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Comment by Maakuth | Hacker News Reader

> How would anyone ever figure out how to split-screen multitask on the iPad if they didn’t already know how to do it?

I actually recently got my first personal iOS (okay, iPadOS) device and this is how I feel about many of the UI features. Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature and I'm struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business. Maybe what's needed is good old RTFM, but having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use, it's kind of unexpected that so much of this stuff is not that discoverable.

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> having heard how easy Apple device are to supposed to be to use

That was a rule for very good reason, and it will take some time to erode, but it’s definitely not as true today as it once was. It’s no consolation, but the first iPad - from the era of usable Apple design - was much better. Not in terms of power or weight, of course, but the OS didn’t have all these weird mystery-meat controls, gestures, broken multi-windowing etc.

Swiping is not discoverable, but no one noticed at first because the iPhone TV ad campaigns all showed how to use it. So most people who got an iPhone already had that bit of knowledge in their brains and thought it was intuitive.

Touch interfaces have an inherent disadvantage here — there's no equivalent of 'hovering' a 'cursor' over something to see if it changes visually, triggers a tooltip, etc. Their interfaces actually need more help to be discoverable, not less.

Swiping isn't even a great gesture for most uses. Earlier today, I had to delete maybe 50-100 downloaded podcasts from the Podcasts app (there is seemingly no way to do this en masse). The quickest way to do so is with repeated swipes, but it's almost impossible to be consistent with your swipes over 50-100 items: sometimes the swipes 'stop short', sometimes they just fail for no obvious reason. A swipe is also a LOT more physical effort than a tap — if I could have just pressed a "DELETE" button 50 times, it would have been a lot more palatable (still short of a proper multi-delete, of course).

It drives me up the walls when some kind of list or collection touch UI doesn't offer any kind of batching, and most don't.

Some kind of data-selection mode where I can drag across all the elements I want to select would be awesome.

Is multi-windowing really broken? I've found it incredibly useful for taking notes in the right window while the book/article I am reading in in the left window. It seems to just work for me.

I think it's 'broken' for anyone who doesn’t use it regularly. It’s too undiscoverable, and too easy to invoke accidentally, for the rest of us.

It’s changed. With the last iOS update, the gestures changed slightly - they used to start with a slide over that could be docked, and moved to a split and/or dock based on the position on the screen.

Individual app’s capabilities also vary based on whether they are windowed or not. For example, you can’t airplay out of YouTube unless the app is full screen (even though once you’ve moved it to your Apple TV, you can switch away freely).

Discoverability is also crap. You have to dig into the manual (which you have to “buy” for free) to get the full details of the feature.

> struggling to undo what I did to get back to the business

You'll love this one: to undo (don't think it works for everything, but it does for typing), shake your device rapidly from side to side.

There’s a gesture for it now, too... but I have no idea what it is. Something like swiping three or four fingers down or across or diagonally. Definitely not discoverable.

Three fingers left and right, theres also a three finger pinch for cut and paste.

uh...they all make more sense on an iPad than the phone though lol.

This was replaced in iOS 13 by a less comical, yet equally undiscoverable three-finger tap gesture.

Considering that command-Z is not discoverable either, it’s not too bad, especially as there are undo/redo/clipboard buttons on the keyboard in most cases.

>> Considering that command-Z is not discoverable

Traditionally, the keyboard shortcut for undo has been listed next to undo on the edit menu. That's pretty discoverable...

And it's brilliant.

Ever time you manually click edit → undo, you'll see the shortcut. It’s not invasive—it’s not some big popup that takes over the screen, or even a neon-colored tooltip that commands your attention—it’s just there, in the background, in case you happen to notice it. Maybe you’re not sure what it means at first, but if you keep seeing it every day, you just might try hitting the sequence of keys at some point...

The best UIs naturally help you progress from a basic user to an advanced user, without you even noticing it. I'm not saying the traditional desktop UI paradigm is the best that can ever possibly be done, but it has had 30 years of evolution at this point, and it's pretty darn strong.

I really miss the consistency of CUA and its derivatives (the original Mac and Windows desktop UX). It may have not been the most ergonomic, but it was extremely discoverable thanks to the menus, and it was very consistent: you only had to learn a few simple principles, and then apply them everywhere - and it scaled nicely from Notepad to Excel.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Common_User_Access

Are you serious?

https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...

> Many apps allow people to shake the device to undo and redo certain operations, such as typing or deleting. When initiated in this manner, an alert asks the user to confirm or cancel the undo or redo operation.

Yup, also Google Maps on iOS detects this as a "Send Feedback" command and shows a dialog for it. Slightly fitting, I suppose.

> Touching some side of the screen triggers this or that surprising feature

Ah this brings back fond memories of Windows 8 :-)

They even did this silly "corner thing" in the server edition, Windows Server 2012 - I remember the first time I RDP'd onto one, and had no clue how to open the start menu (the Windows key didn't work over RDP)!

I had to google it, obviously whilst cursing profusely the whole time. Microsoft have a lot of UI/UX people - it boggles the mind that someone thought this was a good idea!

I legit had to google how to Shut down / Restart a Windows 8 machine back then! It's insane to think that tech people could not figure out the UI, imagine what the regular people had to go through.

I had to open system Help to try to figure out how to log out of Windows NT 4 the first time I used it. We didn’t even have Google.

Helpfully, choosing Help crashed the system, which accomplished my goal.

Didn't Vista default to suspend when pressing the power button - in the menu?

Not sure why the downvote. This was a legitimate concern. I supported Windows PCs back then, and it was hard enough getting people distilled in the mantra of shutting down their PCs without just pulling the power. And then the default behaviour changes. Inconsistent UIs. https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-change-the-start-menu-power-...

In Gnome-Shell, pointing to the top-left corner of the screen (labeled "Activities" on the system bar) will bring up their Windows-8-screen equivalent, and it's quite intuitive to use once you know the basics. It's slow as hell because Javascript, but other than that it works fine. And yes, you can tap or swipe from outside for pure touch access.

The key distinction there is that there is a visual element that does still respond to taps/clicks, which means that eventually you try to click on it, overshoot to the corner, and discover that you don't need to click at all.

Gnome shell does some of this stuff well, but try using it for real work on a tablet and you start needing those arbitrary gestures again. Need to invoke the on screen keyboard? View the app overview? You're going to be searching the web for those gestures, guaranteed.

Hot corners.

That's what they are called. Not sure why the negativity.

There is a manual of sorts: Tips.app

There’s also an iPad User Guide you can download in the Books.app.

I miss the time when there was no "Tips.app" nor a need for such an app. Nearly every UI feature used to be discoverable and made sense. Those that didn't (like gestures to close apps on iPad) were gated by a toggle in Settings so that casual users who don't know/need it don't accidentally trigger it.

Last year I got an iPad, my first Apple device (I needed ForeFlight for flying, and it's only available for iPad). I downloaded a few manuals for ForeFlight, which apparently went to Books. I pulled one up in Books, spent a few minutes glancing and things, and spent the next 15 minutes trying to figure out how to get out of the current book back to my list of books. Finally took it to my wife (a long-time Apple fan), and it took her about 3 minutes of tapping and dragging various places. In the end, neither of us knew how we did it.

It's not a surprise to me that there's a manual and that it's even on the device :). But it seems like an iOS design pattern to keep this stuff hidden. I think it's okay for things that rarely happen by accident (multi-finger swipes or so), but touching (swiping?) over screen edges is something I seem to do often, so it becomes a problem. And I'm a geek in my early thirties, so it's not only a problem for the elderly!

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