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Comment by crooked-v | Hacker News Reader

> you can swipe from the bottom-right corner of the screen with the Apple Pencil and it'll take a screenshot of the webpage and open it for marking up

I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???

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As an occasional iPad user, I find the interface somewhat bewildering, even as a power user of other devices.

I want to search to see if an app is installed. I expect an Overview screen that's easily accessible for this like Android, Gnome or Chrome OS, but on iOS I have to swipe left a few times? Weird.

I want to switch wireless network I'm connected to. I correctly guess that I can swipe down to make a wireless icon appear. I expect that from the icon I can get into the settings, but that doesn't appear to be the case. It only seems to toggle the wireless networking on or off.

Sometimes I have good luck telling Siri what to do, but other times the comprehension of what I'm asking falls flat compared to Google's AI.

You should be able to pull down on any page of the home screen to bring up the app search screen, rather than having to swipe all the way to the left.

You can now also long press the wifi icon (twice) from the control centre in iOS 13 to quickly switch wifi networks without going into the settings app, you can also do the same with the bluetooth icon.

A lot of this stuff is really hard to just discover though if you're not already aware it exists to begin with.

How do you search if you don't remember the name?

Search isn’t name match. E.g. search for “video” and YouTube will be returned.

Not saying you are wrong, but you can long press the wifi button to bring up a sub menu and then long press it again get a list of networks.

Which is pretty much exactly how Android works as well.

Google home is pretty mediocre with basic commands, especially things like “turn on the lights”, it just starts some random song on Spotify.

> I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???

Apple products have been like this for ages. I.e., they present a "simple" interface for the "typical" user, and then they provide "advanced" features for the "power user" that are only accessible via keyboard shortcuts, or what have you. (E.g., doing a screenshot on MacOS is via Command-$.)

Their success in achieving the right balance, however, has been quite mixed IMHO.

How do you find out about the "advanced" features? Via Google or Stack Exchange or reading a book or guide, I suppose.

I'm utterly bewildered that there's no official documentation of this stuff though. This seems to be common with a lot of modern software too.

I remember when google maps changed from having a from location box and a to location box to just letting you type "from address A to address B", which is pretty nifty. However this was never actually documented so I spent months pressing randomly to get the old UI up (it still seemed to exist, but only in some states of the application) before I finally realized that was the new way.

> I'm utterly bewildered that there's no official documentation of this stuff though. This seems to be common with a lot of modern software too.

In iBooks you can download all the user guides for all devides

> I'm utterly bewildered that there's no official documentation of this stuff though.

I don't know if there is or isn't official documentation everything you might typically want to know for Apple products. Clearly, they don't document the answer to every question that anyone might ever ask, but they do document many things that you might not think they do.

I know this because often when I Google for how to do something on a Mac, I often end up on some Apple page that tells me how to accomplish what I want. E.g., a page that documents a bunch of MacOS keyboard shortcuts, or what have you.

Of course, one problem is churn. I.e., the features in the software are changing frequently, and consequently, documentation can get quickly out of date. Also, Apple is likely to be cooperating with book authors. There is the "Missing Manual" series, which often seems to contain a lot of useful information (though, as I mentioned sometimes out-of-date), and I'm sure that David Pogue and friends don't figure all of this out via just trial and error. It seems like they must get some sort of assistance from Apple in the form of release notes or rough documentation, or something.

Or worse, if you accidentally find this feature, will you know what you just did? Or will you suddenly be dumped into somewhere that looks like it is still a web browser but has suddenly stopped responding like one.

It reminds me of all the old Windows users accidentally dragging their start-bar and covering the whole screen.

It’ll just have the screenshot on the bottom right corner of the screen.

It's funny because this was one of the big issues I kept hearing (and agreed with myself) about Windows 8 - all the things that can happen when you hover in the corners and the hideous "charms" bar.

I really REALLY wish buttons would come back in style.

The problem with buttons is that they’re visual clutter once you learn the gesture. This is a yet unsolved problem with making an interface discoverable but having it disappear once discovered without having two separate UIs.

Can you imagine if there was a persistent button at the top of your screen that said “Open Notifications?”

The right-click mouse gestures in Maya 3d are one example of solving this problem nicely. If you do it at normal speed, you see & select items on the context menus and submenus. But as you learn the gestures that form from making these selections you can execute them rapidly and the context menus don't need to be displayed. It's a perfect example of training you to use an advanced feature with an easy learning curve, then letting the 'training wheels' come off on a case by case basis, no change in settings needed!

Does anyone happen to know of any other applications that use this kind of UI, or even better, a windows utility that adds this kind of functionality across the OS, building custom context-menus for each application?

Command palettes in modern editors (usually ctrl/cmd+shift+p) are an excellent solution to this UX problem imo.

You can discover some functionality you're looking for by searching for it and activating it from the palette for the first few times, and if you find the functionality useful enough you can spend a few brain cycles learning/configuring the shortcut to accelerate it.

I think a similar paradigm can work for gestures on mobile as well. Some master gesture to open up a searchable list of context sensitive commands, and some mechanism to map new gestures to frequently used commands.

"Can you imagine if there was a persistent button at the top of your screen that said “Open Notifications?” "

YES PLEASE! I've had enough of modern design. Text, links, and buttons all look the same. Sub-panels are hidden behind random things in random places and behind random swipes.

We're ready for a renaissance of discoverability in UI.

Is it under the Tips app? If it is, that’s probably where they expect people to find it.

Since re-joining the iOS world last year, I've been amazed at how many (often nifty!) features are the exact opposite of intuitive. I was still discovering new features either on accident or via articles, multiple months into ownership of my iPhone. Once I learned about the features many of them were great, but it's very surprising given Apple's focus on intuitiveness.

I've only occasionally used Apple devices but have always thought them to be rather un-intuitive.

I remember spending a good 10 minutes trying to work out how to eject a CD from a Macbook/iMac until someone explained to me that you simply drag the CD icon from the desktop to the trash can...

OMG. This was my first Mac experience exactly. I was on a consulting project and the disk had some very valuable files on it. Someone at the company told me I had to drag the disk to the trash to eject it. I thought I was being punked and refused to do it. My favorite Mac story!

Lack of explanations for your downvotes, but the CD eject issue you described got me as well.

I’m not sure about intuitive vs unintuitive, but as a desktop windows & Linux server user, the Mac was very unfamiliar to me and took a long time to learn its quirks.

Or go into the finder (or iTunes), find the triangle beside the CD name, and left-click it.

I don’t think that existed back in the day, I could be wrong though. I’m thinking 1998-1999 era iMac personally.

It was definitely present in MacOS classic can’t tell exactly when contextual menu was added. But on top of that there was actually a third method, select the disk (highlight) and press cmd-E. Which now now that I think of it is just a shortcut for the fourth one, select the disk then select "Eject" in the file menu. Actually this last method must be the mother of them all, the drag to trash was also maybe one of the first "discoverable shortcut".

It’s just that "drag to the trashcan" gimmick was present since first Macintosh introduction keynote in 1984 and is still usable as of today so no surprise it’s the first answer on every Q/A.

I can’t yet skim through the footage but it might even appear in the 1984 LIVE DEMO (more emphasis needed) of the first Macintosh : https://youtu.be/1tQ5XwvjPmA

The trash can method is how you would of ejected the CD in OS 9, but back then there was also an eject key on the keyboard.

Rewriting using Raskin's theorem - " Since re-joining the iOS world last year, I've been amazed at how many (often nifty!) features are utterly unfamiliar. I was still discovering new features either on accident or via articles, multiple months into ownership of my iPhone. Once I learned about the features many of them were great, but it's very surprising given Apple's focus on familiarity."

Ref: Intuitive = Familiar ... By Jeff Raskin

I feel like apple focuses on intuitiveness for a basic non-power user. But they are okay with adding more complexity that power users will know but are hidden from discovery.

> I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???

Advertising teaches a lot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Glc2mHLPRM

Since the WWDC, Apple has promoted that feature wildly. There are many other features people will miss, but not that one.

Seems like you know it exists within one day of the release, somehow.

Joking aside, the iPad clearly has too many features for they all to be immediately discoverable. The solution to this is for the community to share knowledge, through articles like this and through word of mouth.

The "Tips" app exists specifically to teach you about otherwise undiscoverable features.

I hate undiscoverable UIs, but at least in this case the documentation is right on the device.

> I... but... how in the world is anyone ever supposed to know that exists???

What is the solution? Make people sit through a 2 hour video? Or not include functions that are hard to find?

This is applicable to 90% of gesture-based UI's. iPad makes it even more confusing as it is the 4th UX overhaul in 4 years.

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