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Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to

by nsriv 1y ago

Very slightly unrelated, but this trend is one of the reasons I went Android after the iPhone removed the home button. I think it became meaningfully harder to explain interactions to older users in my family and just when they got the hang of "force touch" it also went away. First thing I do on new Pixel phones is enable 3 button navigation, but lately that's also falling out of favor in UI terms, with apps assuming bottom navigation bar and not accounting for the larger spacing of 3 button nav and putting content or text behind it.

RachelF 1y ago
Similarly the disappearing menu items in common software. Take a simple example: Open a read-only file in MS Word. There is no option to save? Where's it gone? Why can I edit but not save the file? A much better user experience would be to enable and not hide the Save option. When the user tries to save, tell them "I cannot save this file because of blah" and then tell them what they can do to fix it.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  The Mac HIG specifies exactly this: don’t hide temporarily unavailable options, disable them. Disabling communicates to the user the relationships between data, state, etc and adds discoverability.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    This has been the norm on every desktop. But lately I don't think app designers know what "HIG" even is. Everything is web (or tries real hard to look like it even when it's native apps...), which is to say, everything is broken.
- urbandw311er 1y ago
  I half agree. The save option should be disabled, since there is something very frustrating about enabling a control that cannot be used. However, there could be a label (or a warning button that displays such a label) explaining why the option is disabled.
zhivota 1y ago
I am the same, long time Android user and when I borrow my wife's iPhone it is an exercise in frustration. Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing. Now that Pixel cameras outclass iPhone cameras, and even Samsung is on par, there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO.
- Aeolun 1y ago
  > there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO Not having anything to do with Google is a pretty good reason I think.
  - sheiyei 1y ago
    The best one, unfortunately it's a terrible user experience for a high cost.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      Kinda. I was always upset that Apple never let me do everything I wanted with my hardware, but as my usage pattern changed, I started to value the convenience of a more or less consistent system over discoverability.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  > [iPhone] Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing. And they aren't even consistent from app to app. That's perhaps the most frustrating thing.
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    That’s thanks to third party devs, not Apple. If you look primarily at proper native UIKit/SwiftUI apps, there’s a lot more consistency, but there’s a lot of cross platform lowest common denominator garbage out there that pays zero mind to platform conventions. You see this under macOS, too. A lot of Electron apps for instance replace the window manager’s standard titlebar with some custom thing that doesn’t implement chunks of the standard titlebar’s functionality. It’s frustrating.
strogonoff 1y ago
I am firmly in the “key UI elements should be visible” camp. I also agree that Apple violates that rule occasionally. However, I think they do a decent job at resisting it in general, and specifically I disagree that removing the home button constitutes hiding an UI element. I see it as a change in interaction, after which the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. It is debatable whether it is intuitive or better in general, but I personally think it is rather similar to double-clicking an icon to launch an app, or right-clicking to invoke a context menu: neither have any visual cues, both are used all the time for some pretty key functions, but as soon as it becomes an intuition it does not add friction. You may say Apple is way too liberal in forcing new intuitions like that, and I would agree in some cases (like address bar drag on Safari!), but would disagree in case of the home button (they went with it and they firmly stuck with it, and they kept around a model with the button for a few more years until 2025). Regarding explaining the lack of home button: on iOS, there is an accessibility feature that puts on your screen a small draggable circle, which when pressed displays a configurable selection of shortcuts—with text labels—including the home button and a bunch of other pretty useful switches. Believe it or not, I know people who kept this circle around specifically when hardware home button was a thing, because they did not want to wear out the only thing they saw as a moving part!
- fauigerzigerk 1y ago
  >the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. Right, but while it's obvious to everyone that a button is a control, it's not obvious that an edge is a control. On top of that, swiping up from the bottom edge triggers two completely different actions depending on exactly when/where you lift your finger off the screen. Why not move the physical home button to the back of the phone?
  - strogonoff 1y ago
    I think a button that is located behind the screen fits the definition of “hidden interface control” more so than a swipeable screen edge. Forwhat it’s worth, back tap is a feature of iOS to which you can assign an action, though it only triggers on double or triple tap.
Jaxan 1y ago
I still have my iPhone with home button. That’s also a solution ;-)
int_19h 1y ago
I had the same story, which is why the last phone I got for my grandma was an iPhone SE (which still has the home button). This way, no matter where she ends up, there's this large and obvious thing that she can press to return back to the familiarity of the home screen.

by nsriv 1y ago

RachelF 1y ago

Similarly the disappearing menu items in common software. Take a simple example: Open a read-only file in MS Word. There is no option to save? Where's it gone? Why can I edit but not save the file? A much better user experience would be to enable and not hide the Save option. When the user tries to save, tell them "I cannot save this file because of blah" and then tell them what they can do to fix it.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
The Mac HIG specifies exactly this: don’t hide temporarily unavailable options, disable them. Disabling communicates to the user the relationships between data, state, etc and adds discoverability.
- int_19h 1y ago
  This has been the norm on every desktop. But lately I don't think app designers know what "HIG" even is. Everything is web (or tries real hard to look like it even when it's native apps...), which is to say, everything is broken.
urbandw311er 1y ago
I half agree. The save option should be disabled, since there is something very frustrating about enabling a control that cannot be used. However, there could be a label (or a warning button that displays such a label) explaining why the option is disabled.

zhivota 1y ago

I am the same, long time Android user and when I borrow my wife's iPhone it is an exercise in frustration. Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing. Now that Pixel cameras outclass iPhone cameras, and even Samsung is on par, there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO.

Aeolun 1y ago
> there is really no reason to ever switch to the Apple ecosystem anymore IMO Not having anything to do with Google is a pretty good reason I think.
- sheiyei 1y ago
  The best one, unfortunately it's a terrible user experience for a high cost.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    Kinda. I was always upset that Apple never let me do everything I wanted with my hardware, but as my usage pattern changed, I started to value the convenience of a more or less consistent system over discoverability.
SoftTalker 1y ago
> [iPhone] Interactions are hidden, not intuitive, or just plain missing. And they aren't even consistent from app to app. That's perhaps the most frustrating thing.
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  That’s thanks to third party devs, not Apple. If you look primarily at proper native UIKit/SwiftUI apps, there’s a lot more consistency, but there’s a lot of cross platform lowest common denominator garbage out there that pays zero mind to platform conventions. You see this under macOS, too. A lot of Electron apps for instance replace the window manager’s standard titlebar with some custom thing that doesn’t implement chunks of the standard titlebar’s functionality. It’s frustrating.

strogonoff 1y ago

I am firmly in the “key UI elements should be visible” camp. I also agree that Apple violates that rule occasionally. However, I think they do a decent job at resisting it in general, and specifically I disagree that removing the home button constitutes hiding an UI element. I see it as a change in interaction, after which the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. It is debatable whether it is intuitive or better in general, but I personally think it is rather similar to double-clicking an icon to launch an app, or right-clicking to invoke a context menu: neither have any visual cues, both are used all the time for some pretty key functions, but as soon as it becomes an intuition it does not add friction. You may say Apple is way too liberal in forcing new intuitions like that, and I would agree in some cases (like address bar drag on Safari!), but would disagree in case of the home button (they went with it and they firmly stuck with it, and they kept around a model with the button for a few more years until 2025). Regarding explaining the lack of home button: on iOS, there is an accessibility feature that puts on your screen a small draggable circle, which when pressed displays a configurable selection of shortcuts—with text labels—including the home button and a bunch of other pretty useful switches. Believe it or not, I know people who kept this circle around specifically when hardware home button was a thing, because they did not want to wear out the only thing they saw as a moving part!

fauigerzigerk 1y ago
>the gesture is no longer “press” but “swipe” and the UI element is not a button but edge of the screen itself. Right, but while it's obvious to everyone that a button is a control, it's not obvious that an edge is a control. On top of that, swiping up from the bottom edge triggers two completely different actions depending on exactly when/where you lift your finger off the screen. Why not move the physical home button to the back of the phone?
- strogonoff 1y ago
  I think a button that is located behind the screen fits the definition of “hidden interface control” more so than a swipeable screen edge. Forwhat it’s worth, back tap is a feature of iOS to which you can assign an action, though it only triggers on double or triple tap.

Jaxan 1y ago

I still have my iPhone with home button. That’s also a solution ;-)

int_19h 1y ago

I had the same story, which is why the last phone I got for my grandma was an iPhone SE (which still has the home button). This way, no matter where she ends up, there's this large and obvious thing that she can press to return back to the familiarity of the home screen.