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Comment by redwall_hp | Hacker News Reader

It has the same problem: invisible, undiscoverable UI driven by seemingly random gestures. Who cares if you long press or press harder? You still can't tell it's an option unless you try it on everything.

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So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?

It's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click.

Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

I agree, and like the right click, force touch options were always accelerators for more confidant users (rather than being the only way to complete some task).

Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.

The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Force touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action.

That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.

But if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.

Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height.

At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.

You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.

Which was of absolutely zero use to them now as it remains today; they don't understand what happened.

There is a different cursor when you hover it. At some point you can't help people anymore.

Um, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.

Originally of course there was only one mouse button, and you would ctrl-click for the context menu

Originally, yes, there was one¹. But three were used quite soon after.²

¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...

² https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

Two button mice were for sure the standard on non-Macintosh PCs well before Windows was in popular usage.

And 3 wasn't rare, I think.

Yes. That was one of the worst parts of Windows 95’s interface because it wasn’t discoverable.

A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.

I guess you love the extra menu items you only get with Shift+Right button.

Some things are, by design, not meant to be easily discoverable.

It's meant to be reserved for advanced features that you only want to offer to users that know how to find them.

See: right click.

I don't think right click is in the same category. For one thing, the right mouse button is prominent and next to the left one. For another, there was a pretty well established language that right clicking either did nothing (was harmless) or brought up a contextual menu of advanced actions you could then read.

And Apple UI designers (IMO rightfully) were against exactly these hidden context menus. You can see in the older versions of Pages/Keynote/Numbers how UI was meant to work: Instead of right-click menus there was the Info button (promimently found in the shortcut list), which opened a non-modal context menu that could be placed anywhere on screen in a persistent way. This then allowed manipulating all the detail object settings with minimal mouse travel and clicks.

I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable.

Not always. After working for years at Apple I was told (in response to a bug report I filed about missing menu items) that Mac menus might totally change their contents if you PRESSED A MODIFIER KEY. WTF!

So every Mac menu conceivably had (has?) 7 sets of contents, 6 of which are essentially secret. Idiotic.

totally agreed there - these modifiers should go away.

edit: with my post I in no way wanted to indicate that Apple's UI is the pinnacle of design - just that they IMO made the right choice at first by avoiding context menus, or at least keep them optional.

Well, there is this "move to trash" menu item that turns into "really delete" on many file managers. I find it not bad.

If you really need it, you will discover it. Otherwise, you can still go to the trash and really delete the file from there. It's safer than having the really delete item by default, and it's there if you need it.

> I'd say the one thing that MS Office always did really well in comparison is the format paster. Cmd-alt-c/v just isn't as intuitive and discoverable

Office products have the worst copy/paste of any software I use. Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

> Somehow their rich-format copying never does what I want it to do, despite fussing with setting default paste options and learning the advanced keystrokes.

I was like you, until I learned what each of the pasting modes are meant to do, and in particular that it works different if you copy/paste within the same document or from an external source.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2012/02/1...

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/control-the-formatt...

Now I still consider it shitty, but at least I'm moderately in control.

I just wish that the default was to copy/paste the text and not text, style info, multimedia and who knows what else.

You can change the default.

agreed on copy/paste, though I think that's a problem in general in Microsoft-land due to a lack of standardization across their products. what I meant was specifically the format paste feature (the yellow paintbrush icon in Office apps).

I forget when right-click was introduced (9? 10?) but there was only one mouse button at the time.

Sounds a lot like double click on Windows 95 to me.

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