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blub

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.

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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.

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.

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