with discoverability which are very different things. Many very usable actions are left to intuition and discovered as such or by on-boarding. Pinch to zoom is a classic example. The swipe to dismiss gesture is very usable once it’s discovered. iOS does a very good job at training people that actions from the edge of their device do things. It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one. I also feel like comparing navigating an app with its own unique idiosyncrasies that you do so sporadically to navigating an OS daily are very different orders of magnitude on developing muscle memory. Anyway I think you’re arguing very different aspect of UX design
    - dymk 4y ago
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I suspect that designers are tasked with too many features on too small of a device. On a desktop with a mouse + keyboard there is a potential for so many shortcuts ... you have to get much more creative on a touch-only device. I don't endorse it however. I think pop-up menus (even the much maligned hamburger) are at least a way to make many more features discoverable. I dislike "gestures".
- Gigachad 4y ago
  I think this constraint actually created some of the best UI ever. Desktop designers had gotten lazy and just stacked tool bar over tool bar and then sidebars too with hundreds of icons everywhere. Was it really more discoverable to have the icon always on screen but embedded among so many other useless icons?
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Drop-down menus with more or less standard categories were for discoverability. Toolbars were always meant for "quick access", representing the most common - and, usually, user-configurable, subset of commands in the menus.
hk__2 4y ago
> - seeing notifications requires swiping down specifically from the top left Not really, swiping from anywhere on the top (except top-right) works. This is consistent with the other gestures: swipe up from the lock screen to unlock it (just like you would open a roller shutter); swipe down to lock it again -- and see the notifications. You can also simply hit the side button. > - turning on the flashlight requires swiping down specifically from the top right You can turn it on from the lock screen, as others have pointed out. > - turning the phone off requires holding two unrelated buttons Yes, so that you don’t turn it off by mistake. Smartphones are not devices you turn on and off; outside of OS updates they stay on forever. > It makes me wonder if they intentionally design their products to be exclusively usable by tech-savvy people. I would say the opposite. When I think of tech-savy people, I think about mouse and keyboard; when I think of non-tech-savy ones, I think about tactile displays and gestures (and voice). My 92-yo grandfather barely knows how to make his printer work but has no trouble remembering the most common swipe gestures: it’s hard to forget about pinch to zoom or swipe down to 'close' the phone and swipe up to 'open' it again.
- pxmpxm 4y ago
  I've been using ios devices for a decade and half and empirically I'm worse than 50/50 in terms of successfully invoking the show-me-notification gesture. Hitting the power button twice in sequence (lock->wake) has been my heuristic.
matsemann 4y ago
The home button has like 11 different uses based on context and how you press it. It's just insane. I kinda secretly judge UX people that enjoy iOS. And somehow almost all of them are Mac/iPhone users. I think that is a bit responsible for the uptick in form over function lately.

by nfw2 4y ago

fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago

> The flashlight button on the home screen is also not actionable. The button is actionable, it just takes a long press to avoid accidental activation.

romwell 4y ago
Great, add that to the list of undiscoverable and incoherent design choices in the OP's comment.
- mobiledev2014 4y ago
  As you hold your finger down the button grows. The designers considered that to be an affordance, whether successful or not (the swiping between tabs mentioned in the OP also has a fairly obvious affordance IMO) The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)
  - romwell 4y ago
    >As you hold your finger down the button grows. ...like no other button ever does. This only makes it worse. Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen. But growing a button? Amazing.
    - sanitycheck 4y ago
      Truly brilliant. On a touch UI, the visual feedback is on the thing your finger is currently obscuring! I've seen this sort of long-press safety feature a couple of times, and elsewhere it's been accompanied by a helpful message which appears if I try to short-press the button. Why does the flashlight button need the safety feature anyway? It's not a self-destruct button, if I turn it on I can turn it off again with no ill effects. That was a rhetorical question, nobody knows why.
      - sbuk 4y ago
        So you don't turn it on accidently and burn out the lamp/burn through the battery. It's really not that hard or obscure. Tap and hold has been a 'thing' for a long time. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Literally everyone I know personally groks this particular feature. It's not nearly as unintuative as you attempt to make out.
        sanitycheck 4y ago
        I'm not making a mountain out of anything, I'm drive-by commenting on a particularly amusing Apple UI feature I wasn't previously aware of. Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect, and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works. Apple's design approach has been totally _un_intuitive to me for at least 20 years, and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.

mmiyer 4y ago

All those flashlight buttons are actionable, you just need to press and hold. I suppose this proves a point about discoverability.

ceeplusplus 4y ago

I think many of these are inherently poweruser features though. Most non tech-savvy people will rarely have to turn off their phone or clear their open apps (really if the memory eviction system is good this shouldn't even be a concern). Some of the other stuff you mentioned is discoverable in my opinion. Swiping down from home gives you a search bar. Notifications being accessible by swiping down from the left is admittedly not as good as swiping down from the top bar in the older iPhones, but I think still more discoverable than the Windows notification system that requires you to click a button.

layer8 4y ago
From time to time you need to reboot the phone to get some nonworking app or system function unstuck. I regularly have to guide family members to reboot their phone or tablet, and have to google each time which button combination has to be pressed on the particular iPhone or iPad model.
nfw2 4y ago
Turning off the phone is useful if you are low on power and don't have a way to charge. I do this sometimes when traveling or in the city. When I go through open apps, it is usually to get back to something I was doing, rather than to clear it. Finding what you were just looking at 2 seconds ago shouldn't be considered a power user feature.

dagmx 4y ago

Did you perhaps skip the on-boarding process? A lot of what you mention has been part of the Getting to know your iPhone on-boarding since they were introduced on the iPhone X. Specifically where to pull down from and pull up from. I’m not sure what you mean by the flashlight not being actionable. Notification shade/Lock Screen buttons are long press actions to prevent accidental activation. On iOS 16 there’s now a button on the launcher to invoke search in case people want to avoid swiping You say they design their products to be used by tech savvy people but gestural design is designed to become intuitive after the first tutorial. Indeed the only people I know who struggle with it are tech savvy people who skip the on-boarding. In much the same way that people who think they’re handy disregard ikea instructions etc Here’s a talk on the thought process behind a lot of their “fluid” design https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/803 https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/803

nfw2 4y ago
I am not talking about myself personally. Users like my mom, who have trouble navigating AirBnb, are going to have trouble remembering 8 different swipe actions, even if they go through a tutorial. A designer needs to anticipate users skipping tutorials or just forgetting them. A tutorial is not an alternative to usable design.
- dagmx 4y ago
  You’re now conflating usability with discoverability which are very different things. Many very usable actions are left to intuition and discovered as such or by on-boarding. Pinch to zoom is a classic example. The swipe to dismiss gesture is very usable once it’s discovered. iOS does a very good job at training people that actions from the edge of their device do things. It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one. I also feel like comparing navigating an app with its own unique idiosyncrasies that you do so sporadically to navigating an OS daily are very different orders of magnitude on developing muscle memory. Anyway I think you’re arguing very different aspect of UX design
  - dymk 4y ago

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I suspect that designers are tasked with too many features on too small of a device. On a desktop with a mouse + keyboard there is a potential for so many shortcuts ... you have to get much more creative on a touch-only device. I don't endorse it however. I think pop-up menus (even the much maligned hamburger) are at least a way to make many more features discoverable. I dislike "gestures".

Gigachad 4y ago
I think this constraint actually created some of the best UI ever. Desktop designers had gotten lazy and just stacked tool bar over tool bar and then sidebars too with hundreds of icons everywhere. Was it really more discoverable to have the icon always on screen but embedded among so many other useless icons?
- int_19h 4y ago
  Drop-down menus with more or less standard categories were for discoverability. Toolbars were always meant for "quick access", representing the most common - and, usually, user-configurable, subset of commands in the menus.

hk__2 4y ago

> - seeing notifications requires swiping down specifically from the top left Not really, swiping from anywhere on the top (except top-right) works. This is consistent with the other gestures: swipe up from the lock screen to unlock it (just like you would open a roller shutter); swipe down to lock it again -- and see the notifications. You can also simply hit the side button. > - turning on the flashlight requires swiping down specifically from the top right You can turn it on from the lock screen, as others have pointed out. > - turning the phone off requires holding two unrelated buttons Yes, so that you don’t turn it off by mistake. Smartphones are not devices you turn on and off; outside of OS updates they stay on forever. > It makes me wonder if they intentionally design their products to be exclusively usable by tech-savvy people. I would say the opposite. When I think of tech-savy people, I think about mouse and keyboard; when I think of non-tech-savy ones, I think about tactile displays and gestures (and voice). My 92-yo grandfather barely knows how to make his printer work but has no trouble remembering the most common swipe gestures: it’s hard to forget about pinch to zoom or swipe down to 'close' the phone and swipe up to 'open' it again.

pxmpxm 4y ago
I've been using ios devices for a decade and half and empirically I'm worse than 50/50 in terms of successfully invoking the show-me-notification gesture. Hitting the power button twice in sequence (lock->wake) has been my heuristic.

matsemann 4y ago

The home button has like 11 different uses based on context and how you press it. It's just insane. I kinda secretly judge UX people that enjoy iOS. And somehow almost all of them are Mac/iPhone users. I think that is a bit responsible for the uptick in form over function lately.