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First, how about visible details of interaction design, like putting navigation/promo bar on top of the text I'm trying to read... with icons so low contrast yo

First, how about visible details of interaction design, like putting navigation/promo bar on top of the text I'm trying to read... with icons so low contrast you can't know what those buttons do until you tap them? And how do you manage to make it lose scroll position every time I switch back to it on mobile? As to the content, some call me an Apple fanboy but even I found the article full of dubious parallels, captain obvious observations and generally an unbearable read without a point. For example, I never swiped physical book pages, by the way. Since childhood I turn a page by lifting its edge first with initial pinch motion towards the edge. For me "swiping" often lifts more than one page which is frustrating. Yet people like me don't have problems using swipe. (Let alone new generations who see tablets before books.) Maybe because it's just a thing we all learn when using the device? Later this paragraph just killed me, no comment: > As a designer, I love to animate everything. Object permanence, creating a focal point, and delight are all good reasons for doing so. But it's not so obvious when not to animate something. Okay maybe one comment: please stop animating everything, thanks. And I dislike the Pencil's unscrewable tip, because I do actually fidget with it and this leads to trying to write with it not fully screwed on and thinking Pencil is breaking. Because it randomly stops drawing unless it is fully screwed in. A useful detail would be if it had a tactile bump when screwing to let you know you are safe to use it. I'd keep it to myself but the article reads just so full of itself I couldn't resist. Maybe my mood contributed

TeMPOraL 3y ago
> For example, I never swiped physical book pages, by the way. Since childhood I turn a page by lifting its edge first with initial pinch motion towards the edge. For me "swiping" often lifts more than one page which is frustrating. Yeah, that in particular was weird. Even the animation in the article subtly hints you at why you don't swipe pages in books: that's a quick way to get bent or torn pages. A sideways motion is literally the worst way to start a page flip, since the force you apply acts at the right angle to the motion you want, and instead is trying to compress the paper sheet. The pinch gesture explanation was even weirder. Myself, I'd go for analogue of using finger swipes and two-finger motions to slide pieces of paper, or other small objects, on a desk. Only in that context pinching sort of comes up as a candidate zoom gesture - bringing small objects closer or further apart.
- throwaway290 3y ago
  I think it's easy to explain both swipe and pinch and the author just misses the mark. Device establishes a simple intuition: while you touch the screen you expect whatever is under your finger to follow where your finger goes until you lift it. So within that intuition designer's job is to see what gestures are physically OK to do with a screen and what tasks the user needs to accomplish, and to come up with interactions that suitably bridge them together. So it doesn't have anything to do with book reading or anything. In fact it misleads the readers. In reality designers establish a simple primitive intuition/map and build on top of it. Swipe and pinch are pretty much the two things you can work with on flat screen, and pinch is obviously zooming (per above), so there was no other way for them to do page turning (If you are like me you probably noticed how this intuition breaks when you try to pinch or move stuff around to find out it's unmovable. This is also why in scroll lists it lets you scroll past the end: to satisfy the intuition.)

TeMPOraL 3y ago

> For example, I never swiped physical book pages, by the way. Since childhood I turn a page by lifting its edge first with initial pinch motion towards the edge. For me "swiping" often lifts more than one page which is frustrating. Yeah, that in particular was weird. Even the animation in the article subtly hints you at why you don't swipe pages in books: that's a quick way to get bent or torn pages. A sideways motion is literally the worst way to start a page flip, since the force you apply acts at the right angle to the motion you want, and instead is trying to compress the paper sheet. The pinch gesture explanation was even weirder. Myself, I'd go for analogue of using finger swipes and two-finger motions to slide pieces of paper, or other small objects, on a desk. Only in that context pinching sort of comes up as a candidate zoom gesture - bringing small objects closer or further apart.

throwaway290 3y ago
I think it's easy to explain both swipe and pinch and the author just misses the mark. Device establishes a simple intuition: while you touch the screen you expect whatever is under your finger to follow where your finger goes until you lift it. So within that intuition designer's job is to see what gestures are physically OK to do with a screen and what tasks the user needs to accomplish, and to come up with interactions that suitably bridge them together. So it doesn't have anything to do with book reading or anything. In fact it misleads the readers. In reality designers establish a simple primitive intuition/map and build on top of it. Swipe and pinch are pretty much the two things you can work with on flat screen, and pinch is obviously zooming (per above), so there was no other way for them to do page turning (If you are like me you probably noticed how this intuition breaks when you try to pinch or move stuff around to find out it's unmovable. This is also why in scroll lists it lets you scroll past the end: to satisfy the intuition.)