It's funny how I've witnessed a complete 180° change from how, in the 1990's, software was supposed to be entirely discoverable and it also came with a manual that documented literally everything, to now there's a ton that's hidden, often without any manual whatsoever... but you can Google everything you need to know.
Probably the single most useful skill I've had to learn in my life is, whenever you wonder something, just Google it. If you don't think your software does X... don't just assume it. Look it up.
I've been astonished at how often a feature was added 3 years ago to a program I've used for 8 years, or there's a secret swipe that avoids a bunch of menus, or an unofficial command-line flag.
And it really leaves me feeling deeply conflicted. Because on the one hand, I still believe in the virtue of learning your tools inside and out. I would read the manual and be proud I knew exactly what every program/language could and couldn't do. But on the other hand, is that really just a waste of time? Programs have so many features now, that instead of learning all the things via discoverability or a manual, we just learn them by... querying how to do things when we need them.
I don't really like the idea of so fundamentally relying on Google and forums and tutorials and Reddit and YouTube videos as the main way of learning how to use software. But at the same time, software does so much now and adds new things so quickly that it appears to be the only reasonable way.
> we just learn them by... querying how to do things when we need them.
The problem with this is that you don’t learn any new features that you wouldn’t have come up with on your own.
I loved reading the well-written manuals and “on-line” (integrated into the software) help of the 90s (and 80s) that explained all the concepts and features of the particular software. You’d learn a ton of new ideas and possibilities. It was really fun and exciting, and it gave you the perception of a well-designed and well thought-out whole. You built up a consistent mental model of the software, and you thus ended up with the feeling of mastery and control over the software.
Nowadays it feels more like poking the software with a stick in an attempt to build a mental model and discover its capabilities by trial and error, often remaining in doubt about the actual intent of how exactly things are supposed to work.
As annoying as they can sometimes be, the little tips that pop up every now with "Hey did you know you can do this?" are a neat little solution to this. Really like the unobtrusive ones like the GitHub "ProTip!" at the bottom of the pull requests page
It does get a bit ridiculous though. There's entire sites and content creators focused solely on VS Code tips. At what point are we gonna end up with engineers working on adding a feature to VS Code that they didn't know already existed?
The tips aren’t really a solution to this, because they don’t give you a general introduction and big-picture explanations about the system as a whole, and about the individual features in context. They are useful to inform you about the presence of a new feature when you’re already familiar with the software overall. Even then, they don’t go into any depth about the various aspects of the feature and how it interacts with other features and in different configurations, etc. In a good manual, you would get a whole short (or long) chapter about the feature.
> the little tips that pop up every now with "Hey did you know you can do this?"
I don't think those have ever come up at the right time, usually only when I'm halwfway in the middle of an action, and not in the headspace for a tutorial or tip.
And that tiny little tooltip, that offers no screenshot or example gif isn't going to get me to learn.
I swiped up to dismiss the Safari browser on my iPhone this morning and accidentally invoked a half-hight bookmarks view. I wasn’t sure if it’s a new gesture in iOS 16 or if it’s been there for a while. I wasn’t able to reproduce it and a brief web search didn’t find mention of it in the first few hits. I didn’t really care, so I gave up looking.
If anyone knows how to invoke this feature, I’d love to know. Just not enough to try to find out from checking more than about three search results. Anyway, ahhh discoverability. I remember you…
A related story, shortly after upgrading to the new iPHone. I noticed while driving I got a big album art preview on the Lock Screen while I was driving. However, after customising my Lock Screen it’s gone back to the small activity preview. I have tried a few changes to back, but no dice. New versions of iOS have been successively making the album art smaller and smaller, and i thought this was a return to form, but I guess it must’ve been a bug.
I believe the bookmarks panel just defaults to half-height now. You can pull it up to fill the screen, but otherwise — tapping the button opens it at half-height for me.
Haha, yes! I'm a software engineer and it took me a decade of smartphone usage before I realized that long-pressing various keys (e.g. vowels, symbols) shows a pop-up allowing you to enter related characters (e.g. á, æ, ¡, ₹, ±, ·, ½, ²)†. Blew my tiny little mind! If I were using a language that required the variants menu in its native keyboard layout, I might have discovered this a decade before by explicitly searching for how to enter certain characters.
† Typed these on mobile, of course. Android, in case you're wondering.
Maybe related to being a SWE myself, but usually the first thing I do with any piece of software is go to the settings. If you do that with the Google Keyboard you'll see "Preferences -> Long press for symbols".
If you enable that, each key on the keyboard now shows an additional symbol you can get to by long press, for example, 'a' now also allows you to type '@'. If you try and long press for 'a' you'll suddenly see that accented versions of 'a' are also available. And that's the story of how I "naturally" discovered that same feature.
If I remember correctly, early Android versions (or it could have been HTC specific) had a tutorial for this, as part of the new phone setup process. I guess they removed it when most buyers owned a smartphone before.
Around the time of the first iPhone, Apple also had a long video on their website (it must have been 30-60 minutes) meticulously going through and explaining every feature of the iPhone. No idea if something like that still exists.
I feel like I’m reading more manuals than ever. Libraries, CLI tools and other specialized software have well written and very useful docs. Same with pro camera software, music gear software, and more.
For “consumer” software I usually don’t need manuals, I can find what I need via poking; this often includes power user features (when I use something sufficiently often).
Is it possible that what you’re feeling is nostalgia? Have you actually read the manual for your phone?
> Have you actually read the manual for your phone?
I have, and it’s abysmal, because it doesn’t make any attempt at explaining anything on a conceptual level, or even explaining basic UI elements. It doesn’t teach you how to interpret what you see on the screen. It does the bare minimum of enumerating the steps to activate a given feature, presuming that you are able to match those descriptions to what you see on the screen (there are barely any screenshots) and that you know why you would want to use that feature in the first place. It also doesn’t address any failure modes, and doesn’t discuss relevant considerations regarding the use of the given feature.
Home appliances also used to come with detailed and easy-to-understand manuals, and mostly don’t anymore. It’s mainly that manufacturers stopped caring, due to accelerated product cycles and globalization, because the products sell regardless.
I recently bought a new washing machine. It has a mode with an odd name that turns out to be tied to a cleaning product from another company. The manual doesn’t have any information on what the mode does or why it exists. The manual is a generic manual for like 5 or 10 models, and seems to only include the functions common to them all. Any function on a higher-end model that’s not included on the lower-end model is just not documented. I guess if you want to use those, you’re on your own.
But of course, there’s a phone app you can download and give the company a bunch of personal information to connect your washer to your home network so you can get notification when it’s done with its cycle.
Companies used to provide manuals that'd include part numbers and even schematics!
Now they're developing products for themselves. No customer ever asked for a TV that plastered the screen with ads every time they adjusted the volume, or a lightbulb you need some shitty app to turn on and off, but now it seems everything comes with some kind of hidden monkey paw style gotcha attached to it.
Those manuals from good old times came with introductions and basic training chapters. Manuals for music gear software don’t come with composition crash course, do they? In 80s and 90s they would have.
Because modern software engineering ( cough ) doesn't do well designed or well thought out software any more. It is all about "Move fast and break things", while the phase was coined by Mark Zuckerberg, ( or attributed to him ), that mentality or philosophy largely came from Google during the Web 2.0 era.
This make some sense for Web Product development where you want to find a market fit, VC and media were all over it. But it doesn't work as well for Desktop and other type of Apps. Or in System Programming.
And it is funny we start seeing push back against it 10 - 15 years later.
> And it is funny we start seeing push back against it 10 - 15 years later.
Except we’re really not. Tools like container registries, software dependencies on remote repos, and cheap infrastructure have brought the fast half-baked iteration to systems programming, desktop apps, etc.
Well I should say some push back. I mean I have been complaining ( or ranting ) about it since ~2005ish and I would only get downvoted into oblivion in nearly all major forums, with little to zero comment ever agreeing. At least now we see some agreement with that on HN. So that sentiment is growing somewhat, no matter how small it is. It then takes more time until a large enough force to recognise it as a problem, and even more time for people to actually do something about it.
Have you tried googling "iphone manual"? The first result is the iPhone User Guide [1], which is a comprehensive manual that does document literally everything.
The manual is also available as an 843-page ebook [2], and is accessible via the Tips app, which is preinstalled on the home screen.
It's not quite like the days when a paper manual would be right in the box, but it's close. And I think most people would be unhappy if their sleek new phone came with an 843-page tome (not to mention how much paper that would waste).
Yeah I was mostly being snarky and pointing out the irony(?) of the manual itself not being a part of "it just works" because it's not called a manual and most people wouldn't expect it to be under "tips". The thing you need to know how it works doesn't "just work", but then again if it "just works" you shouldn't need the manual. Maybe it's a catch 22 instead of irony.
Most people don't care to know in the first place. Here on HN we are interested in technology and being a 'power user', but most users don't want to spend a lot of mental cognition on it.
That doesn't seem to have a search feature? Not that a paper manual has, but flicking through quickly is a lot easier in paper than on screen.
I tried to find the answer to a problem I had and it's not there. I inherited an iphone where the side ringer mute toggle bounces back after setting, it's a mechanical error. There is no software "unmute" override - unless you use assistive touch. It took quote a while of wading through google results and well-intentioned-but-clueless advice from people before I found someone who revealed this. The manual just says assistive touch can help adjust volume so it is technically true I guess but the keyword "mute" is not there.
I did learn about the triple-click shortcut from than online manual just now, so I should thank it for that (even though it neglects to mention it needs to be enabled first).
It's hard to Google things you don't know exist. And it's hard to Google things that changed. If you've ever had a problem on macos, Googling is only useful if the problem is new; if it's been an issue in older versions, you're going to find all those questions and maybe some answers but they likely don't apply because Apple broke it differently now. Other vendors are not immune to this either, of course. I understand Apple actually does have manuals, they just don't print them and if they reference them, many people (including me) never noticed.
The "Tips" app has the User Guide available interactively with full Table Of Contents & search functionality. There are also more tutorial-esque articles for things like 'open control center' or 'take a screenshot'.
Google only helps if you know what you're looking for and it's a search that it happens to give you good results on. I've increasingly found the latter to be a problem, because when it comes to the point that I need to search online, it's probably not something easily found.
Apple actually does have an extensive and up to date manual on their products which includes all those obscure convenience features. I don’t think much has really changed in this regard. The manual exists, is very easy to read and understand, but people don’t care because they get by without it just fine.
All too often the search results are padded with advice for some other version than the one I am having trouble with, and it is difficult or impossible to craft a query specific enough to weed them out as the information simply isn't there.
Then there is the problem of authors using product- and version-specific jargon that I haven't mastered yet, precisely because one can usually pick up the basic operations without reading a manual - "1. From the customization agent..."
As an aside, the ability to stop yourself and know when to google something is what’s starting to separate the truly “smart” from everyone now - whether it’s coding, or general knowledge and discussions, or even when you’re just sitting in the toilet musing about some random question.
Especially in coding I see this as the major difference between a good and great engineer - google things at the right time to find the best solutions. You don’t have to build it all yourself.
Macs in the 90s, so System 6, 7 and 8, were full of hidden stuff. Clicking stuff while holding option, you would discover all kinds of interesting features and easter eggs.
I think you just articulated what my #1 blocker to mastering vim and/or emacs has been: they're both designed for the "mastery thorough thick manual" era. Dashing off to Google answers my immediate query, but often is far less instructive than a well-organized manual with an index at letting me discover the adjacent thing I actually need.
OK, that's my #2 blocker. My #1 blocker is that I am no longer 15 and have things to do other than just poke about until I master a new text editor.
> My #1 blocker is that I am no longer 15 and have things to do other than just poke about until I master a new text editor.
100% this. Once upon the time my attitude would have been a bratty "you just don't want to do the work to master your tools!" My response to that now is "no the fuck I do NOT, I want problem number 8131 solved yesterday so I can move on to problem number 8132 which btw requires entirely different tooling."
emacs and vim are tools that you'd use enough that mastering them is probably worth the time investment. However, it's 100% true that mastering every package your stack touches is impractical. Learn just enough to get the tests to pass and move on to the next bug.
I was lucky enough to have first encountered LaTeX and LilyPond while still in high school.
For me, those are ancient tools for ancient times, designed when things really were different. We have other capabilities now, nobody is forced to work on the CLI anymore - I also refuse to spend weeks to „master“ my editor.
Typing code is literally the least bad thing slowing me down when creating software.
“Ancient” with regard to a living thing is usually a characteristic that shows an ignorance of features and a lack of experience with dynamics of toolsets. Truly ancient (obsolete) things get lost to history.
We have other capabilities now, nobody is forced to work on the CLI anymore - I also refuse to spend weeks to „master“ my editor
I agree with all of that, but from the vim side of things. Although these are not my main concerns with organizing a development process, I find it troublesome to set up and tune a modern IDE into a useful state either, and refuse to do that unless it’s a workplace requirement.
Typing code is literally the least bad thing slowing me down when creating software.
Typing code in vim-insert or emacs is the same as in any other editor. You press keys, they show up on the screen. Press F1 and type a command. Press a shortcut to enter files pane and select a file to edit. Press C-K C-9 to expand all user folds. Install a plugin, map some keys and now you can set and cycle through bookmarks easily.
It’s not about typing faster. It’s about learning a language of editing. When you’re begin to be fluent in it, you will be communicating with the editor the changes you want to see. And it’s just a terse language that realizing what you want to actually do it and see it done take only one or two seconds.
I strongly believes the “Think about it” -> “Express it” -> “See it done” is much better the whole ballet your hand would be doing with the mouse and keyboard.
Yes it's great that we can Google/DDG most stuff at a whim. And there are often many great tutorials both written and video searchable online on a lot of software.
That does NOT solve the original discoverability problem.
>>I've been astonished at how often a feature was added 3 years ago to a program I've used for 8 years, or there's a secret swipe that avoids a bunch of menus, or an unofficial command-line flag.
THAT is the problem right there. You're a likely typical example of someone who is smart, knowledgeable, experienced, and motivated, probably beyond what used to be called a "power user". Yet great swaths of features, and the work of scores of designers, developers, & testers for years, simply escapes our notice.
The result is that vast amounts of productivity go squandered until we discover by chance accident or encounter with some "You didn't know this!" post.
I've occasionally seen some introduction wizards be somewhat helpful, but they are never in any kind of depth. It's like they are afraid to show you what the software can really do — but the real case is some marketing dude thinks (likely sometimes correctly) that if the intro is too long, people will think it's complicated and won't use it. If that's the case, we're again being dragged down by the lowest (of most ordinary) common denominator.
Solutions? How about the Quick Tour, and even the outline/TOC of a full manual, so we can at least skim it and see if some feature exists and then Google/DDG it...?
I think relying on google might be too far, but there is certainly a middle group. My linux tools usage vastly improved by switching to a newer shell , with auto complete, pop up man pages, syntax checking arguments before executing, etc. Same with vim and tmux. Also using modern cli tool replacements that rust made popular. I wasted so much time when I was younger remembering things that provide a very small to no advantage if you do the above instead.
So, I'd say, google can be wrong, the ideal case is modify your existing tools as needed to maximize discoverability and minimize friction to actual documentation
This pattern is quite global. Everything is "more available" now, real time streamed, there's no apparent need for apriori organization since we can correct on the fly. Or so it seems.
Games are patched live, browser in constant update etc etc
> I've been astonished at how often a feature was added 3 years ago to a program I've used for 8 years,
This looks suspiciously similar to lifecycle of a social media, especially how they grow new features and eventually dies when users migrate.
Maybe it's a viable strategy for a social media, mobile OS, MMORPG, anything aaS to not explain features or educate users, but to grow as users consume added mechanics, until it becomes impossible for new users to catch up and old users to keep up?
I actually miss picking up books like the Macintosh Bible where you can read through UI features. There was something fun about reading and then trying it in front of the keyboard.
I'm very, very tired of the size of the backlog of stuff I probably ought to Google. It's too freaking long. Just make it easy to do without looking it up!
I really LOVE how rust approaches this: provide as much help as possible in the compiler error messages. Not sure if they were inspired by elm that does this too, but it means you do a lot less context switching between your program and “the manual”/stackoverflow/whatever else.
In the 1990s, plenty of people felt obligated to drive to the mall, walk into B Dalton, and purchase a 300 page book to learn how to use their new software. There was a whole section for it.
Today, they can find the equivalent information for free without leaving the device where the software is running.
Hard to say though if those books were in fact published by opportunists that surmised (correctly) that there was an audience out there that were either intimidated by the software manual (or assumed they would be without actually trying to read it) or who had pirated the software and so had no manual.
I haven't encountered a professional software product without a manual yet. What you describe applies to software for mass consumption only. It might change in the future, but it would be a bit ridiculous for a company to sell a product for a professional without documentation.
The G in "GUI" stands for "graphical." People forget that when they defend shitty, undiscoverable UI. The examples in this article are right on point. Apple (and others) far too often simply punt and give up on doing the necessary design work, burying functionality behind some bullshit like "long presses" or "gestures" or modifier keys or modifier-key-clicking on a text label that isn't even demarcated as a control.
UI design takes time and thought; that's true. But why does a company with Apple's resources not bring the necessary effort to bear on it? It's not as if they can't afford it. Sure, there are time constraints, but if you're going to fold to those and trowel out shitty UI, then don't presume to publish "human interface guidelines" or other such bibles.
And it's high time to stop tolerating smug douchebags who denigrate any complaint about missing functionality and declare, "Well, you simply long-press Option-Shift-Command-Q to bring up the configuration menu."
As an interface designer I am completely confident that you're looking at old usability through rose colored glasses. Most software these days doesn't come with a big monolithic manual because it doesn't need one. More people directly use software now than ever before and most of them will probably never read a single line from a software user manual; not because they don't exist, it's because they don't have to. The vanishingly small percentage of folks very experienced with interfaces designed for professional software users– often using old interface flows and metaphors– get frustrated with software designed for everybody else. Your understanding of software usability isn't representative– that's why almost no open source software, no matter how big the manual is, gains anywhere close to the same usage as their commercial equivalents.
That's not what the article ssys though.. do you really think "everybody else" would have discovered the actions described without any sort of help page?
I think the modern software does not come with the manuals because it simply has severly reduced functionality compared to the old days. For example, when was the last time you had used a navigation software with "avoid area" and "add custom road" features?
There was always a tradeoff between "more features thus more UX complexity" (power user approach) vs "cut features to keep UX simpler" (UX designer approach). Sadly, the designers won.
> do you really think "everybody else" would have discovered the actions described without any sort of help page?
No, the article is completely accurate about the lack of discoverability of those features. It highlights them because they are a direct contrast to nearly every other interface feature on iOS. That's what makes them interesting to interface designers.
> I think the modern software does not come with the manuals because it simply has severly reduced functionality compared to the old days.
Oh?
> For example, when was the last time you had used a navigation software with "avoid area" and "add custom road" features?
Did those navigation applications offer traffic overlaying satellite imagery? Public transit directions with real time vehicle tracking? Were you able to just type an address as we parse them or did you need to enter it in some weird little-endian order? Density of people at any given location, how many people are on a bus, or how busy Home Depot is? Up-to-date business hours? Alternate routes on regional rail and airlines? Up-to-date road closures even for temporal events? 3D photographic street-level POV navigation? Terrain maps? Cycling instructions? Weather? Descriptions of area attractions with an array of photographs for each? Wildfire maps? Hail you a ride share?
The number of gained features dwarfs the number of lost features by an order of magnitude in software lasting that long.
> There was always a tradeoff between "more features thus more UX complexity" (power user approach) vs "cut features to keep UX simpler" (UX designer approach).
You're wrong. Our software today does vastly more than software of yesteryear. Most of it feels so natural-- like those maps features-- that you don't notice it coming into existence. It just sort of fits right into the ecosystem-- and that's the whole point.
FOSS is a perfect example of what happens when software interfaces are assembled by developers rather than designed. I've been a developer, mostly towards the back of the stack, for a good 11 years. I also have art school education in interface design. Most developers have no idea how little they know about the way people use interfaces. To us, a GUI is a visual wrapper that facilitates interacting with the underlying software, like an API. Obfuscating functionality when it's not likely useful seems wasteful to someone used to reasoning about complex software. The problems arise when they take their personal usage preferences, assume they're representative of all users, and treat them as broadly applicable maxims in all of the software they create.
Most users don't have the mental models in place to reason about the software functioning behind the interface-- to them, the interface is the software. An interface that doesn't consider what users need to and almost as importantly, don't need to see at any given point is confusing. Confusing is bad, so to them, the software is bad. To a developer, a confusing interface is something to be overcome by reading a manual.
For example, you'll regularly catch professional photographers kvetching about the cost of adobe products... they have almost all tried Gimp but nearly none of them use it. There's little photographers (vs. say, graphic designers) can do in Photoshop that they can't do in Gimp... so why don't more photographers use it? Because it was designed by developers, for users who already have a mental model of the way software works with little regard for everyone else. Literally the only people you see advocating for Gimp are more FOSS fans than artists. Ask photographers why they don't use it and they'll mention the same things every time-- the interface sucks. It's confusing. Things are in unexpected places and function in unexpected ways. Affinity Photo, on the other hand, is starting to get a following.
Photoshop is far from simple, but both the new user experience and the overall capability vastly surpass Gimp. That's why Adobe's userbase grows by millions of users every year despite direct competitors and people having complained about the price since they released v1. Software with expert users will either accommodate expert workflows or they'll no longer have expert users. Software with new users will accommodate beginners or nobody will adopt the software, if there's competition.
Inkscape, on the other hand, enjoys a decent-ish reputation among professional vector graphics artists and unlike Gimp, is sometimes considered a viable tool of the trade. Illustrator and other tools do a hell of a lot more, but people don't roll their eyes when someone brings it up as a FOSS alternative.
Design vs functionality is a false dichotomy. The fact that so many developers assume complexity in interface == good functionality is the reason open source alternatives are alternative rather than the standard.
> Sadly, the designers won.
Your misplaced blame betrays your lack of understanding of what interface designers actually do. Only managers controlling the purse strings want software to do less. Designers are perfectly happy doing the hard work of figuring out the best ways to communicate software's functionality by what is shown, and what is not shown, on any given screen.
Could you imagine people with different domain expertise, like health insurance claims, designed the interfaces around people with their level of familiarity with the underlying systems? What would you say when they scoffed at your lack of sophistication when you refused to crack open a 400 page manual to file a simple claim? After all, it's right there on page 288 in the manual! How do you find it? Just look for 'adjustments, claims' in the index! How would you know to look for that term? "Hhhhhhhh... you don't deserve to have that claim filled!"
Hyperbolic? Sure. But you shouldn't need an existing mental model of the underlying insurance claim machine to file an insurance claim, and that flavor of contempt for users not already understanding "how software works" is endemic in software development, and exactly what designers mitigate.
I think you might be misreading the intent behind those statements in one of two ways:
1) Capability != Experience. Gimp is capable of doing about what Photoshop can do for photographers but with a much, much worse experience.
2) Photographers aren't the only Photoshop users and Gimp's shortcomings are much more consequential for, say, Graphic Designers. Comparing Gimp's typesetting tools to Photoshop's is like comparing a screwdriver to a fully-stocked workshop. Since those features generally aren't on photographers radars, let alone in their regular workflow, I didn't include them.
You know, I've had experience teaching elderly and computer-illiterate people tech. It was much easier to teach them Windows in early 00s than iOS today, because the former, while looking more complicated, was also very consistent - once you explained the basics like drop-down and context menus and drag and drop, those things generally worked everywhere throughout the system, even in new apps they haven't seen before.
Conversely, with iOS, the problem isn't just that all those techniques are undiscoverable - it's that the tricks you learn for one app will rarely work in another. Well, that, and the fact that they regularly change basic UX, too, like removing the physical home button.
The Back Tap feature is my favorite "hidden" action on the iPhone. You can double (or triple) tap the back of the phone to trigger whatever action you want. For example, toggle the flashlight or lock rotation. Show Spotlight or run a Shortcut.
You have to adjust your grip so that you can robustly tap the back with your index finger (holding the phone firmly between the other four fingers and your palm/base of your thumb). I agree that it’s not really practical.
> I think Apple does a decent job telling people about iOS features across the User Guide, Tips.app, and the Apple Support YouTube channel.
I have a nit-pick with the article, because all of the listed features are features where an obvious, more intuitive interface exists, but may be clunkier.
Eg. Calculator: the way “real” IRL calculators change the number you type is with the “clear” button. IPhones support that. Personally, i didn’t know about the swipe, and I think they should add a backspace button because swiping is confusing and younger people may not understand clear either. But you don’t need to swipe to use the calculator.
Keyboard cursor: This feature was demo’ed live when it was released, and it added a more dexterous way to position the typing cursor besides just touching the text where you want (old way, still works). Touching the screen where you want to type is pretty discoverable, and has been a stable feature for a while. It matches how mice and word processors on desktops would work, and seems intuitive to just tap on screen where you want to type anyways.
Safari Tab Change: You can just go to the safari tab page, available by touching a permanent on-screen button. Also, the swipe to change tab feature mimics the operating system’s swipe to change app experience, where the URL bar is indicative of the system’s handlebar. (Also demo’ed live when the feature was launched).
> Eg. Calculator: the way “real” IRL calculators change the number you type is with the “clear” button. IPhones support that.
The screen recording of the calculator app seems to just have "C", which I would assume deletes the whole number, not one digit. That's not the same action.
The Android calculator has a backspace button, that removes a single digit. It's clearly recognizable as a backspace, just like on any other on-screen keyboard input.
> The screen recording of the calculator app seems to just have "C", which I would assume deletes the whole number, not one digit. That's not the same action
Correct. That’s how “irl” calculators work. You can retype the number easy enough, its not going to be more than a few characters long, but technically yes its a different action. To my point, you can still achieve your goal, through more discoverable means, but it may be more clunky. They should also have a regular backspace here imo.
That's a vestige of history, and not some innate property of a calculator. I went through school with a calculator that had cursor positioning, insert mode, and so on, and mine was definitely not the fanciest in class.
The idea of holding a computer calculator app to exactly the limits of a historical four function calculator is skeuomorphism at some of its worst.
* 2. Move the insertion point by dragging around the keyboard.*
Anyone know how to go down doing this? Left, right, and up are all good, but I can’t figure out how to go down consistently. The 1.5mm below the space bar is really fiddly.
What do you do when you are using a traditional laptop trackpad, you're dragging an item downward but your finger is already at the bottom of the trackpad?
(Hint: the amount the cursor moves does not only depend on the dragged distance on the trackpad.)
Now do the same thing for the on-screen virtual trackpad.
Is this to work around the way Apple has utterly and bafflingly broken the insertion-point handling in iOS?
It worked fine for years, and now suddenly it takes five tries to invoke the "select all", "paste", or whatever menu. And moving the insertion point? Cumbersome shitshow.
Why did Apple remove the cursor keys that would appear in landscape aspect? There’s still plenty of unused space for them. Thankfully there’s the long press on spacebar gesture but I only recently learned about that.
The PlainText app would show cursor keys in its customer keyboard but that’s long gone from the app store so I’ll lose it at my overdue upgrade.
Amen to all that, especially the headphone jack. I'd respect the company more for these anti-customer moves if they'd be honest about it or just say nothing.
But the stupid excuses for removing the jack are insulting to consumers and make Apple look like assholes.
I wonder what motivates the on-going degradation of UI that was sorted properly for years. The insertion-point and keyboard failures mentioned here are examples, and then there's the (widely scorned) new notification UI on Mac. Half the time you can't even dismiss a notification because the peek-a-boo X disappears when you roll ONTO the dialog. And the "snooze," etc. options are often missing. And if you have more than one notification, they're shown as a stack and the only dismissal option is "dismiss all." There's no way to just dismiss the top one and see what the next one in the stack is.
Oh yeah, and while we're on this, how about the suddenly asinine Groups functionality in your iOS contacts? You used to go into Groups, pick the type of contacts you wanted to see, then go back to the list. For example, let's say you have a group called Doctors. You'd go in there, press Doctors, and boom you're browsing your doctors.
Now when you go into groups, you have to manually scroll through them and hunt down and un-check whatever group(s) you're currently viewing, and then select the one you want to view. Who the hell manages categories like that? It's especially stupid when you consider that you can put people into more than one group at a time.
Note that enabling "Back Tap" will cause a daemon to run in the background all times taking a couple percent CPU (to detect this action, of course). I don't have very good numbers of the battery life impact but my guess is that it's perhaps half an hour or so. Might be worth keeping in mind when deciding whether to enable this feature.
> Note that enabling "Back Tap" will cause a daemon to run in the background all times taking a couple percent CPU
Is this true? I was under the impression that iPhones (and most modern high end devices) had dedicated hardware to monitor these sort of features, and triggers a system event in the OS (the same way you don’t need a daemon to check for a keyboard or power button).
It is, the process is named "AccessibilityUIServer". There is a dedicated motion coprocessor but when the events come back the are plumbed through CoreMotion to a framework called Phoenix, which runs a ML model on them.
This is a primary source :) Something needs to handle those interrupts. Perhaps this stack trace from the profiler may be enlightening as to what that thing is:
I had screenshot function mapped to back double tap when I attempted to use iPhone last year, result was a gallery full of screenshots triggered by putting the phone on a table.
Wow, these are great! The back tap feature seems really handy, and it even worked with my case on. I guess they're doing it by sensing phone movement/rotation rather than some sort of touch sensor on the back.
> Tips.app? You mean that piece of trash that tells me a bunch of useless noise?
The first thing I do when setting up iOS is delete the stock apps, including Tips.app. I just downloaded it to see what it actually is, and flipped through it for a few minutes.
I'm not sure what useless noise you're referring to. After going through the app, it contains a very good list of things to know about using an iPhone, such as how to navigate, how to set up features like Medical ID and use Emergency SOS, as well as personalize your iPhone will wallpapers, sounds, font sizes, etc.
Tips does a very good job of not being information overload -- there are 5 sections under "Get Started", with each section having a 5-10 short sentences about each feature. It also contains a link to the full iPhone User Guide.
There's no upselling or suggesting that you buy some subscription in the app, nor any ads. I'm not sure what you have against this app, even someone who's had an iPhone for a while will probably learn one new thing after spending 5-10 minutes in it.
> Apple Support Youtube Channel? I have to use a competitor's product to learn about the iPhone?
This is ridiculous.
> So I have to move my fingers from the keyboard at the bottom of the screen to some imaginary place at the top of the screen? It's hard enough getting the damn phone to understand a left/right swipe instead of an up/down swipe!
You're switching from the topic of discoverability to Apple makes poor features.
> that is trying to disagree with the parent in every way possible
I'm not trying. I do. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's how internet discussions sometimes work.
> The parent linked to it in their comment
Thanks. I'll clarify what I meant; that URL was not provided to me by Apple or sales representatives when I purchase my iPhone 8, iPhone Xs, or iPhone 13.
> The first thing I do when setting up iOS is delete the stock apps
Cool, that's you. The first thing I do when setting up iOS is go over all of the settings.
I don't delete stock apps because I have trauma over Android completely breaking when deleting things that come with the phone. I have no idea what will break iOS or not and I don't want to break the phone and spend the stupid amount of time to fix something I know nothing about.
> > Apple Support Youtube Channel? I have to use a competitor's product to learn about the iPhone?
> This is ridiculous.
What exactly is ridiculous about expecting a company to provide support on a company's own facilities instead of using third parties?
> You're switching from the topic of discoverability to Apple makes poor features.
> > Apple Support Youtube Channel? I have to use a competitor's product to learn about the iPhone?
> This is ridiculous.
What exactly is ridiculous about expecting a company to provide support on a company's own facilities instead of using third parties?
This is absolutely ridiculous. You don't have to use a competitors product to learn about the iPhone. You can use the Tips app, the iPhone user manual, Apple support documentation, AppleCare over the phone and over chat, or you can even go to an Apple Store for a training session for free.
Alternatively, you can choose to view Apple's tutorial videos on YouTube, which is, without a shadow of a doubt the largest and most commonly used video sharing web service. You argue it should be on the "company's own facilities," and I'm not sure what exactly that means in this case, since Apple does not have a widely-used cross-device video sharing platform.
Tips.app? You mean that piece of trash that tells me a bunch of useless noise?).
It's so strange to see someone call an app that helps onboard new iOS users a "piece of trash" in a discussion around discoverability in iOS. To make matters worse, it seems like you've never opened Tips.app, because if you had, you'd know that it is actually a great resource for new users (the homepage for Tips.app shows me tutorials like "Navigate your phone" and "What's new in iOS 16", which are not actually 'useless noise'. If you had even bothered to scroll to down one and a half screens on the initial view of Tips.app, you'd see a clear and obvious link to the 'iPhone User Guide'.
Your criticism's aren't compelling because they don't come across as the complaints of a real user making a sincere effort, your comments read like invective written by someone who has significant disdain for Apple as a company.
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.
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
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.
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
So there is an onboarding process that is skippable, and it would appear that either most people either do, or at least click-through. While the onboarding doesn’t show every gesture and shortcut, it does show how to “figure out how to use this device”.
And herein lies the problem, and it’s not exclusive to iOS. No matter how much hand holding there is, if the user doesn’t engage, then it’s a lost cause. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.
Discoverability is as much about trying something that you know works elsewhere as it is showing direct affordances.
> It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one.
Swipes, and especially swipes from behind the edge were definitely not "fundamental" in the first version of iOS. I don't even recall them being fundamental in the first iPad.
I’ve been using iOS devices for years and getting what I want when I swipe down is a constant roll of the dice. Did I do it in the ambiguous zone for the control center or did I do it where I’ll get recent notifications? Oh wait if I’m on my phone instead of my tablet I need to swipe up for the control center. Why it needs to be different on the tablets I’ve never really known, it used to be from the bottom and it was really nice for it to be consistent. Maddening.
Phones with home buttons have the control centre in the same place it always was, at the bottom. Only the newer notch-style phones have it on the top-right.
I have always thought this was weird, but for what it’s worth, it works the same way on the tablets (if it has a home button, swipe from the bottom, otherwise, swipe from the top right).
Nope. The iPad Air 2 I’m typing this on has a home button but makes me swipe from the top right for the control panel. And yes it is fairly up to date, it’s on 15.6.1.
It’ll probably change in a few years again. Except it won’t for some devices.
I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Japan, when you buy a phone in a mobile carrier shop, they set it up for you, which means any on-boarding that exists on the phone OS is skipped entirely.
iOS setup is personalized so your carrier shouldn’t be setting up anything for you. E.g when you startup you need to setup your faceid and other personal info, that a carrier can’t setup. The most a carrier can do is pre-configure the phone with a specific activation.
If they’re skipping that for users then they’re breaking the entire flow for transferring data , setting up payment and authentication etc…
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect
You’d be surprised.
> and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.
The information is out there. When you first run, when you upgrade, there are numerous prompts to show you “what’s new”. Many ‘power users’ (I really dislike that name) arrogantly dismiss these. Then there are the online guides, the offline guides (book in the books app, Tips app). If the user pays attention, there are affordances everywhere — the safari tabs example in the article being a perfect example.
> 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.
This is testament to the point I’m making. Sure some of it isn’t completely obvious, but this ain't one of them, and discoverability isn’t about obviousness. If that were the case, we’d still be hunter-gatherers.
Yous said all that, and it's still not a justification to introduce a non-obvious and unique UI/UX paradigm just in one place that prevents user from accomplishing the task they need to do.
It's obvious. As soon as you touch the flashlight button, there is haptic feedback along with the button growing, exactly like the camera button on the other side. And yes, the button grows beyond the size of a 95th percentile finger. Now, whether or not you pay attention to the physical and visual cues is up to you. The cues are there. The instructions are in the official online guide as well as "About 3,020,000" other pages. They are in the official user guide in the books app. It's 'discoverable' without much of cognitive load for anyone that has used a phone in the last 20 years, not 'immediately obvious'.
Hmm? If you accidentally turned on the flashlight and it was left on, you would be bummed to find out your battery had drained next time you picked it up.
The reason it’s the same there is that that screen looks exactly the same as the Home Screen. So, if you know how the Home Screen works, you know how this one works. Making it different would be non-discoverable.
But, personally, I’d rather a UI that’s convenient to use rather than discoverable. Discovering a feature happens once, using happens forever.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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".
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What I find most annoying in iOS UX is how much information is tucked behind the "Share" icon. Having to click the share button to access "Find on Page" is super unintuitive.
To add insult to injury, sometimes the share sheet is really, really slow! Like several seconds with no UI feedback to indicate anything is going on! That’s quite frustrating when I want to quickly invoke my password manager or search on page.
I agree, the share sheet is just too confusing. Favorites management, my password manager, air drop, texting, find on page, and the kitchen sink are all in there and are quite undiscoverable if you don’t know to look for them.
To add some confusion on top of that, some features and extensions go in the similarly un-discoverable “aA” button in the URL bar, so it’s not even like everything goes in the share sheet. That button is really tough to remember even exists since it goes away when you scroll.
You don’t have to use Share for Find on Page. Just type in the address bar, then “On this Page” will be the bottom option. Obviously, that doesn’t seem to be sufficiently discoverable as well.
The share button also has actions that vary unnecessarily.
For example, in SFSafariViewController there is no “add to home screen” button, but in actual safari there is. Despite them both being web view experiences controlled entirely by Apple.
(And you can’t detect SFSafariViewController vs Safari as a web app, so good luck onboarding users for your PWA.)
Have you looked at Apple’s Shortcuts App that allows some customisation of the share actions? e.g. that is the way to run JavaScript snippets in a web page on Mobile Safari (equivalent to javascript: bookmark urls in desktop browsers). I’ve only tried it on iPad, but I presume it works the same on iPhone (it would be unobvious if it didn’t).
The Shortcuts App is the way to access some deep and very unobvious functionality.
It's a little ironic how at the advent of the iPhone, the desktop os was mocked as being clunky and full of those things you just have to know, rather than being discoverable. The iPhone was limited and simple. And it really helped adoption of smartphones. Now it's assumed everybody is already familiar with smartphones and welcomes yet another shortcut or gesture to make usage quicker. Take Android and the removal of the three buttons at the bottom, in exchange for some gestures. Just so the interface looks cleaner. Imagine someone who has never used a smartphone before would be starting out with that. Just hand them the phone and see how long it takes them to return to the home screen after opening the first app.
Not to say this is good or bad, just an observation mostly.
The removal of the three dots completely throws me for a loop. I simply could not get the gestures to stick in my brain. And not to sound entitled, but... I shouldn't have to?
Anyway I'm ride or die for the three dots and am pretty worried they'll kill off the option to bring them back.
I don't use gestures, never had, if possible never will. Phone works 100% fine for me as it is (samsung s22 ultra), i am as efficient with it as I want and need. Whatever works for you is how you should use the product.
Plus, lets not be pathetic with wasting life on phone, real life happens outside screens. Its good to keep reminding oneself this little truth regardless how shiny new gimmicks manufacturers bring to keep us glued to their products and ad-based services.
The iPhone got some undeserved credit for being intuitive just because it was so limited. It did not even have copy/paste. Even now, it is far from obvious how to use undo (tap with three fingers). It’s when there are many features that great UI/UX designers shine.
Late to this thread - while 3-finger tap pops up the text editing menu, you can undo with a three-finger swipe from right-to-left, and redo is left-to-right. Also if you have something highlighted you can do a 3-finger pinch-in to copy, do it twice to cut, and the reverse (pinch-out?) to paste.
I like the way Xiaomi enabled gestures on my phone. The default was the three button layout, with the option to switch to gestures. The moment you enable gestures, you get a little interactive tutorial on how to use them so you don't get confused.
Android at least lets you re-enable the old UI in most cases. And then there's the ability to install custom launchers etc that also helps maintain sanity with major releases.
I moved to iOS over a year ago after using Android exclusively, and I agree that this was a discoverability downgrade. Editing text with various multi-finger gestures, shaking the device, or even putting the entire Photos app into a different mode to select multiple items are outright downgrades to what Android does.
The iPhone innovated finger-touch-based on-screen keyboards while everyone else was still typing with a stylus on a tiny keyboard, but since then, they seem to stagnate. iOS 16 just got haptic feedback on its keyboard in 2022(!), and I am still making more typing errors compared to Android with Gboard.
> iOS 16 just got haptic feedback on its keyboard in 2022
Wow thanks for letting me know. I finally have haptics again after switching to an iPhone 6 years ago.
I totally agree with iOS having a worse typing experience. On Android with Gboard I could swipe/type extremely quickly with few errors. On iOS I make a mistake every few works, and the swipe accuracy is significantly worse.
I know that there is Gboard with iOS, but I've had a lot of trouble with custom keyboards on iOS, so I've given up.
Well, the screen estate on a mobile device is limited, so the number of actions that are easy to discover needs to be limited too - otherwise the UI would be cluttered. I find Apple good at balancing this. Notice how actions that he mentions are just quicker alternatives to stuff that one can already do in another way.
That excuse doesn't hold for the calculator example, where the 0 button takes up 2 spaces for no good reason, and they could easily added a backspace button instead.
> That excuse doesn't hold for the calculator example, where the 0 button takes up 2 spaces for no good reason, and they could easily added a backspace button instead.
It would be a really weird place for a backspace button and you would always tap on it by mistake.
Not 'just' quicker. Easier. Less frustrating. Important elements. This is my experience of using the long-spacebar technique for placing the cursor.
Digressing: An AI noticing that someone has moved the cursor several time without ever typing anything could pop up a "Want me to show you other ways to move the cursor?" dialog, and teach the 'hard to discover' technique. I await the day ...
The Calculator app could suggest that I can swipe on the display at the top if it notices that I'm using 'C' often. This would not even need an AI. I wonder if there are UI frameworks that support the detection and suggestion of "better" actions?
I never used Clippy. Reviled? You mean Microsoft took the idea of 'context appropriate useful suggestions' and bungled the user interface? Inconceivable!
This seems crucial to me - most of these 'nondiscoverable' actions are shortcuts, and there is another discoverable way to achieve the same outcome. They are similar to keyboard shortcuts in that way, they just help power users who know them.
(The calculator backspace seems to be an exception, which is why I also dislike it.)
There isn't a backspace in the calculator, but the swipe is still (basically) a shortcut for something which does have a button. Pressing the C button clears the current input entirely, after all.
The worst degradation for my UX with my iPhone has been when they added some Siri smart search stuff to searching. I'm someone who's given up on memorizing the layout of my apps and I always just swipe down and search by the name of the app. This used to be extremely efficient. Usually a single letter is enough to have the app be in the top 3 results
Now they also search a bunch of other apps and I think Siri does something with your searches, possible even looking for web results. All I really want is for the app results to show up first and not have them bogged down by all the other stuff being searched
Edit: Seems I'm not the only one.[0][1] Also what I was talking about was called "Spotlight search" now its in "Siri & Search". Doesn't seem like there's a real solution
Yeah sorry I should've specified I already tried turning Siri results off and it didn't help. I see you can also turn off "Show Content in Search" for each app... I guess I can spend 10 minutes doing that on my 100+ apps
I do the same and instead just search from the App Library screen that shows only apps.
Like I just swipe to that screen which is my second screen and enter the first letter and it’s done. Same amount of swipes just right instead of down!
Doesn’t help if you have pages of apps and have to swipe five or six times to get to the App Library but I hide them all in two folders, one for Apple apps and one for installed apps so searching is key. (this was before the option to add to App Library only, indeed before App Library existed I’d basically created my own!)
> Doesn’t help if you have pages of apps and have to swipe five or six times to get to the App Library
There’s another hidden feature: swiping on the row of dots near the bottom of the screen lets you scroll through the pages at speed.
Om iOS 16, you have to turn off the search field on the home page, since it replaces the dots. Fortunately, you can still swipe down to reveal the old search field.
You don’t have to turn the search field off at all. Just swipe the search field.
This is a great example of how discovery works. Before replying, I just tried swiping and it worked.
Edit: normal swiping between screens switches the search field to dots. This got me to thinking, how much of this is a discovery problem (which I’m increasingly finding harder to believe) to one of users not paying attention.
Swiping on the search field works (I had already forgotten that), but when you have a lot of pages, as I do, the feedback is much worse, as it does not expand the field to accomodate all the dots. It’s amazing what difference such small details make.
Edit: The feedback is unimportant if all you want is to swipe to one end, if course; which is what prompted this subthread.
I love articles like this because they make me feel like a super-genius even though I am completely average.
Every single one of those esoteric morsels of forbidden knowledge is in the Tips app, which I read from top to bottom when it was first released.
Here are the instructions on how to delete a number in the calculator, the first arcane incantation the author discovered through his or her intense study of the dark arts: https://imgur.com/a/3BgTg1K
Something which I've known for years, because I RTFM.
I'm willing to bet, but not bothered enough to check, that every single "TOP TEN FEATURES APPLE IS HIDING FROM YOU" is thoroughly documented, with full-color illustrations where warranted, in Tips.app.
It has been a long time but I believe that Tips.app comes preinstalled and there are some nag-notifications for you to read it.
I am sure many people smarter than I instantly deleted Tips.app the second they set up their phone to which I can only say "Careful, Icarus".
And yeah, I read the manuals that come with my all of my products, usually while on the toilet. Who doesn't want to know the amperage a NES Mini draws from its AC adapter?
I grew up in the technology era where if you didn't read the manual you were screwed, and my Apple IIgs Toolbox book, which I read from cover to cover to learn how to program my IIgs is still on my shelf surrounded by hundreds of other reference books.
Tips.app is just the 2022 Apple IIgs Toolbox and I'm not haughty enough to look down on it.
I like this feature, but what annoys me is that unlike the regular use of Back, you can’t Forward to undo the Back in that situation, even in the common case that the original tab is at the top of the history (i.e. has no current Forward target of its own).
Right, but the reopened tab doesn’t restore to the previous scroll position as Forward does, and the tab also cannot be closed by Back anymore, both meaning that it isn’t a true Undo. These are just more inconsistencies. The problem is that iOS is full of such smaller and bigger inconsistencies.
Another thing that annoys me is when you open a new tab via Look Up > Search Web (which in a sense is quite similar to opening a link in a new tab), then that new tab cannot be closed by Back.
I wish Apple would spend a year or two in streamlining all that stuff.
I was very late to the smartphone game, transitioning somewhat suddenly from a Nokia to an iPhone SE. I found the discoverability to be against everything I was taught as a programmer. It really felt like I was expected to have grown up with the iPhone from the first generation.
Worse yet, the gestures ... I searched in vain for a decent printable sheet of the commonly used gestures, only to make my own set of diagrams for an iPad I tried to get my mother to use, leaving her with a set of laminated sheets: the green one detailing the parts of the iPad, the red sheet showing the different screens and how to get there, and finally a blue one with the gestures.
I think iOS really needs a "Tutorial mode" app bundled with it. This of course requires that someone resist the temptation to interject with all of the bundled apps that Apple wants you to know about but aren't needed to do the basics. No Focus, no Stocks, no Apple TV ... just show me how to get around in some Settings, practice locking and unlocking a screen, drills for all of the basic gestures.
It's worse than that. If you started with iPhone from the first generation, you'd have remembered how to use the home button (which also had a lot of functionality crammed into it, with double- and even triple-clicks). Which eventually got removed, so anyone who got used to that - like, say, my parents - had to re-learn once they upgraded.
> I don’t think any of these are intuitive or easily discoverable.
Then again, perhaps they don’t need to be universally intuitive / discoverable; i.e.: the users who need these features may instinctively search for them and eventually discover them.
Anecdotally, I’ve been able to discover three out of four actions mentioned in the article (the fourth one was about the calculator app, which I don’t use that often).
> the users who need these features may instinctively search for them and eventually discover them
I discovered the “space bar allows you to move the cursor around” hack through a friggin’ TikTok video only a few weeks ago. My mind was blown; never did I realize I needed a feature this much, I always thought it was just my fat thumbs that were the problem.
My wife was equally blown away.
Some may consider me an idiot for not discovering this earlier or googling this, but seriously, I just never realized there could be a better way and was always blaming my fat thumbs. I just thought other people never had this problem.
What does anyone have to gain by making it a quest to find these features? It doesn’t benefit the user who found them anyway and obviously doesn’t help the user who didn’t find them. Does it make you part of a UX VIP club to find them?
>The users who don’t need these features don’t have to know about them, don’t have to click through tutorials, or be pestered by hints.
Welcome to the new iCalculator!
To simplify your experience, the only operator button is "+", which now takes half of the screen, and is therefore easy to find and press, adding to the pleasure of using the calculator.
You might ask, where's the "-" button? Was it stupid to remove it? No, it's brave! Don't be so negative about it; our UX studies show that "+" is statistically the most used button, and so your needs don't matter.
If you need to subtract, swipe "+" button down; to multiply, swipe "+" right, and to divide, swipe "+" down. Swipe "+" up to raise to an exponent.
To quickly square numbers, hold "+", then perform a square gesture clockwise aronud the button. To take a square root, perform it in reverse.
You may notice that we have removed the digit buttons as well. That's because you don't need to type the numbers in - just say them out loud! Swipe the screen diagonally from the bottom left corner to the top right one to activate voice input.
Note: digit buttons can still be enabled from the accessibility options in the system dialog.
Note 2: voice recognition of operators is coming in a future upgrade.
To clear your input, you can simply restart the app, no buttons needed.
Note 3: you can enable a haptic shortcut in system acessibility settings: "Clear input by shaking phone".
Finally, you can read this instruction manual by telepathically tuning into the lead engineer's mind, as it's not available anywhere else.
That's one approach. Or we could add all kinds of buttons and some Clippy that gives you a random hint every now and then. I'd say Apple's solution is a nice middle ground.
Who has ever used a calculator and hasn't needed a backspace key? This is not an unnecessary feature that can be hidden behind an unguessable UI.
I wonder if anyone knows when this gesture was introduced. Has it been there since the beginning? I've had an iPhone since the day they came out, have watched most iPhone announcements and WWDC keynotes, and I had no idea about this gesture. I wonder how many Apple Geniuses are aware of it.
I have never needed this. If I make a mistake, use the C button, just like old-style pocket calculators.
PCalc has a backspace button, along with a bunch of other buttons making it more complicated than the iPhone calculator. It makes sense that Apple kept it simple with just a C/AC button.
So could they just have an AC button, since one could also just start completely fresh?
Given how Apple's Calculator works on the Mac, with the delete key erasing digits one at a time, it would be sensible for them to offer this key on iOS.
If they offered no delete functionality, that would be insisting that no one needs it. They don't do this — they offer the functionality behind a gesture that is nearly impossible to discover.
I would say most people don't know 90% of how to use the iOS interface but ppl are in general not interested in learning it and wouldn't read a manual if the box included one or even watch videos of it. People just what Apple to read their minds, to get their stuff done in as little effort as possible and people are willing to pay a lot of money for that experience
I fail to see the flaw here. When catering to large groups of diverse people, I don’t expect homogenous use of a product. Everyone should be able to find their own high-value solutions within a product, according to their real needs.
We could call the presented paradigm needs-based discovery.
It inherently means that some people won’t be aware of solutions that benefit others – that is, until their need or exposure evolves. And that is okay. More than okay, it’s great. To return to the basics… people don’t like being inundated with features they don’t want and they do like discovering solutions to problems.
This is excellent design.
Could those features be better presented? Always.
The iPhone interface has an incredible array of constraints: it needs to serve literally every type of person on the planet. That’s beautiful. I have huge respect for designers capable of connecting with such diverse stakeholders. It is masterful design in the most pure sense.
I used iPhone 2008-2012, Windows Phone 2012-2015, Android 2015-2022, and then recently bought an iPhone again to see what it's like these days.
I was baffled by how unintuitive it has become. So many "secret codes" you need to know these days to use an iPhone. Swiping down from the top on the left or the right bring you different dashboards? Swiping up from the bottom and hold to switch between tasks? How is anyone supposed to guess guess this stuff?
They could read the onboarding steps you are forced to click through when you set up the phone. Or the “Tips” app that comes preinstalled. Or even the full and extensive manual on iOS.
While I also hate the "undescoverability". It's possible that all (maybe not all) usecases of an app are still available to anything visible. For older or less tech interested people, this is actually perfect.
The problem lies in the following cases:
1) Person accidentally does something
2) Edge case / state / scenario, which cannot be solved without knowing some shortcuts.
I think iOS became too complicated for some people. At the same time the UI is a pretty messy and inconsistent at times.
The other problem is the flat design which makes it non-obvious which parts of the UI are tappable controls and which are just read-only design elements or indicators or labels.
Another issue is inconsistent placement. For example during iPhone setup, sometimes you have Continue buttons centered in the bottom half of the screen, and sometimes you have to tap the small “Next” label at the top right of the screen. I’ve had family members get stuck in that process because the Next button was so inconspicuous and so far removed from the main elements of the current dialog that it was completely unclear to them how to move forward.
In unfamiliar UIs, I often find myself accidentally triggering keyboard shortcuts and getting into weird states, so 1) leading to 2). A classic example is changing into override mode[0] in Microsoft Word or similar[1].
You end up in a mode where typing no longer adds characters, but replaces them. If you're at the end of the document, it would still add characers, but you stay in override mode. Meaning that once you're in this mode, it doesn't strike until you start editing or try to fix a typo, when the computer. WordPad doesn't even have any visual distinction.
Visual Studio Code's solution to this is nice. If you enter `Tab Moves Focus` mode, with <kbd>Ctrl</kbd>+<kbd>M</kbd>, the info bar shows the text `Tab Moves Focus` in a (tastefully) highlighted button, clicking which disables that mode. So you will have a moment of confusion upon pressing tab, inadvertently entering the mode, however the situation of 2) is avoided as a helping hand is visible.
Perhaps another UI is to have a log of activated keyboard shortcuts always visible, with 'new' shortcuts highlighted more obviously (perhaps with some estimation of decaying familiarity). I'm not familiar with this being implemented anywhere, but I think it at least merits consideration.
[0] This is activated with <kbd>Insert</kbd>; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insert_key
[1] In the version of Word I currently have installed, this behaviour seems to be disabled/removed. However, Wordpad still changes into override mode upon pressing Insert.
I was surprised when I needed to use my partner's iPhone I had no idea how to complete certain basic actions, despite using a similar Android smartphone every day. Maybe I had gotten used to the undiscoverable features on my phone, but I felt that a modern iPhone was borderline unusable for me without learning about certain hidden actions like swiping from different edges of the screen and knowing where certain settings are.
What this article misses is that a lot of these features are shortcuts for things that are not essential or you could achieve in other ways.
These are generally referred to as accelerators, and are by design harder to discover as they are targeted at expert users. You trade learnability for convenience and efficiency (also less clutter, which should not be underestimated).
Just to clarify, there are indeed also some places in iOS where it’s maybe less ideal, but my point is that there is a place for undiscoverable features.
Where I work we've been developing mobile apps since the first iPhone, and we still have these "How the hell was I supposed to know?" moments quite often.
A couple of my friends who don't work in tech. are sort-of hobbyist iOS fanboys, and they always get a kick out of it when they show me some feature or gesture that I wasn't familiar with.
This drives me mad too. However, not sure it’s the end of the world. In many cases these are extra shortcuts, analogous to key bindings. Power users are (should be?) aware of the existence of such things and look them up. It’s hard to make keyboard shortcuts discoverable (though IntelliJ does a good job).
I think it’s extremely problematic when these are core UI actions instead of shortcuts. Manipulating long form text is quite annoying without the space-bar trick for example. Hard to see how you’d make that discoverable though. (An interesting UX thought experiment!)
The space bar trick is clearly explained in the iOS manual. Probably even in the Tips app too. At some point there is just no way to get people to know every feature short of forcing them to read the manual and locking the phone with a quiz on it at the end.
My least favourite “feature” of iOS now is shake-to-undo. I’ve never triggered it intentionally. It’s too weird of a thing to remember when I actually want to do it. It would also feel ridiculous even if I remembered it. The only times I trigger it, it’s by accident, and then I need to cancel it.
The one that bugs me sometimes is shake to send feedback, because the feedback form isn’t useful whenever I trigger it by accident. The funniest implementation is Microsoft Teams, where if you shake it pops up a feedback form that then says you can’t send feedback because it can only be sent via Mail.app, not Outlook (you know, the Microsoft email client that your IT department makes you use instead of Mail.app?).
On the contrary it's one of my favourite iOS features. If you're writing any volume of text on mobile it's super useful to undo accidental mistakes. Android just doesn't have undo at all and your text is gone. Probably would be better as a long press menu option though.
I actually use that quite frequently, because it’s often quicker than the equivalent text editing operations. You can turn it off in Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Shake to Undo.
Today I learned the calculator app allows character deletion. Weirdly you can swipe both left/right and they both behave as backspace. That’s pretty weird!
I knew the other gestures, which are nice conveniences. The lack of clear controls in the calculator is a good example of poor discoverability. The other examples are actions which all have more obvious alternatives, either visible in the UI (tab switching of various sorts) or more directly interacting (caret placement). I think it’s fine that those are less discoverable because you don’t actually need to know they exist unless you want to, and they become obvious when you find them.
With, uh, one big exception: the new tab/back button thing is an excellent idea, and I even remember it being announced as a major new Safari feature (on macOS! It might’ve even still been called OS X it’s been around so long). But it’s horribly buggy, leaving phantom tabs and history behind at every turn, and has been the same since it shipped. I think I have a mental model of how it works and its failure modes, but just imagining the explanation is exhausting.
The article argues that blue text is obviously a clickable link, but that swiping from the left to navigate back isn’t. While I do think it makes a difference that the link is visually different, I also think that what is affordable or discoverable is ultimately a subjective thing. You could argue that for anyone born in this millennia, swiping down to refresh is just as intuitive that blue text being clickable.
I don't think the Safari "swipe the URL bar to switch tabs" example is unintuitive. There is a strong hint at their swipeability because you can see the neighbouring tabs poking out on each side. I remember discovering this almost immediately when it was introduced!
(It's perhaps slightly less intuitive that you can also swipe the bar UP to access the tab switcher interface)
Hmm. I tried it on iOS Chrome and iOS Firefox. Works in Chrome (but it's not as obvious as in Safari because you don't see the adjacent tabs at the edge of the screen) ... but curiously not in Firefox.
The long-press spacebar wasn't even really a great design, it was a hack to replace an older, better feature.
iPhones prior to the iPhone 11 used to be able to sense the pressure you touched with on the display, and a firm touch had a ton of neat but hard to discover user interactions, from previewing links in safari without opening them to preventing accidentally hitting the flashlight on the lockscreen on X/XS by requiring a bit of pressure.
One of the best (imo) features was the ability to move the cursor in any direction by dragging firmly anywhere on the keyboard. No delay, no press and hold, just instant access to a cursor. The new "haptic touch" way of doing this makes it difficult if not impossible to scroll down, and needing to press and hold ensures it will always be slower.
I really miss the haptic touch features. The flashlight one was particularly cool because you could instantly enable it by just clicking it like you'd click on an actual flashlight (usually the on button requires some pressure). Now it's an awkward half second delay that is still hard to discover and now feels less natural.
In my experience (on an iPhone 7 Plus), the hard-press still involved a small delay, so the new long-tap isn't that much different. They may have optimized this in newer versions of the phone, but I jumped from a 7 to an 11 and thought it wasn't that bad. I didn't like the original version because the delay left me wondering if I'd pressed hard enough or not waited long enough for it to activate.
I found swiping on the Safari URL bar to switch between tabs a bit too “discoverable”: I was constantly performing it by accident when trying to switch between apps. I quickly switched back to “Single Tab” mode in settings.
Because Apple cannot deign to offer its users even basic physical documentation of how their glass slab works, publishers have filled the void with books with large pictures and screenshots of iOS functionality:
1) iPad for Dummies (they need to get rid of that name)
2) a bunch of random publishers selling magazine-style paperbacks like "iPad OS Guide for 2022". You can find these on mag-sharing websites, as they're low-volume and usually only available at checkout counters at grocery stores, or airport shops.
I can forgive the URL bar swipe to change between tabs, because there is a visual cue that the other tabs are there - the URL bars of the adjacent tabs peek onto the screen.
I actually like the way Apple is doing these things.
There is almost always a way to achieve the same things using established patterns, that takes slightly longer and is a little less convenient.
It's not like you can't use an iPhone without knowing about these little "shortcuts".
Admittedly, most users won't discover these hacks, because of poor discoverability.
They could add a ton of UI like dedicated buttons for all these hidden gestures, even label them to make it more obvious what they do. The downside is, that the UI would quickly become a complete mess.
Another way would be to have the user sit through a tedious tutorial upon opening the app for the first time and then remind them from time to time how to do things. This gets annoying really fast.
The real alternative Apple would choose however is to simply omit these little features and "streamline" their apps.
Because they aren't core the usability of the phone, I consider them welcome extras, which means I'm delighted every time I learn a new one rather than bummed out about the ones I don't know about.
Discoverability isn’t important to shortcut functionality like this.
You don’t have to navigate text with the spacebar, you can touch the text directly and touch and hold.
You don’t have to delete numbers in the calculator, you can hit C to clear the current number and retype it (a lot of people think that doing this will totally clear your operation, which isn’t true: C is different than AC).
You can hit the tabs button in Safari to switch between tabs, swiping the address bar is a shortcut.
I would also argue that the safari address bar swipe is very discoverable. You can see the next tab’s address bar on the side of the interface, so it’s implied you can scroll to it.
Basically, an analogy to this argument is that the author of this article should be telling us that keyboard shortcuts should be banished because they’re not discoverable.
Also, I don’t think discoverability is the same on touch screens as in desktop operating systems. Nobody complains about the discoverability of pinch to zoom or tap and hold because it’s so obvious and intuitive. On the desktop, drag and drop is a similar feature that could be seen to be not so discoverable.
I've been an Android user since day 1 and had never used an iPhone until about a year ago when my company replaced my work phone (Android) with an iPhone. It took me two months before I realized there is a difference between swiping down from the top on the left and swiping down from the top on the right.
I don't think Android is necessarily better though - I simply have more experience with it.
These features aren't nondiscoverable; discovery just takes place outside the operating system, in communities like this one. Good designers know that communities are a constant of the power user UX just like a settings menu or instruction manual. You don't have to pollute the UI with hints and copy about every little thing because power users are their own discovery engines.
It's important to make features as easy to discover as possible. Especially the basic features.
The actions in this article are _shortcuts_. Like a single swipe to switch tabs. It's hard to make it more discoverable (there's a tiny hint on the hide, but that's it). At this point, there's two options:
- Overload the UI showing the possible action. Results in overloaded UIs and worse UX.
- Leave it as-is and just mention it online or in "did you know" pages.
The second option usually makes sense the most. I see a big online trend of "let's remove right click options because they're hard to discover", and I think it's ridiculous. Actions hidden behind right click should be visible elsewhere (e.g.: the options on a file manager are all in the menu bar too), but right click is a fast and convenient *shortcut*.
>Ah yes, the three finger force press double tap right swipe, of course.
What bothers me about these is how non technical people who don't search will never find them. On the other hand, it might be good to have things hidden so someone non technical can't get their phone into a bad state.
Another example of a very hidden feature is "export/print as pdf". If you do share => print, you don't get a pdf option, but you can do a zoom gesture on the preview and then +poof+, it's a pdf you can save. How was I supposed to discover that?
How tf would anyone think that swiping a calculator screen will make the digits go away one at a time, and that this behavior would be organically discovered?
As with all design you can have the discussion if there are better alternatives, but it's not that crazy to design it like this considering most old physical calculators don't have a backspace button.
They have C and CE (or AC) buttons to either clear the last entry or everything, similar to the app. You could very well reason they are sticking to convention.
Also in most basic use of a calculator it's quite fine to input the last number again, it's probably often even more convenient than backspace.
This makes the backspace swipe feature an extra, non-essential feature, and it's probably ok to not be discovered organically. Most UI is full of hard to organically discover accelerators aimed at expert users. They are intentionally not visible, to keep the basics simple for novice users.
The right question is; can people use the calculator app without knowing about this feature? The answer is yes, as many people do without any problem.
Again, you could have a discussion if there should be a visible backspace button, but accelerators are an important part of any well designed UI. To answer your question: They don't think it will be discovered organically, it's by design.
My favourite is the “double tap with three fingers to zoom in the display”. This happened to me by accident while my phone is in my pocket. The first time it happened, I had to borrow someone else’s phone to look up how to undo it.
I think the swiping back on new tab feature is a very well thought out piece of UX.
If a user taps a link that is set to open in a new window/tab, while the bottom/top (depending on user config) URL bar does animate to show the transition, the user may still expect to be able to navigate back to where they came from (especially in such a case where they haven't deliberately made the decision to open in a new tab).
I'd argue it would be worse UX for the back swipe to not navigate to the previous page in such circumstances than that it does but closes the tab (which is reasonably signalled by the URL bar animation).
It was even worse with the force touch" - sometimes I found myself pushing the screen, with finger turning white, trying to summon some functionality I was expecting to have there.
Even the basic spotlight search is pretty hard to discover. I'd say about half of the iPhone users I meet have never heard of the feature, and are surprised when I swipe down on their screen and show it to them. With iOS 16 though, they've finally added a button, so that should help on that front.
Another feature that isn't well known is swiping between recent apps by swiping horizontally along the bottom of the screen. I didn't know about that feature until somebody posted about it on HN a while back.
The best one is the kinetic (inertial) scrubbing they brought to videos on iOS 16. For example, open a YT video from Safari (don’t open on the YouTube app), go full screen and the flick to scroll backwards and forwards! I bet we’ll all consume more data as a result of this UI addition. I certainly use the YT mobile web version as a result.
The worst was when I had to Google how to delete a contact (I think it was the contacts list view, or something very similar), I have to swipe it to the side, then a big red delete button appears?? But dont swipe the wrong way because then it's something else?
It's probably different now, I ditched the Apple boat long ago.
I kind of want some way to record myself using my computer or phone, and have an expert look at the recording and point out things I’m doing the hard way.
Preferably software instead of human so it’d be slightly less embarrassing.
I’m afraid there’s a shortcut to something that would save me X minutes per day but that I’ll never even know to ask.
> I also think about the category of things that aren’t intuitive and require some guidance, like... putting together IKEA furniture. Woe is the fool who tries to discover a complicated IKEA piece through action!
Do people try to do this? I've never considered not using the IKEA instructions.
I’ve found watching the WWDC keynotes where they announce a new version of iOS or MacOS a good way to learn many of the new gestures and features.
For your average user many of these features will remain hidden and I suspect that’s partially by design. They want such users to have a simple experience.
I never understood the cliché about Ikea furniture being difficult to assemble. I always admired how they sidestepped the problem of producing directions in many languages by just using pictures. It's a marvel of clarity to me.
I'm a seasoned software developer and UX specialist and iPhones scare me. I have no idea how to use them and try to get them out of my hands as fast as possible. Interfaces like that give me serious anxiety.
Finding little gems like these by accident gives an impression of something bigger, something mysterious and grand. Seems like the author wants a giant red arrow saying gem here on a treasure hunt.
I like the surprise of finding these nuggets when I do discover them over time. Why does everything have to be so freaking obvious that even a toddler can discover it with eyes closed?
The Apple Books app has a iPhone User’s Guide for download that has all of these tricks documented. Apple should make it more obvious that there is official documentation there.
one thing I discovered just now, four years after switching to iPhone:
you can actually tap and drag the scrollbar! You need to find the correct time for it to appear, and you need to tap it just right - not too much on the top or on the bottom. And then you can very quickly go up or down, without stupid scrolling like idiot.
Very useful if you want to scroll more quickly. Scroll like it’s 1998!
these features may be hard to discover but they are all really useful. Imagine if Apple just didn’t add include because they couldn’t find any way to do so intuitively. And once you know them, they’re not complex or hard to use.
“Intuitive and easy” > “unintuitive and easy” > “intuitive and hard” > “unintuitive and hard” > “non-existent”
I actually cheated and used the built-in recorder with an external mouse (I somehow had a USB->Lightning adapter on hand). You can then, in the Accessibility settings, enable an always visible cursor under Pointer Control, though Pointer Control is only visible _after_ you have the mouse plugged in. Ironic to have such iOS struggles for a post about iOS struggles...
Probably the single most useful skill I've had to learn in my life is, whenever you wonder something, just Google it. If you don't think your software does X... don't just assume it. Look it up.
I've been astonished at how often a feature was added 3 years ago to a program I've used for 8 years, or there's a secret swipe that avoids a bunch of menus, or an unofficial command-line flag.
And it really leaves me feeling deeply conflicted. Because on the one hand, I still believe in the virtue of learning your tools inside and out. I would read the manual and be proud I knew exactly what every program/language could and couldn't do. But on the other hand, is that really just a waste of time? Programs have so many features now, that instead of learning all the things via discoverability or a manual, we just learn them by... querying how to do things when we need them.
I don't really like the idea of so fundamentally relying on Google and forums and tutorials and Reddit and YouTube videos as the main way of learning how to use software. But at the same time, software does so much now and adds new things so quickly that it appears to be the only reasonable way.