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The strangest thing for me is that my 17 month old seem to pick the interaction with an iPad or Apple TV way more naturally than I could. She's not afraid of experimenting, and she's not overthinking what's happening or not — and since other children (same age or older) seem to "get it" as fast, I would say they're on something. I'm more weary of the ergonomics of their products : what's good for a toddler (the Apple TV remote for example) may not be the perfect solution for a grown up hand. Likewise, their pen for the iPad Pro seem to be designed for look over function, or their mouse, or... But we'll see.

Right. Kids are not worried about the consequences of screwing everything up. The stakes are too high to mess around with work email or calendaring. You just can't click and see what happens, unfortunately. The brilliance of dropdown menus is the ability to rummage without triggering events.

No only that it's also your parent's who know don't have to work through layers of abstraction to understand how to manipulate something.

Meet my mom:

http://000fff.org/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-at-com...

My mom once called me up with a computer problem.

"My fox fire[sic] isn't working."

Turns out her problem was Windows wasn't booting. All she knew was she wanted to get to a website and she couldn't.

This is what Tog and Don Norman have been saying for more than two decades now, so I’m not sure how you can be surprised by what they said. They have always advocated for an extremely “literal” and explicit design of user interfaces.

It’d be interesting to see HN’s reactions to Tog’s articles explaining how the mouse is more efficient than the CLI.

Gestures are the epitome of interface metaphors. Not only that, but their hidden nature can make them exceptionally difficult to learn or master.

Not sure what gestures and what metaphors you are talking about.

Touch something on the screen is not a metaphor it's the closest to what you would do in real life.

This is why kids and people less experienced with computers have such an easy time picking them up and start using them.

Sure, touching is the easy part, but there are now quite a few gestures available:

* Four finger swipes on the iPad to go to the task manager or switch between apps.

* Swipe from the left to go back in a navigation controller.

* Swipe from the top to activate the notification center.

* Swipe from the bottom to activate the control center.

* Swipe list elements right or left (but not from the edge) to delete or perform other actions.

* Swipe notifications from the left to perform the default action for that notification.

And then there's 3D touch.

I think you picked poor examples. All the ones you listed are power user accelerators for actions you can do in other ways that are slower but more straightforward.

Except this one:

> Swipe notifications from the left to perform the default action for that notification.

But this one has a “slide to open” text explainig what to do right below it.

All interaction is learned. There is literally nothing that is obvious to the unexperienced thats not the discussion here.

The question is whether the metaphor model that Don & co are advocating is a better one and to which I would argue it's not because that too rely en metaphors to be learned.

The touch metaphor is litterally the way into the interface (ahh i can touch things, ahh i can also swipe things etc.)

In the classical universe you had several layers of abstraction between the user and the content. Apple is trying to make it as close to a one to one relationship they can. Your examples are about something completely different.

All interaction is learned. There is literally nothing that is obvious to the unexperienced thats not the discussion here.

But there is a scale of how easily something is learned, and a UI with more or better affordances will be easier to learn than one with worse or fewer affordances.

As someone who designs a lot of UI, I was nodding through much of this article. The most obvious part I disagreed with was the idea that they are at least making things more attractive as they damage usability. If those comments referred to the current trend for bland, homogenous, flat UIs, then I find most of these much less attractive than those we had just a few years ago. Almost everything looks the same now, and that look is so dumbed down that to me it feels like the digital version of painting a big canvas solid blue and then selling it for $100,000 as "modern art".

Thats not really how to look at this though.

There are of course completely useless UI but for most of the UI we are talking about here it really just is a matter of learning it and most of the times making something easy to learn might mean that it's not as powerful to use. I.e. there are no right solution just a bunch of solutions each with their various drawbacks and advantages.

In the context of this discussion though the things they complain about are missing what apple is trying to do (remove the layers of abstraction so that the very elements themselves are the interface rather than by proxy of some other controllers.

There are of course completely useless UI but for most of the UI we are talking about here it really just is a matter of learning it and most of the times making something easy to learn might mean that it's not as powerful to use. I.e. there are no right solution just a bunch of solutions each with their various drawbacks and advantages.

That may be true to an extent, but UIs could offer a lot more support to beginners trying to find their way around than many of the current generation of mobile UIs do. I agree there is always a balancing act, but at the moment we seem to be getting the worse end on all of the scales at once, with limited functionality, limited discoverability, and limited aesthetics. And the really sad part is that this has been a step backwards from the state of the art just a few years ago, when the typical mobile UI was both more attractive and easier to use than the flat junk that Apple, Google and Microsoft seem to be obsessed with today.