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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

It’s always been notable to me that the thing that killed Flash wasn’t the wars with the usability community 20-odd years ago, it was the iPhone. People dumped these garish interfaces because a beautiful device came along that refused to run them, not because they were in many or perhaps most cases terrible for the task at hand.

I think a lot of the methodological knowledge built by usability people has probably been ignored in favour of a metric-driven approach these days. That approach is very good at identifying bottlenecks in existing workflows or deciding between two ideas, but ultimately lacks the empathy you describe. You can only really build that by engaging directly with users, and watching them suffer at the hands of your creations.

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I've always felt it a bit weird that iPhones quickly became the norm for all designers I've worked with, them hailing it as a so great to use. While I'm stuck not knowing how to find stuff, it's always hidden behind some undiscoverable swipe gesture. The home button used to have 10+ or so different functions based on context. They way you touched the screen (click, long press, 3d touch or whatnot) mattered.

Do normal users know all this? Or do they just only use the 10% easy functionality of the phone and is happy with that? Maybe articles like "17 Things You Didn't Know Your iPhone's Home Button Could Do" is a sign usability has been sacrificed in order to have a clean&neat design.

I have a half-baked still-gooey thought about this, but it's really around the time of the iphone (and the take off of the smartphone) that discoverability got thrown in the trash. Search bars instead of menus became the primary means of interaction, and ironically you can only find something with the search bar if you already know what you are looking for.

Of course menus don't translate well to touch devices, and menu systems can quickly become unorganized junk drawers for functionality, but it feels like discoverability was never fully solved on touch devices.

As an Android user it's also a problem here. The settings menu got a Search feature a few releases ago and its a sad concession that people have no idea where to find things in the Settings menu.

And it also has the same problem you describe - you don't know how to find something unless you know what it's called. And even if you do find something, there's no breadcrumb trail to learn how to find it without using search. You have to look at what's on the current page and like some kind of reverse engineering sherlock, think about where a designer could possibly have put this page. It's insane.

You can tap on the clock to scroll to the top on iphone (not only in browser).

Actually, having 10% common functionality easily available for unsophisticated users, and the rest hidden but fast to access, is good UI.

Sure, discoverability is good to have, but it is not a failure that you need to be told about it as long as it only contains features useful to power users.

Requiring experts to undergo some training to make the most out of their devices is acceptable UI if the final interactions are optimized for their use; double so if it doesn't interfere with usage by untrained users.

Yes, but I just feel that I have to help my parents with the most menial of tasks, but even then I sometimes cannot figure it out without googling.

I wonder if it's kinda a stockholm syndrome or if it caters to one's ego somehow. After discovering a feature, one feels smarter / more connected to the device, compared to if it was actually easier to use from the get go.

Examples of such tasks? I gave my 65yo mom an Iphone a few years back and there were literally zero issues after the quick intro on how to launch apps etc

I wish my 71yo dad was as proficient as your mom. He doesn't remember anything he doesn't do regularly.

For example, he texts frequently but doesn't know how to check his email. Because I am the tech support child, he reaches out to me for iPhone help. However, since I am not an iPhone user, I always struggle and sometimes fail to solve his problem.

Perhaps this is a sign I have not dedicated enough time to learning this new OS in my family ecosystem, but I do feel it is the least-similar to the other OS's I have used. It's like if my dad was learning programming and asked if I'd help him with his Lisp program. No thanks.

Though maybe I am just a luddite and the universe is written in iOS.

I've used computers all my life and I find iphones really difficult to use.

Not just unfamiliar, difficult.

Yeah. You are supposed to say "dumb, little ole me, look how smart this this thing is, hiding all this cool stuff...isn't that neat!" It fits well with the kind people our society churns out. Victims that blame themselves.

I have never understood the hype about the iPhone interface. I had an early Android and I loved it. Then, for a year or two, I had an iPhone 4 which I got from work. I never learned to love it. It always felt a bit obtuse and like it didn't quite do what I wanted. I felt like the interface was sacrificing usability for a superficial sense of elegance and efficiency for smoothness of animations.

When that phone stopped working I got a decent Android phone and it felt so much more comfortable.

Interesting. I've worked in design orgs since the iPhone came out and in my experience it's always hovered around 50/50. Maybe it's an East Coast, West Coast thing?

I will say that when it first came out the direct manipulation of the iPhone UI was a qualitatively different experience compared to any other touchscreen for a very long time. Back then most Android reviews included caveats like "stuttery", "janky", or "low resolution", and these had the cumulative effect of spoiling the illusion of direct manipulation.

Today the gap is much smaller and easier to ignore, and the iPhone has added lots of hidden affordances like swipes and double, triple, and force taps to cater to expert users at the expense of novices.

How is it as the expense of novices? They were fine without it before and they’re fine without knowing about it now. But if they do end up wanting to do some of that advanced stuff, it’s one Google or friend-suggestion away.

It's a persuasive argument, and one I've used myself.

One danger is if the affordance is triggered accidentally. For example, my kids like pushing buttons and swiping when I wouldn't think to do those things and accidentally switch apps or enter into guided access modes without meaning to. In my case I occasionally trigger things like sticky keys unintentionally.

Another danger is if application developers start assuming that they can rely on users knowing hidden affordances and use swiping, double-tapping, force pressing, right-clicking, etc in the core application workflow. Not an Android iOS example, but last night one of my kids started playing Stardew Valley as their first non-tablet game. It has a steep learning curve since it relies on multiple different keyboard keys and on differentiating between right and left-click, whereas I wouldn't consider right-clicking to be a novice skill.

On Windows anyway, I think most users are very familiar with the right-click context menu. A lot of people don't even know the keyboard shortcuts for cut/copy/paste because they just right-click and there it is.

For complete novices, the first thing they do is click the mouse, and since there are only two buttons it doesn't take long to figure out that left-click is the primary button, and right-click brings up a menu with handy options (practically everything has a context menu in Windows). But with the Web, where context menus are rare, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not as well-known anymore.

I think you may be right about the web. It is not my experience that novices think to look in right-click context menus on the web, with the exception of text operations like copying text that you mention, and sometimes link actions. (I'm basing this off dozens of usability studies on web-based applications, it may be different for older windows applications.)

I have theories -- maybe it's because most web apps do not bother with context menus (outside of text operations), maybe it's because more people have developed their mental model from touchscreen devices where context menus are less commonly used, maybe more people are on laptops with trackpads that do not make right-clicking as obvious, maybe because there's no visual affordance indicating which onscreen elements have a useful context menu and which have the standard webpage context menu so it's a guessing game. I don't honestly know. But I am confident that if you place key functionality in a context menu of a web-based app that most novice users will not discover it on their own. As per Jakob Nielsen: "...be warned: less skilled users rarely use these [context] menus." [1]

Once end-users learn how to use your app (and therefore are no longer novices) then they seem to have no trouble remembering and using context menus, so it's a great way to expose expert affordances.

In the case of my kids I can also say that the Stardew Valley user interface (such as keeping right-click and left-click actions straight) has been the most difficult part of the game so far. And it doesn't seem like it was particularly necessary distinction to make -- there seem to be few cases where both right- and left-click actions are equally appropriate.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/feature-richness-and-user-e...

> [...] but ultimately lacks the empathy you describe. You can only really build that by engaging directly with users, and watching them suffer at the hands of your creations.

While that's the only way to build empathy, you should be aware (and beware) that it is also a good way to build contempt (as counterproductive as that often is). Many of the "dark patterns" probably originated that way.

Could you explain more? Most dark patterns seem to me to be metrics-driven tricks to maximise people accepting GDPR or spam opt-ins, or making additional unintended purchases etc. I don't believe they come from any sort of process of watching users on a task and talking to them. If you're saying that understanding your users allows you to better be hostile towards them, then yes, I agree, but that's bad user interface design by definition.

I mean I hat I've observed developers and designers who, when forced to watch users struggle, have the reaction "damn, they're stupid" and further that dark patterns are sometimes motivated by "I bet a lot of people are stupid enough to..."

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