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Comment by rendezvouscp | Hacker News Reader

With regard to “why do I have to exit messages to scroll through a list of my contacts”: are you aware that you can start a new message and either start typing in the “To” field or tap the + button to bring up your list of contacts? Is there something else you’re looking for?

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Sounds like a textbook case of a feature that is not discoverable enough.

It is essential to understand that a feature is worse than worthless to the extent that users are not aware of it.

I agree with your general point on the increasing lack of discoverability, but this feature, in fairness to Apple, is "hidden" behind basically the only graphical icon in the Messages app, on the main screen, of a pen on paper, practically screaming to be touched, and once touched, jumps to an email-composer-esq screen with a "to:" text box with the cursor flashing in it.

I have to say, I am a bit surprised I never touched it. It truly is the only icon there, I dunno what I could have thought it meant, but I guess it never occurred to me that it would bring up contacts.

For what it's worth, you also don't need to do that if you've ever had a conversation with them (since deleting your message history), since you can use the conversation search field in the app's home screen - though some users may not know that scrolling up from the initial view of a scrolling list in iOS sometimes reveals a search field. And this also works with non-contacts and group conversations: you couldn't just change the home screen to be a contact list, you'd have to combine them with those other two types of conversation, which sounds more likely to cause confusion than the current setup.

See, and that does work and I know about that feature somewhere, but there's no indication where that works. So if I know it works in one place, it doesn't occur to me that it might work somewhere else.

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