"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time."
I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.
20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.
The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:
1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.
We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.
I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating.
To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and tricks):
Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:
1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass.
3. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again.
To paste (most to least reliable):
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
2. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.
Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-pinch".)
> 1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!
People have the patience of learning the new tricks ONCE when they get a new phone. After that nothing major like this should change. I am sure this change would have created more than a few hundred WTF moments while someone was driving/cooking/whatever and texting (yes, I know it is bad, but everyone does it) and I wouldn't be surprised there are a few accidents.
> Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
FYI: Triple-tap is for sentences. Quadruple-tap is for paragraphs.
Text selection is the one area that the lack of 3D Touch affects me the most, and I am truly upset about it.
With last year's phone/iOS, you could 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard and enter a cursor-move mode. This was replaced with the spacebar thing, which is fine.
But then while moving your cursor around in the old version, you could 3D Touch again to select a word, again for a sentence, and again for the paragraph. I could select text so easily! This made deleting sections or copy/pasting bits of edited text sooooo much easier.
Now it's significantly worse. I can move the cursor fine, but then to select text I have to use my fingers to tap on the text directly and it's much more difficult to be precise. (Why? Because I can't see through my fingers, surprisingly. You can see through a cursor just fine.)
Sigh. I'm really disappointed in this change specifically.
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
I sneered at the pinch/unpinch copy/paste gestures when I first read about them. But Apple's implementation, at least on the iPad, is stellar. I'm still not used to it, but when I remember to use it, it works flawlessly every time.
And there's even a little feedback bubble that pops up at the top of the screen letting you know you did something. That kind of feedback in invaluable, and desperately lacking in this era where programmers look down on feedback animation as superfluous.
FWIW, I recall being shown some of these new gestures (cut and paste, undo) in post-update iOS 13 splash screen of some kind.
By contrast, when I hardware swapped from XS to 11, nothing prepared me for the loss of formerly oh-so-intuitive 3D Touch. I’d read about it, didn’t realize how second nature it had become. I often saw others struggle with or unaware of 3D Touch, so my guess is Apple metrics showed it wasn’t as widely used as they’d hoped. The other positive is consistency, as I occasionally attempted 3D Touch on iPad or old phones and felt stymied.
With older iPhones with 3D touch, there used to be a fourth way:
4. Deep press anywhere on the keyboard to switch to cursor moving mode.
On my iPhone X, I used this all the time. With the iPhone 11, there is no substitute: you cannot long press on anything but the space bar to move the cursor. Also, a deep press was quicker to activate, a long press takes a fraction of a second longer. It's a bit annoying.
> 1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
Specifically, either long-touch the space bar or force-touch any letter. Just don't force-touch the left side of the screen, which will invoke the app switcher.
In fairness, iOS these days is wildly unintuitive, and I'm not yet thirty. It's positively littered with hidden gestures and features that you'd never discover during normal usage. Many of them are really slick once you learn about them! But discoverability is worse not only compared to previous Apple software, but even to other systems like Android. And from what I've read, iPadOS is even worse.
I switched from iOS to Android in the iPhone 4 days, and switched back last month.
The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything. Part of this is the obsession over gestures in place of buttons, the size of the screens and distance of the swipes also makes it difficult to use with one hand (I can't use my thumb to unlock the device), apps are completely unintuitive, and there seems to be an obsession with presenting new data at you rather than keeping the same pathways to find previous data giving me a sense of always being lost in every app.
The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.
I'm going to stick with Apple due to privacy concerns for the time being, but I'm really upset with my purchase.
They end of the skeuomorphic interface was the end of usability. UI design went from functional for a wide audience to "looks good in a demo". This coincided with the rise of web apps because unlike desktop apps using native widget sets web apps are a "blank slate" as far as UI design goes.
I've been using computers religiously since I got my Vic20 at 9 or 10, after working for it for a year.
Almost every time I need to change something on son's aging iPad (2012 issue, updated to latest iOS but is before cut off point for iPad OS) it seriously risks defenestration.
Parental setup including App store restrictions is the absolute worst, followed closely by the scattered application settings.
If only there was an Android tablet that was as well physical engineered. Unfortunately they don't really come close.
So his iPad is for educational apps only, and I got him the newly issued Switch for gaming. The quality of the A grade titles is astounding, well worth paying; none of the ad ridden crap that's par of the course on the iPad. And even though I'm missing some granularity, their parental controls are a textbook case of fantastic UX work by comparison.
The companion Android app lets me easily define and monitor daily limits; it just works.
This is how it always was. They always have secret keyboard shortcuts that don't have a menu option. Still, to this day, it's hard to even find your hard drive folder by default in Finder. Apple's UX is incredible if all you need to do is look at photos.
"It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before."
To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone had moved on from that and changed their APIs.
I had a similar problem with an in-house Electron app from 3-4 years ago. A user reported a problem running the app on high Sierra. So I updated Electron to the latest version and compiled but then I got some new errors because Electron changed something and it broke Gulp. So I updated Gulp and turns out they changed their API too and I had to change the logic... I lost a day with this.
You can open an old jQuery project from 10 years ago change some stuff and everything just works, even after updating jQuery to the latest version.
I think it's partially due to stack ranking. You have to justify your position to your peers (most of whom don't even use the application) and show everyone metrics of people using your crap. If you don't make any "improvements" to the app, you can't get any promotions. If an app is already perfect, then these "improvements" can only ruin the application.
It should come as no surprise that if you ruin your UI, "engagement" goes up, because people are dicking around trying to figure out how the hell it works now. Unfortunately, statistics are hard, and nobody really knows what they're doing, so I don't think the organization is always aware of this kind of stuff.
Apple was one of the pioneers of it with it's always changing skeuomorphisms followed by its plane design trend. Their marketing has been mocking the stability of their competitors since forever, and only stopped when that stability went away.
That said, I'm peaceful with he fact that I can't access most of the features of my phones (I use Android, that while not being a pioneer has followed quite passionately). That also helps restricting my dependency on it so I have the option of not being spied on and avoid problems once the functionality goes away.
Apple design often prioritizes "slick, stylish and minimal" over straightforward, obvious and pragmatic utility. It's definitely gotten worse as demonstrated with the iPhone X, but they've always had things like hidden gestures and timed presses for basic functionality.
Android designers aren't doing much better though.
I liked the 3 dots because it was natural for me to associate it with "etc...". I don't know what the 3 horizontal lines are meant to represent, but I know that it's really difficult to explain to my parents and that they keep forgetting its meaning because they cannot associate the symbol with anything :(
Similar thing with the "back button"-icon ( https://icon-library.net/images/android-back-icon/android-ba... ): it's an equilateral triangle, maybe pointing to the left, or maybe to the top/bottom right corners, or maybe just a "triangle" (associate "triangle" with "back"?) depending on how you think. I'd prefer a less stylish but classical arrow ("<") than that.
I'm not sold on the new volume and silent mode controls on iOS 13. I can see where the designers are coming from, but it's harder to see and use. The bigger issue is that there's no setting to go back - the new way is just supposed to be better, for everybody.
Skype suffers the same problem. It's almost like Microsoft is paying these engineers to create new widgets and gimmicks that make the program clunkier, slower, and less secure. And then pays those engineers to "patch" those issues. I hate Skype so much, but I don't really have an alternative app to make prank phone calls to tattoo parlors and pastry shops in Ukraine.
This particular iOS thing has also been annoying me since I upgraded to iOS 13 (which for the record, has otherwise been very positive for me). I really wish they had done some kind of "Here's what is new" tutorial.
Rearranging icons in folders is still a clusterf--k though - am I the only one that ends up fighting sometimes just to a) get the icon into the folder I want and b) actually keep it there without accidentally scrolling the screen, accidentally dragging it out of the edge of the folder because I'm trying to page it to a particular place?
What I'm noticing with iOS in particular is that lots of 'hidden' functionality is creeping in. This is something I remember Microsoft getting criticism for with Windows 8 -- non-obvious gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen to bring something up. Apple seems to have wandered down that same road.
god yes I fucking hate trying to rearrange my icons
oh look I accidentally moved this icon between two others and it reflowed everything and the last icon in THIS screen is the first on on the NEXT screen and this cascaded to the next few as well, now I get to move them all back, joy!
It's especially fun when you are trying to put an icon into a folder in the last slot in a screen and it slips to the next page instead. JOY. UNMTIGATED JOY AND DELIGHT.
And I still hate how you can't have any organization for your icons beyond "all of them crammed up towards the top left of the screen". I still miss that from Android and I still miss that from the days when there was a usable jailbreak.
Yeah, rearranging icons has always been inexplicably fiddly, but they somehow managed to actually make it worse in iOS 13.
It used to be possible to explain most of the mechanisms and concepts in iOS with about a ten minute tutorial. Now it feels like every time I see my parents I have to explain some new concept or procedure to them.
It is easier if you use two fingers--one to "pick up" the icon or icon you want to move (you can grab a whole stack of them) and the other to navigate to where you want to be.
I've gone the opposite direction (or just skipped ahead into second childhood?) - if I can't see the option I want I spend a minute or so monkey-slapping the screen in random directions with random numbers of fingers, because apparently this is what qualifies these days as "discoverable".
(A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see the sent times. Did you know that? If so HOW DID YOU KNOW?)
I knew because it was in the tips app, that shows how to do new stuff with new releases. I got a notification from the tips app after I upgraded, offering to show me what’s new.
Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason.
It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peeking at the times of messages are both in there and demonstrated.
It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example).
What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable."
Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, but it seemed like a much better experience than iOS 13.
Also, as much as people on HN enjoy bashing skeuomorphism, the fact is that it works, it's intuitive, and is 9,385% more user-friendly than a bunch of identical Playskool-colored squares with no demonstrable function.
Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read).
And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
Skeuomorphism and pixel perfect design where the interface was tightly tied to the screen resolution doesn’t work when you have multiple screen sizes. Back then developers only had to worry about the 320x480 iPhone screen and the 1024x768 iPad resolution.
> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
I had no idea you could move the cursor this way! Until I read your comment!
My wife had the same problem. I knew how to do it because the tips app showed me after I upgraded. Not sure if it didn’t show the same thing to everyone.
I think it works fine although I still generally prefer the haptic/long touch spacebar method.
I always had trouble with selection vs placing the cursor, and it irritated me to no end. The long touch spacebar works great though and I still prefer it.
If you aren’t familiar with the long touch spacebar, give it a try. It temporarily changes the keyboard to a touchpad for moving the cursor. It’s great.
There used to be a little magnifier, too, when I was moving the cursor around. I don't see it anymore, just the "caret" moves. I don't know if it's because I switched to the bigger size, or did they just drop that feature when moving the cursor.
At age 56, it's hard for me to see where the cursor/insertion point is, especially because it's blocked by my finger when I try to move it.
They dropped the magnifier between iOS 12 and 13. That's been bugging me quite a bit too as I was very used to using that to make cursor movement easier.
You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
One of the hazards of working in this space is that as you develop sympathy for others, trying to “think like a normal user” you eventually succeed. Your own thinking starts to shift and pretty soon you suffer from the same class of problems.
I overheard several people talking about this when I first started thinking about UX and sure enough within a couple years I was making some of the same sorts of “mistakes”.
Having fallen into that thinking, at some point a few years back I realized that I was selling myself short by thinking that I should behave "like a normal user". And now I combat it with a secondary mindset of training some actions into muscle memory, as if I were learning martial arts techniques.
With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.
Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.
Prior to iOS 13 I used this all the time to great success but now it seems like whenever I use it, it tries to select all the text beneath wherever I move the cursor instead of simply moving the cursor to where I want it.
Rofl, just yesterday I was teasing a ex apple employee about how I can do that very same trick in Android but apple can't do it unless you install the Google keyboard.... Even HE didn't know this trick was in the default some keyboard!
I miss the cursor magnifying glass widget and will miss using 3D touch to open the cursor when my iphone 8 eventually dies. Disappointing. That used to be one of the major things separating iOS from Android. Holding the spacebar feels nowhere as smooth.
I found the 3D touch on the keyboard to be flakey compared to the spacebar -- if you moved your finger before 3D touch activated, then it lost context and wouldn't activate 3D touch, and then you'd have to delete the stupid 'j' that just got dropped in your email.
I was just trying to select all before giving up and manually moving the edges of the selection bar. Eventually I found out you can only select all when you have nothing selected and hold the cursor and release. And I'm 20...
My cynical view is that this is just more promotion-driven development for all those UX designers. The optimistic view is that this is necessary to integrate new features. The reality is probably somewhere in between.
> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
This 1000%. Working with text on iOS is such a pain now.
Hold on the space bar. They removed force touch on the whole keyboard, but this is an okay alternative. I find not having to hold my finger over what I'm selecting much easier to use.
I don’t think the changes to selection and sharing in this update had any point.
Previously when I got an update I would think ‘oh, that tiny annoyance is finally gone!’, but now I just thought ‘why in fucks name did they find it necessary to change this’.
Yep - the biggest difference between older and younger people in a usability study is that older people remember things and younger people discover things. As much as I like iOS - it favors discovering over seeing and remembering.
I also can't find Select all for the text shown in the browser, when the cursor is anyway not visible before.
Btw (not iOS 13 specific) when I select the word in browser the hovering menu has more options behind a minuscule right arrow that I almost always manage to touch outside, making the menu disappear. And I need the "second part" often. Sad.
> It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
Companies hire too many designers, developers, project manager and product managers which means they must do something to occupy their time. Bug fixing is boring. Writing something new is sexy. Sexy > boring so you get a "new and improved" version.
I'm not really following the complaint here. I've been on iOS 13 for a few weeks, but honestly I don't recall that much of a change.
Now you can tap anywhere to more the cursor there. Before you had to do some sort of cursor grab I think.
You say "under your finger" but obviously you'd move your finger down or up so you can see where the cursor is going? There's no swiping gesture needed anywhere, not sure what's that about?
I do remember it being very annoying to move the cursor before. Now it seems much easier. I'm happy, that's one data point I guess. And yeah, I'm getting older. My father, now 70-something, says he likes it, too.
Re: 1), you also have to place the cursor before you can grab it and move it. You used to be able to place it precisely in one step using a long press to get the the magnifying glass, but now that selects the word under your finger instead.
If there’s no cursor yet, you have to 1) tap somewhere to get a cursor to appear, 2) drag it where you want it.
Super annoying to change such a basic, useful functionality.
i still can't figure out how to do screen splits on iPad, since it was introduced in OS 11? i watched videos on it, etc, and still couldn't get it to work. the only way i got it to work is to split screens for an app that's on my dock, which itself is very limited.
i ended up giving the ipad to my 5 year old as his toy and the other day it died completely.
For me and the whole family, sharing via WhatsApp has gone from being the first option to being hidden under a sub-menu. Naturally my mom has stopped sharing photos on WhatsApp since the iOS upgrade. Certainly there is local historical telemetry data so removing one of the most-used options during an upgrade seems careless.
Deep at the bottom of that submenu is a place where she can change the order of what's shown in the share menus, but the likelyhood of her ever finding this is of course nil.
one of the more challenging experiences in my adult life was my dad screaming about how upset he was that windows had forced some upgrade, and as a result (?) he'd lost genealogy work he'd been doing for years (eventually he found it).
he was furious, and crying, and shouting... "i don't want any f* upgrades! just leave my f* computer alone!! i never asked for any of this, i just want to do my work"
i dont' spend a lot of time at the house any more ... and i didn't know what to tell him, so i hugged him. later i brought up linux (again) and i think we'll get to that place soon, so that he has a chance to learn before age sets in too much further.
One reason I like to force touch the keyboard rather than using spacebar is that, when you force touch, you can force touch again with the cursor active, and it will select an entire word. Dragging on keyboard now expands the selection a word at a time. Force touch again (while keeping your thumb on the screen) and it selects a whole paragraph. One more force touch and it switches back to a plain cursor.
It doesn’t seem possible to do this using the long-touch spacebar approach.
I agree it was better before. One nice tip, though, is that you can press and hold the spacebar to turn the keyboard area into a trackpad of sorts to move the cursor. That’s totally undiscoverable but works well.
ITT: “The A/B test and creepy stalker analytics told us that everyone was doing other things more often so lets not show these less often tapped features”
It's charming how he goes out of his way not to step on any designer toes. "I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs."
No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: "And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."
I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well-crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.
Leave poor “beautiful” out of it! It’s innocent! Apple’s shit is beautiful because it is simple and functional, not the other way round.
I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.
I'm with you on everything else (I'll be the first to admit that I love trashing Apple at every opportunity I get these days), but I find it weird that people criticize the dongle thing so heavily. Surely standardizing everything to USB-C would be an example of the exact thing you're talking about? (keeping it simple and functional). Somebody has to make the switch first, and if Apple didn't, wouldn't we all be using dongles anyway, just the other way round?
I'm happy to cop a bit of temporary pain in the pursuit of standardization. It's the one thing that actually isn't shitting me about my work Macbook.
Your first paragraph was precisely my point! But I guess now you're saying they've strayed from the beauty part recently too. I admit I don't know much about it, as I haven't used Apple stuff lately. (No particular reason on my part, just that the industry I'm in tends to keep pulling me toward Windows.)
I kind of hate the entire iOS 13 share sheet. Having the option to instantly send anything I happen to be looking at to my mom with an errant tap wasn't a feature I'd been missing.
On the flip side, the quick-send list is one of my favorite features of iOS 13. Instead of the arduous process to share something to my SO before (it was something like, share > Messages > type the first couple letters of her name and choose her contact from a list of names > send), it's much easier to just (share > tap her photo > send).
Honestly I rarely ever use any button in the "share sheet" except for Copy or Copy Link. Every time I open it I'm just searching for those Copy buttons. I'll "share" it myself with Paste. Idk how "sharing" ended up like this.
I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered.
This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.
For anyone else in my boat:
System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always
> people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.
Yes, it seems like the younger generation is conditioned to a different form of UI "discoverability" than those of us who learned computing in the desktop era. I look for visual indicators, even on touch user interfaces, so I am always missing functionality that is hidden behind a non-visual interaction. "Pull down to refresh" is something I would have probably never found in many applications if it had not been pointed out to me. iOS is especially notorious for hiding features behind odd/innovative UI behaviors such as press-extra-hard or shake.
I almost feel as if "just show me visual indicators of all functionality because I am old-fashioned" needs to be a new accessibility concept or setting.
I am 30 and I find this hidden scrollbar fad (aka try-to-swipe-every-screen) really frustrating, am I already so old that UX designers should build special accessibility settings for me?
Sure, when I see younger people trying some new GUI they basically touch and swipe everything to discover hidden options and functionalities, because someone decided that a flat rectangle looked "cooler" than a button, or that a greyed out textbox looked more "modern" than a standard white one... but isn't this just bad design? what happened with make things as simple as possible, but not simpler and don't make me think?
Or the "shake to undo" in Notes on iOS that is totally undiscoverable. Also, three fingers gestures, 4 key keyboard shortcuts and ton of UI that changes when alt is pressed, Apple OS are actually harder to use than Windows in some respect.
I've been thinking about adding this to the app I'm working on, as a sort of UI hint. Just something real subtle at each edge that is scrollable, to signal the user that they can scroll in that direction (maybe a transparent animated chevron or something).
It definitely does feel like something the browser should handle though. Having to work on stuff like that instead of actual functionality is painful, especially for startups that are trying to iterate fast.
It seems like much of the design rules that evolved by experience is being thrown away by designers because they don't think it's looks nice or is clean enough. Interfaces like Windows 95 that are neither too early nor too modern seem to be really excellent at conveying meaningful information to the user.
The Windows 95/98 scroll bars were vastly superior to those in Win10. No matter the size of the window or the scrollable content, you can tell what is the scroll bar and what isn't. On Win 10 it's sometimes ambiguous. Removing the scroll bar when you're not scrolling is the worst design decision.
Peak OSX / MacOS was Snow Leopard. From next version they hid scrollbars, swapped default scroll direction and started a steady move to make it seem everything should be hidden like iOS.
The success of phones and tablets appears to have made the desktop world afraid they were obsolete, so the trend since Snow Leopard and Windows 7 has been to make the desktop more like a phone or tablet. Windows 8 clearly went too far and provoked a revolt, so Microsoft improved things with Windows 10, but I think the Windows 7 UI is still better than Windows 10 in many ways.
My favorite was an issue which plagued Chrome for a while. When you need a scrollbar to jump down a very long page: 1) wiggle the page with two fingers to make the scrollbar appear, 2) switch from two fingers to one finger and grab the scrollbar handle, 3) just kidding, they automatically hid the scrollbar before you had time to grab the handle.
I pretty much always use an external mouse on my Mac at work and at home. Plugging in a mouse automatically makes scrollbars always visible on a Mac and I didn't even realize that for a long while
Clearly, those of us who prefer a real mouse are too addled to use anything more sophisticated, so I suppose this, at least, is a +1 in the usability area.
I have usb mouse plugged into this mac and there was no scrollbar.
edit: I have a magic trackpad 2 also. It took when I turned that off and reloaded the page. Well that's annoying that I lose the scollbars with the trackpad.
I just yesterday found that you can scroll a whole iOS scroll area by scrolling a little then holding your finger over the now-visible scroll indicator bar to "grab it" and drag it around.
Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.
"Checking to see if something scrolls" means some form of finger or hand movement.
I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)
> I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide not to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's because scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.
A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.
Are you actually checking every paragraph, section, list, etc? There may be additional content with overflow-y…
(This is a real-world issue: In a write-up, you may want to present detailed data, but don't want to have every user, interested in the details or not, to scroll over several pages of extensive data. So the logical choice is to present a small, illustrative sample and have more in the overflow. The same technique may be used – and has been historically extensively used by the Engelbart community – for outlined text content.)
> Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.
This is the typical narrow minded view that these app designers (not you) have. There are other uses for the scroll bar. For instance, I used to be able to tell how long it would take to read an article by looking at the scroll bar. Now they are gone and to compensate every other article now as an indication of reading time. Which is of course a worse solution, because people's reading speeds differ and it also clutters screen estate, even is a more annoying way.
The well known xkcd[0] about breaking workflows does not only apply to features, but also to UI. Few designers seem to acknowledge that.
On my iPhone SE, it is also well-spaced and perfectly cropped, omitting the 'copy' row and perfectly finishing below the second line of icons.
(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)
Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods. Then even the touchscreen will be removed, to be replaced by a LIDAR chip mounted around your belt buckle. The design of the Great Wizards of Old will have come to fruition, and men will call forth driving directions and Amazon orders using mystic incantations and vigorous, unnatural hand movements.
> Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through your AirPods.
This function is already available (with the minor difference that it speaks to you using, you know, words and stuff). It's called VoiceOver. It's designed for blind users.
Eventually we'll be forced to have chips implanted in our brains as babies where we can communicate with the giant computer in the sky which can also regulate gland secretions.
On my SE I also have only two rows, no menu entries. (1)
I've also wondered where the functionality went.
Without this article I would never know that it's actually there but hidden.
Somehow I feel really bad about that.
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1) I don't remember if I've tried to adjust the font size. My pet peeve regarding that is the font in the Notes app which has a and o similar enough to allow false reading of anything that is not plain common words.
In design this is called “the illusion of completeness.”
“The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area.”[0]
It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens.
It's something I really miss about the height of Windows 8/Windows 8.1/Windows Phone 8 design: the grids were specifically chosen to really to push that incompleteness feel: a few pixels from the next column over or the next row down always peaking through; big parallax landscape backgrounds that give a sense of background space that there's more to pan.
That feeling that not everything fits perfectly on the screen and things were almost always incomplete bugged a few people about those design patterns, but it did create a lot of nice, simple cues that things were scrollable without needing scroll bars or other indicators.
This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call-to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.
Arguably, news articles have been written from the start (even in physical newspapers) so that the most important information is listed first, knowing that many readers won't bother to flip the pages to get to where the article is continued. Giant page-ending ads online just continue this tradition, they'd rather you click three more headlines than keep reading the mostly-redundant article body.
Our mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user lab testing (which is not terrible in itself, often I've gotten mostly useless feedback when I watched them) but sometimes you work in an environment that has too many people who know the app too well to notice issues.
I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability in UI was with Windows 95 - and even that wasn't free from form-over-function issues. In Windows 3.0 it was meant that only elements you could interact with the mouse would have a beveled 3D appearance, so people would know just by looking at a screen what they would be able to interact with. However it wasn't fully followed - checkboxes, radio buttons and input boxes were flat. Instead of addressing that Windows 95 made everything 3D.
Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.
Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.
I miss good old fashioned menus. It's one reason I liked the PalmOS UX so much better than iOS and Android.
Menus are so wonderfully discoverable. The first thing I did when opening a new app (on PDA or desktop) was drop each one down to find out what tools I have available. Like a pilot looking over his cockpit or a craftsman laying out his toolbox.
It seems a lot of the last 10 years of UI "progress" has been about burying things in order to "simplify" (aka dumb down) interfaces for audiences developers think of as kindergartners.
Zen of Palm showed us streamlined, clutter-free minimalism is possible to achieve without making your app stupid.
We, as an industry, used to do a lot of UX research. Today's designers ignore all of it because they don't like what it says. Spacial file managers? Global menu bars? 3D buttons? Ew. Let's just make shit up.
In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.
It is a serious decline - Apple was literally the best there was at this in the past.
I noticed their design attitudes towards affordances and contextual clues changing around the time Ives made some claim about how phone users have been educated about touch UI sufficiently to start dropping them. That seems to have become an general excuse to lean towards 'pretty' over 'functional'.
And worse are third party apps. They always have been more variable, of course, but the old HCI guidelines were actually really good, so much so that people followed them because they were convincing.
UI decay isn't the only reason I use my phone and Ipad less, but it is one of them. (Current Screen Time: 24 minutes a day. That's mostly checking email while standing in line and mashing 2FA buttons.) The dynamic lists of recent activities and such mean I have to stare for a while to see what the options are this time, and generally be careful not to make mistakes. I've turned off autocorrect, because it makes enough enough mistakes that it is slower (and really irritating) to use.
>Our designers seem more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things.
This stereotyping of a profession is becoming a cliché and is being rude towards a profession who has contributed so much to make technology accessible.
The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one. This is perhaps a good example of how 'fragmentation devil' is coming back to bite iOS now - which probably is not factored in Apple's product development process.
Designers deserve every bit of this stereotyping. There was a time when designers were taught to value fitness for use. Now "design" seems to be exclusively about aesthetics. This may be rooted in how designers are taught or simply in how they now practice. Or it could be that managers insist on aesthetics-only, in which case designers need to push back hard.
Whatever the cause it's a failure on the part of designers and their profession, and they deserve criticism for it.
> The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one.
Strong disagree with this point. The device from the example is an older one (iPhone 8), and this is a brand-new OS. This was not existing software that's being applied to a new screen size -- it's the other way around.
The design spec should have taken the older device into account -- there are still millions of devices with this screen size out there* -- and noted exceptions or adjustments from the iPhone X/11 size.
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*And still being sold. And never mind the SE, another screen size which was still being sold just 12 months ago.
I don't understand your point. Shouldn't designers design the interfaces for all devices and screen sizes? If a designer fails to account for the specific sizes of an actually supported device then it is the designer's fault; perhaps just an oversight but nevertheless a fault. If the designer thinks it is fine to only design for iPhone X and above and let older devices suffer from inattention, it is most definitely the designer's fault that has made technology inaccessible to users that might not be affluent enough to afford newer devices.
Exactly. It's the same concept with buttons that give no visual indication they've been pressed, then 3 seconds later something happens. But depressed button state looks so dated!
I've learned to just wait. That list that appeared to have rendered completely is going to refresh half a second later causing you to click the wrong item. That button did something, you just don't know it yet.
When programmers get too distract by having their own fun, we get hard to maintain complex code base. But hand designers do it, it directly harms users.
I switched to Android around the time iPhone 5 came out.
Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.
The poor design described in the article is really bad.
But
> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.
Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
I use both and am now a current iPhone user. Certain things on iPhone (like muting all notifications with "Do Not Disturb" are much more unintuitive on the iPhone)
> Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn.
Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.
It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.
Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.
> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!
I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.
On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.
A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)
Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.
Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.
Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.
(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
The iPhones have degraded in every respect as far as I can tell. When I got my first Android phone about 4 years ago I didn't want to spend a lot of money. I was surprised at how expensive the iPhone was but after using a friends phone I understood that it was a higher quality product and you got what you paid for.
But my girlfriend recently got the latest one (11?) and I was shocked at how bad it is. It feels absolutely massive for a start. Has weird software. But it has a huge design flaw that I really struggle to believe actually exists. I've pinched myself several times and I'm now convinced that it's true. Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface. The cameras bulge out of the back such the whole thing rocks like a table with a short leg when you use it. If anyone can explain how that is considered OK I'd love to know.
Bugs me too (iPhone SE is the last good phone anyone made), but I think the assumption at this point is that it’s a $1000 phone and everyone puts a case on it, so as long as the case is as thick as the camera bump it’ll sit flat.
The iPad is worse. Camera bump sticks out so that it doesn’t sit flat, and no one should be using a 13” tablet as a camera so I’m not sure why they thought adding a good camera was important enough to make it not sit flat on a table.
Maybe the USA is different but here in Japan the odds of seeing an iPhone without either a case or a ring are probably 1 in 1000. Problem solved. Further, there rows and rows and rows and rows of cases for sale.
I'm not saying the phone shouldn't sit flat (though I personally don't care). But just in looking around most people seem to want to customize their phone by adding a case so at least in Japan it's a non-issue.
Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface
That's a feature, not a bug.
When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
I have a Xiaomi that copied the camera bulge from the iPhone X/XS. Doesn't bother me in the slightest. I literally never ever tried to use a phone flat on the table. Why would I ever need to use it like that?! I always pick it up.
For some reason this always accidentally triggers when I’m using the ‘Mail’ app. After opening an email, it offers me the opportunity to ‘Undo Read’. It means ‘leave the email you just read marked as unread for now’, but somehow instead the displayed confirmation modal implies that iOS can reach into my brain and take back the information imparted by the email.
Ha, yep I feel like an absolute idiot doing that in public. My genuinely favourite hidden/unintuitive feature is the force-touch on the on-screen keyboard to see a little cursor you can scroll around the text field you are using. I hate that it's so unintuitive, but it's incredibly useful
They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe thing that for the life of me I can’t remember, so I still shake my iPad or just hold down backspace.
They need to rebuild their software development team.
iOS 13 just added a delightful feature where long press on a web browser link it opens on Safari, even if you are in Firefox, and even if you are in private browsing. It pops up a split screen window that has no close-window button. The only way to close the pop up window is to exit your browser and go Home, and then go to Safari to clean up.
The best user interfaces (which include some video games) have great discoverability for new users, while rewarding the user with greater speed and efficiency after learning the app after a time.
With all the things mentioned in this thread so far, how are you supposed to discover them if you are a new user?
I managed to lock myself out of the office earlier this year on a work from home day, so no one I worked with was there and my phone / keys were at my desk.
We're in an office park, so I could still get into the building, just not into our office.
Wandered around a while hoping to find someone that would let me use their computer. Eventually found someone I'd seen a couple times before. Told them I was locked out and asked if I could use their computer to contact someone who could come let me in.
Instead of their computer, they handed me their iPhone and said they'd be back in a few minutes. I had absolutely zero idea what the heck was going on. Eventually did manage to find a browser. Took probably a minute to figure out how to open a new tab.
Finally managed to navigate to the Slack page and sign in, only to be greeted by a notice that I couldn't actually use Slack from the website, I had to download the app for "optimal experience". I wasn't about to install an app on some random person's phone, so instead I just accepted defeat.
Handed the phone back when they came to check. Told them no luck but I'd figure something out. Ended up just walking two miles to the coffee shop I was planning to meet my wife at for lunch and waiting.
Hahaha, funny, I feel the exact same way about Android whenever I pick one up. Not saying one is better or worse, just different enough to be unintuitive and confusing to an outsider.
If it's a X/Xs/11. It's on the initial lock screen. The bottom left of 2 buttons has a flashlight icon. You just touch the phone to wake it up then click the flashlight.
Thank God that setting does not persist through reboots!
Seriously though, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the control center will appear, a button to turn the flashlight on or off should be there.
Dunno about iOS but on android, one of the first things I do on a new phone is set all animations to twice the speed. I can't stand these sluggish animations.
This is a very common issue. The best and most common solution (besides visual indicators for scroll) is to make sure you are always cropping some elements. Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.
I used to use that about 5-6 years ago, you have to be very delicate with it because it can look extremely cheap, but if you make it too subtle it's impossible to see.
What's worse is that if there's enough of a bottom boundary to the last visible bit of content in the viewport, it doesn't look like there's anything below it at all, which puts you in the same position.
> Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.
In this case it's not in a fluid container. All of the elements shown are of a fixed size—the photo, the row of contacts, the row of apps, and then the actions. (Well, the list of actions is fluid, but those are mostly off-screen).
Plus, one of Apple's advantages is that they have a small set of possible screen dimensions, because there are only a few phones. This should absolutely have gotten caught.
> This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance.
I just did some testing:
• Play Store uses scroll-snapping for the horizontal scrolling
• Play Store doesn't use scroll-snapping for the vertical scrolling (they should adjust white space to ensure you see 0.1 of an item at the bottom). Fiddling with text size and display size in the display settings can cause vertical items to exact fit (unobvious that vertical scrolling is available).
I thought about this and while it does work, there's not enough screen real estate on a phone for this to be efficient. Phone screens are already very narrow and vertical. So either the scroll bar would be too narrow to be useful or too large.
Readit News
I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20 years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the "aging" community.
20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.
The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:
1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere now.
We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech, design, etc.
I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is irritating.
Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:
1. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves the cursor.
2. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky, especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text and there's no more magnifying glass.
3. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.
To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you wait a beat before tapping again.
To paste (most to least reliable):
1. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.
2. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little bit, making a precise paste difficult.
Crazy! Apparently there's a whole set of commands accessible this way, most notably three finger swipe left = undo!!! This is a significant improvement. They could've told me while I was painstakingly shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo - shake - confirm undo ...... ing!
FYI: Triple-tap is for sentences. Quadruple-tap is for paragraphs.
Text selection is the one area that the lack of 3D Touch affects me the most, and I am truly upset about it.
With last year's phone/iOS, you could 3D Touch anywhere on the keyboard and enter a cursor-move mode. This was replaced with the spacebar thing, which is fine.
But then while moving your cursor around in the old version, you could 3D Touch again to select a word, again for a sentence, and again for the paragraph. I could select text so easily! This made deleting sections or copy/pasting bits of edited text sooooo much easier.
Now it's significantly worse. I can move the cursor fine, but then to select text I have to use my fingers to tap on the text directly and it's much more difficult to be precise. (Why? Because I can't see through my fingers, surprisingly. You can see through a cursor just fine.)
Sigh. I'm really disappointed in this change specifically.
I sneered at the pinch/unpinch copy/paste gestures when I first read about them. But Apple's implementation, at least on the iPad, is stellar. I'm still not used to it, but when I remember to use it, it works flawlessly every time.
And there's even a little feedback bubble that pops up at the top of the screen letting you know you did something. That kind of feedback in invaluable, and desperately lacking in this era where programmers look down on feedback animation as superfluous.
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/use-text-editing-gestures-i...
FWIW, I recall being shown some of these new gestures (cut and paste, undo) in post-update iOS 13 splash screen of some kind.
By contrast, when I hardware swapped from XS to 11, nothing prepared me for the loss of formerly oh-so-intuitive 3D Touch. I’d read about it, didn’t realize how second nature it had become. I often saw others struggle with or unaware of 3D Touch, so my guess is Apple metrics showed it wasn’t as widely used as they’d hoped. The other positive is consistency, as I occasionally attempted 3D Touch on iPad or old phones and felt stymied.
4. Deep press anywhere on the keyboard to switch to cursor moving mode.
On my iPhone X, I used this all the time. With the iPhone 11, there is no substitute: you cannot long press on anything but the space bar to move the cursor. Also, a deep press was quicker to activate, a long press takes a fraction of a second longer. It's a bit annoying.
Specifically, either long-touch the space bar or force-touch any letter. Just don't force-touch the left side of the screen, which will invoke the app switcher.
The new iOS UI/UX is horrible and it's extremely difficult to understand how the hell to navigate anything. Part of this is the obsession over gestures in place of buttons, the size of the screens and distance of the swipes also makes it difficult to use with one hand (I can't use my thumb to unlock the device), apps are completely unintuitive, and there seems to be an obsession with presenting new data at you rather than keeping the same pathways to find previous data giving me a sense of always being lost in every app.
The Podcasts app might be the best example of a horribly designed product. I can't believe anyone at Apple is actually using that app.
I'm going to stick with Apple due to privacy concerns for the time being, but I'm really upset with my purchase.
Almost every time I need to change something on son's aging iPad (2012 issue, updated to latest iOS but is before cut off point for iPad OS) it seriously risks defenestration.
Parental setup including App store restrictions is the absolute worst, followed closely by the scattered application settings.
If only there was an Android tablet that was as well physical engineered. Unfortunately they don't really come close.
So his iPad is for educational apps only, and I got him the newly issued Switch for gaming. The quality of the A grade titles is astounding, well worth paying; none of the ad ridden crap that's par of the course on the iPad. And even though I'm missing some granularity, their parental controls are a textbook case of fantastic UX work by comparison.
The companion Android app lets me easily define and monitor daily limits; it just works.
To my mind this is becoming a BIG problem in tech and I'm really saddened to see Apple falling for it. I guess too many people in a position to change things that feel like they need to justify their positions. Either way, it needs to stop. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
The other day I opened a Vue project from 2-3 years ago and after installing deps with NPM it reported something like 50 critical vulnerabilities. Fine, I'll update dependencies. After doing that nothing worked anymore. The Webpack config didn't work, the Webpack loaders for Vue didn't work, etc. I had configured this project with an "old" version of Vue CLI and now everyone had moved on from that and changed their APIs.
I had a similar problem with an in-house Electron app from 3-4 years ago. A user reported a problem running the app on high Sierra. So I updated Electron to the latest version and compiled but then I got some new errors because Electron changed something and it broke Gulp. So I updated Gulp and turns out they changed their API too and I had to change the logic... I lost a day with this.
You can open an old jQuery project from 10 years ago change some stuff and everything just works, even after updating jQuery to the latest version.
It should come as no surprise that if you ruin your UI, "engagement" goes up, because people are dicking around trying to figure out how the hell it works now. Unfortunately, statistics are hard, and nobody really knows what they're doing, so I don't think the organization is always aware of this kind of stuff.
Apple was one of the pioneers of it with it's always changing skeuomorphisms followed by its plane design trend. Their marketing has been mocking the stability of their competitors since forever, and only stopped when that stability went away.
That said, I'm peaceful with he fact that I can't access most of the features of my phones (I use Android, that while not being a pioneer has followed quite passionately). That also helps restricting my dependency on it so I have the option of not being spied on and avoid problems once the functionality goes away.
Android designers aren't doing much better though.
"Options/other"-icon before: 3 dots ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )
"Options/other"-icon now: 3 horizontal lines ( https://cdn1.iconfinder.com/data/icons/android-user-interfac... )
I liked the 3 dots because it was natural for me to associate it with "etc...". I don't know what the 3 horizontal lines are meant to represent, but I know that it's really difficult to explain to my parents and that they keep forgetting its meaning because they cannot associate the symbol with anything :(
Similar thing with the "back button"-icon ( https://icon-library.net/images/android-back-icon/android-ba... ): it's an equilateral triangle, maybe pointing to the left, or maybe to the top/bottom right corners, or maybe just a "triangle" (associate "triangle" with "back"?) depending on how you think. I'd prefer a less stylish but classical arrow ("<") than that.
Etc... .
It is very unlikely that people are changing things just for fun.
Rearranging icons in folders is still a clusterf--k though - am I the only one that ends up fighting sometimes just to a) get the icon into the folder I want and b) actually keep it there without accidentally scrolling the screen, accidentally dragging it out of the edge of the folder because I'm trying to page it to a particular place?
What I'm noticing with iOS in particular is that lots of 'hidden' functionality is creeping in. This is something I remember Microsoft getting criticism for with Windows 8 -- non-obvious gestures like swiping from the edge of the screen to bring something up. Apple seems to have wandered down that same road.
oh look I accidentally moved this icon between two others and it reflowed everything and the last icon in THIS screen is the first on on the NEXT screen and this cascaded to the next few as well, now I get to move them all back, joy!
It's especially fun when you are trying to put an icon into a folder in the last slot in a screen and it slips to the next page instead. JOY. UNMTIGATED JOY AND DELIGHT.
And I still hate how you can't have any organization for your icons beyond "all of them crammed up towards the top left of the screen". I still miss that from Android and I still miss that from the days when there was a usable jailbreak.
It used to be possible to explain most of the mechanisms and concepts in iOS with about a ten minute tutorial. Now it feels like every time I see my parents I have to explain some new concept or procedure to them.
(A simple example I discovered before I devolved to this level - when looking at messages on an iphone, swipe and hold left to see the sent times. Did you know that? If so HOW DID YOU KNOW?)
Somehow this doesn’t seem to work for everyone. Not sure if people just ignore the tips app notifications or if they don’t get them for some reason.
It’s a normal app you can run any time. I just looked and the cursor movement as well as peeking at the times of messages are both in there and demonstrated.
I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example).
What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable."
Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, but it seemed like a much better experience than iOS 13.
Also, as much as people on HN enjoy bashing skeuomorphism, the fact is that it works, it's intuitive, and is 9,385% more user-friendly than a bunch of identical Playskool-colored squares with no demonstrable function.
And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
> I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect. I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.
I had no idea you could move the cursor this way! Until I read your comment!
I think it works fine although I still generally prefer the haptic/long touch spacebar method.
I always had trouble with selection vs placing the cursor, and it irritated me to no end. The long touch spacebar works great though and I still prefer it.
If you aren’t familiar with the long touch spacebar, give it a try. It temporarily changes the keyboard to a touchpad for moving the cursor. It’s great.
At age 56, it's hard for me to see where the cursor/insertion point is, especially because it's blocked by my finger when I try to move it.
You can compensate a bit by grabbing the cursor from a lower spot in the I-bar, to the point where you can basically grab the cursor from entirely underneath (ie, touch the cursor as if it was a line below where it actually is), but discovering that was a lot of trial and effort on my part, and it's still not quite so useful as the magnifier was.
I overheard several people talking about this when I first started thinking about UX and sure enough within a couple years I was making some of the same sorts of “mistakes”.
With a lot of hardware-only workflows, muscle memory training happens by default, which also means that they "get away with" really poor UX ideas at times. With software you can have some mixture of defaults/presets and technique. It's not worthwhile to try to customize all of it(good defaults are precious, early-binding forms are valuable) and technique usually suffices for covering the remainder. But technique is less discoverable than a settings menu, as well, and swipe-and-tap techniques are extremely so since they operate on many dimensions. Compare the new iOS gestures to chorded keystrokes - once you know that chording exists, you can learn any new one given some time.
Interestingly I did not know about it and only found out whilst complaining to a friend. Friend pointed me to this selection alternative, but it was not obvious.
Can't wait to show him on Monday... Lol
This 1000%. Working with text on iOS is such a pain now.
Previously when I got an update I would think ‘oh, that tiny annoyance is finally gone!’, but now I just thought ‘why in fucks name did they find it necessary to change this’.
"Select all" disappears for 36 y.o. too, and I have no idea why and how to fix it.
Btw (not iOS 13 specific) when I select the word in browser the hovering menu has more options behind a minuscule right arrow that I almost always manage to touch outside, making the menu disappear. And I need the "second part" often. Sad.
Companies hire too many designers, developers, project manager and product managers which means they must do something to occupy their time. Bug fixing is boring. Writing something new is sexy. Sexy > boring so you get a "new and improved" version.
Now you can tap anywhere to more the cursor there. Before you had to do some sort of cursor grab I think.
You say "under your finger" but obviously you'd move your finger down or up so you can see where the cursor is going? There's no swiping gesture needed anywhere, not sure what's that about?
I do remember it being very annoying to move the cursor before. Now it seems much easier. I'm happy, that's one data point I guess. And yeah, I'm getting older. My father, now 70-something, says he likes it, too.
How many promotions in your life did you get by not changing things? Or by doing the exact same thing as the guys before you did?
If there’s no cursor yet, you have to 1) tap somewhere to get a cursor to appear, 2) drag it where you want it.
Super annoying to change such a basic, useful functionality.
i ended up giving the ipad to my 5 year old as his toy and the other day it died completely.
i guess i will never know.
he was furious, and crying, and shouting... "i don't want any f* upgrades! just leave my f* computer alone!! i never asked for any of this, i just want to do my work"
i dont' spend a lot of time at the house any more ... and i didn't know what to tell him, so i hugged him. later i brought up linux (again) and i think we'll get to that place soon, so that he has a chance to learn before age sets in too much further.
The long touch spacebar method still works great for cursor movement and it’s my preferred way.
Also, that’s weird about the select all. Still works for me, but I can’t be sure the behavior didn’t change.
It doesn’t seem possible to do this using the long-touch spacebar approach.
Dead Comment
No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: "And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."
I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well-crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.
I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.
I'm happy to cop a bit of temporary pain in the pursuit of standardization. It's the one thing that actually isn't shitting me about my work Macbook.
My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.
Honestly I rarely ever use any button in the "share sheet" except for Copy or Copy Link. Every time I open it I'm just searching for those Copy buttons. I'll "share" it myself with Paste. Idk how "sharing" ended up like this.
This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if it scrolls or something? I dunno.
For anyone else in my boat:
System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always
Yes, it seems like the younger generation is conditioned to a different form of UI "discoverability" than those of us who learned computing in the desktop era. I look for visual indicators, even on touch user interfaces, so I am always missing functionality that is hidden behind a non-visual interaction. "Pull down to refresh" is something I would have probably never found in many applications if it had not been pointed out to me. iOS is especially notorious for hiding features behind odd/innovative UI behaviors such as press-extra-hard or shake.
I almost feel as if "just show me visual indicators of all functionality because I am old-fashioned" needs to be a new accessibility concept or setting.
Sure, when I see younger people trying some new GUI they basically touch and swipe everything to discover hidden options and functionalities, because someone decided that a flat rectangle looked "cooler" than a button, or that a greyed out textbox looked more "modern" than a standard white one... but isn't this just bad design? what happened with make things as simple as possible, but not simpler and don't make me think?
It definitely does feel like something the browser should handle though. Having to work on stuff like that instead of actual functionality is painful, especially for startups that are trying to iterate fast.
edit: the issue is still there :(
edit: I have a magic trackpad 2 also. It took when I turned that off and reloaded the page. Well that's annoying that I lose the scollbars with the trackpad.
I've been using iOS since 4.
Settings > Ease of Access > Automatically hide scroll bars in Windows > Off
I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just see the existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively without the slightest motor movement.
"Checking to see if something scrolls" means some form of finger or hand movement.
I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time. There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)
> I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.
That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might just decide not to scroll before they leave your content because the first page is so uninteresting to them. It's because scrolling requires interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab their attention.
A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.
(This is a real-world issue: In a write-up, you may want to present detailed data, but don't want to have every user, interested in the details or not, to scroll over several pages of extensive data. So the logical choice is to present a small, illustrative sample and have more in the overflow. The same technique may be used – and has been historically extensively used by the Engelbart community – for outlined text content.)
This is the typical narrow minded view that these app designers (not you) have. There are other uses for the scroll bar. For instance, I used to be able to tell how long it would take to read an article by looking at the scroll bar. Now they are gone and to compensate every other article now as an indication of reading time. Which is of course a worse solution, because people's reading speeds differ and it also clutters screen estate, even is a more annoying way.
The well known xkcd[0] about breaking workflows does not only apply to features, but also to UI. Few designers seem to acknowledge that.
[0]: https://xkcd.com/1172/
(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions, which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)), went. Oh well...)
Look at us trying to appease the machine spirits.
This function is already available (with the minor difference that it speaks to you using, you know, words and stuff). It's called VoiceOver. It's designed for blind users.
I've also wondered where the functionality went.
Without this article I would never know that it's actually there but hidden.
Somehow I feel really bad about that.
-----
1) I don't remember if I've tried to adjust the font size. My pet peeve regarding that is the font in the Notes app which has a and o similar enough to allow false reading of anything that is not plain common words.
“The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the viewable area.”[0]
It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens.
[0]https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-completeness/
That feeling that not everything fits perfectly on the screen and things were almost always incomplete bugged a few people about those design patterns, but it did create a lot of nice, simple cues that things were scrollable without needing scroll bars or other indicators.
Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a Win95-styled UI.
Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these inconsistencies.
Menus are so wonderfully discoverable. The first thing I did when opening a new app (on PDA or desktop) was drop each one down to find out what tools I have available. Like a pilot looking over his cockpit or a craftsman laying out his toolbox.
It seems a lot of the last 10 years of UI "progress" has been about burying things in order to "simplify" (aka dumb down) interfaces for audiences developers think of as kindergartners.
Zen of Palm showed us streamlined, clutter-free minimalism is possible to achieve without making your app stupid.
Way to throw Bob under the bus...
In reality, most design work these days is shifting to research and usability testing. Any designer who doesn't consider these things is just not a great designer and has much to learn.
I noticed their design attitudes towards affordances and contextual clues changing around the time Ives made some claim about how phone users have been educated about touch UI sufficiently to start dropping them. That seems to have become an general excuse to lean towards 'pretty' over 'functional'.
And worse are third party apps. They always have been more variable, of course, but the old HCI guidelines were actually really good, so much so that people followed them because they were convincing.
UI decay isn't the only reason I use my phone and Ipad less, but it is one of them. (Current Screen Time: 24 minutes a day. That's mostly checking email while standing in line and mashing 2FA buttons.) The dynamic lists of recent activities and such mean I have to stare for a while to see what the options are this time, and generally be careful not to make mistakes. I've turned off autocorrect, because it makes enough enough mistakes that it is slower (and really irritating) to use.
I like my laptop a lot more these days.
This stereotyping of a profession is becoming a cliché and is being rude towards a profession who has contributed so much to make technology accessible.
The example in the blog would not have been intention of the design spec, it looks like more of a failure of test pass when a new device (with different form factor) got slapped with bits designed and tested for another one. This is perhaps a good example of how 'fragmentation devil' is coming back to bite iOS now - which probably is not factored in Apple's product development process.
Whatever the cause it's a failure on the part of designers and their profession, and they deserve criticism for it.
Strong disagree with this point. The device from the example is an older one (iPhone 8), and this is a brand-new OS. This was not existing software that's being applied to a new screen size -- it's the other way around.
The design spec should have taken the older device into account -- there are still millions of devices with this screen size out there* -- and noted exceptions or adjustments from the iPhone X/11 size.
---
*And still being sold. And never mind the SE, another screen size which was still being sold just 12 months ago.
Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and confusing.
But
> Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on the web.
This is exactly how I feel when I pick an Android phone (even with stock Android). Finding apps and launching them quickly seems like an art to learn. And don’t even get me started on how settings are organized. So I conclude that both platforms are a matter of getting used to and learning how to use them, since both makers have crammed a lot more on to smaller screens than can be intuitively deduced.
Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it! I wonder how they learned that and why they even do it (I can understand killing rogue apps or buggy apps).
Swipe up from home screen, the launcher + search bar appears.
It is somewhat annoying that none of the primary buttons now brings up the launcher, but that change happened long ago. :/ IIRC pressing the home button while on the home screen would make the launcher appear. Since it is Android there is probably a utility to add that back.
Of course users can also arrange apps on their home screen however they want and ignore the launcher altogether.
> Funnily enough, among all the Android users I’ve seen, everyone has a habit of force killing their apps every time they close it!
I haven't witnessed this, but anecdotes are useless! I've had to show iOS users how to force kill misbehaving apps. Back in the days of 1 button knowing the right sequence of taps / holds to activate any of the button's many features was, well, the exact opposite of intuitive. Not that the modern practice of various arbitrary swipes around the screen to do stuff is much better.
On stock Android, one button is switch task, one button is go home, one button is go back. Three of the most common things users want to do, all right there.
A quick access menu + notifications can be pulled down from the top. Pull down once to get notifications and common shortcuts (Wi-Fi, flashlight, rotate, Do Not disturb, shortcut to settings), pull down again to get less commonly used options (Airplane Mode, BT Toggle, manual brightness adjustment)
Media playback stuff is done in the same UI as notifications, media playback apps pin a card to the top of the notifications list. No separate UI to learn, everything is in one place.
Don't get me wrong, Android used to be terrible. It was slow, buggy, and background apps had free rein to thrash the system to the point of it being unusable. But now days it is pretty good.
Also I can set my own animated wallpapers, so that is pretty nifty.
(But seriously, Windows Phone 7, most discoverable UI ever!)
But my girlfriend recently got the latest one (11?) and I was shocked at how bad it is. It feels absolutely massive for a start. Has weird software. But it has a huge design flaw that I really struggle to believe actually exists. I've pinched myself several times and I'm now convinced that it's true. Somehow it's considered OK that the phone doesn't even sit flat on a surface. The cameras bulge out of the back such the whole thing rocks like a table with a short leg when you use it. If anyone can explain how that is considered OK I'd love to know.
The iPad is worse. Camera bump sticks out so that it doesn’t sit flat, and no one should be using a 13” tablet as a camera so I’m not sure why they thought adding a good camera was important enough to make it not sit flat on a table.
I'm not saying the phone shouldn't sit flat (though I personally don't care). But just in looking around most people seem to want to customize their phone by adding a case so at least in Japan it's a non-issue.
That's a feature, not a bug.
When placed on a surface, the phone becomes a tripod, so that any hard dirt or crumbs can't scratch the majority of the surface. It reduces the potential surface area and the parts of the phone that will most likely be scratched by being placed on a dirty surface are confined to the bottom edge and the edge of the lens protrusion.
From the main Messages window, swipe down and previously hidden search bar appears. There's no indication this is an option or it exists.
As far as I know it's been there since at least iOS 9.0 (probably longer) and 6 people hadn't found it yet.
They need to rebuild their software development team.
With all the things mentioned in this thread so far, how are you supposed to discover them if you are a new user?
We're in an office park, so I could still get into the building, just not into our office.
Wandered around a while hoping to find someone that would let me use their computer. Eventually found someone I'd seen a couple times before. Told them I was locked out and asked if I could use their computer to contact someone who could come let me in.
Instead of their computer, they handed me their iPhone and said they'd be back in a few minutes. I had absolutely zero idea what the heck was going on. Eventually did manage to find a browser. Took probably a minute to figure out how to open a new tab.
Finally managed to navigate to the Slack page and sign in, only to be greeted by a notice that I couldn't actually use Slack from the website, I had to download the app for "optimal experience". I wasn't about to install an app on some random person's phone, so instead I just accepted defeat.
Handed the phone back when they came to check. Told them no luck but I'd figure something out. Ended up just walking two miles to the coffee shop I was planning to meet my wife at for lunch and waiting.
End slightly related rant.
Seriously though, swipe up from the bottom of the screen and the control center will appear, a button to turn the flashlight on or off should be there.
Or when podcasts are buffering, instead of giving an indication, the play button stays on pause. Confused me until someone on the internet told me.
The UI is unintuitive, but for work purposes it was fine.
Found the near daily updates I had to "sign in" AND enter passcode for annoying. Especially when I was in work crisis mode.
Not sure why Android doesn't have these problems, but I don't understand why anyone would get an iPhone, they feel years outdated.
This is very heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like 3.1-3.2 elements.
Edit: example, you can see how this is used in apps as well as screenshots: https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting-material-d...
These don't have to be scrollbars. A pattern I've seen lately is a semi-opaque white gradient to indicate "you can scroll more."
What's worse is that if there's enough of a bottom boundary to the last visible bit of content in the viewport, it doesn't look like there's anything below it at all, which puts you in the same position.
In this case it's not in a fluid container. All of the elements shown are of a fixed size—the photo, the row of contacts, the row of apps, and then the actions. (Well, the list of actions is fluid, but those are mostly off-screen).
Plus, one of Apple's advantages is that they have a small set of possible screen dimensions, because there are only a few phones. This should absolutely have gotten caught.
I just did some testing:
• Play Store uses scroll-snapping for the horizontal scrolling
• Play Store doesn't use scroll-snapping for the vertical scrolling (they should adjust white space to ensure you see 0.1 of an item at the bottom). Fiddling with text size and display size in the display settings can cause vertical items to exact fit (unobvious that vertical scrolling is available).
• There is a CSS feature for this: https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-snappoints
The problem here is that Apple used no visual affordances. Scroll bars are the wrong choice, but there are others.
Yes, but you normally cannot control that :)