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Did you perhaps skip the on-boarding process? A lot of what you mention has been part of the Getting to know your iPhone on-boarding since they were introduced on the iPhone X. Specifically where to pull down from and pull up from.

I’m not sure what you mean by the flashlight not being actionable. Notification shade/Lock Screen buttons are long press actions to prevent accidental activation.

On iOS 16 there’s now a button on the launcher to invoke search in case people want to avoid swiping

You say they design their products to be used by tech savvy people but gestural design is designed to become intuitive after the first tutorial. Indeed the only people I know who struggle with it are tech savvy people who skip the on-boarding. In much the same way that people who think they’re handy disregard ikea instructions etc

Here’s a talk on the thought process behind a lot of their “fluid” design https://developer.apple.com/wwdc18/803

I am not talking about myself personally. Users like my mom, who have trouble navigating AirBnb, are going to have trouble remembering 8 different swipe actions, even if they go through a tutorial. A designer needs to anticipate users skipping tutorials or just forgetting them. A tutorial is not an alternative to usable design.

You’re now conflating usability with discoverability which are very different things.

Many very usable actions are left to intuition and discovered as such or by on-boarding.

Pinch to zoom is a classic example.

The swipe to dismiss gesture is very usable once it’s discovered. iOS does a very good job at training people that actions from the edge of their device do things. It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one.

I also feel like comparing navigating an app with its own unique idiosyncrasies that you do so sporadically to navigating an OS daily are very different orders of magnitude on developing muscle memory.

Anyway I think you’re arguing very different aspect of UX design

"Can I use this device" and "Can I figure out how to use this device" are not nearly as different as you're making them out to be.

So there is an onboarding process that is skippable, and it would appear that either most people either do, or at least click-through. While the onboarding doesn’t show every gesture and shortcut, it does show how to “figure out how to use this device”.

And herein lies the problem, and it’s not exclusive to iOS. No matter how much hand holding there is, if the user doesn’t engage, then it’s a lost cause. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.

Discoverability is as much about trying something that you know works elsewhere as it is showing direct affordances.

> It’s fundamental to the design of the OS and has been so since day one.

Swipes, and especially swipes from behind the edge were definitely not "fundamental" in the first version of iOS. I don't even recall them being fundamental in the first iPad.

I’ve been using iOS devices for years and getting what I want when I swipe down is a constant roll of the dice. Did I do it in the ambiguous zone for the control center or did I do it where I’ll get recent notifications? Oh wait if I’m on my phone instead of my tablet I need to swipe up for the control center. Why it needs to be different on the tablets I’ve never really known, it used to be from the bottom and it was really nice for it to be consistent. Maddening.

What are you talking about? iPad uses the same activation area as iPhone. https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT210974

It is consistent.

Phones with home buttons have the control centre in the same place it always was, at the bottom. Only the newer notch-style phones have it on the top-right.

I have always thought this was weird, but for what it’s worth, it works the same way on the tablets (if it has a home button, swipe from the bottom, otherwise, swipe from the top right).

Nope. The iPad Air 2 I’m typing this on has a home button but makes me swipe from the top right for the control panel. And yes it is fairly up to date, it’s on 15.6.1.

It’ll probably change in a few years again. Except it won’t for some devices.

what!??!!??! Well there goes that theory.

They actually denied this when the X was released. It make total sense in the context of not having a hardware button. It reduces false triggers.

It is not. My iPad Air 2 and iPhone 6s are both running 15.6.1. I have to swipe down for the control center on the tablet, and up for the phone.

Some are saying they see a pattern of “if it has a home button you swipe up, otherwise down” but both of these iThings have a home button.

> Did you perhaps skip the on-boarding process?

I don't know how it is in other countries, but here in Japan, when you buy a phone in a mobile carrier shop, they set it up for you, which means any on-boarding that exists on the phone OS is skipped entirely.

iOS setup is personalized so your carrier shouldn’t be setting up anything for you. E.g when you startup you need to setup your faceid and other personal info, that a carrier can’t setup. The most a carrier can do is pre-configure the phone with a specific activation.

If they’re skipping that for users then they’re breaking the entire flow for transferring data , setting up payment and authentication etc…

Now that you mention it, faceid had to be setup... I don't remember how that happened, though.

"Good design is often invisible, if you skip the on-boarding process" -- Dieter Rams

> The flashlight button on the home screen is also not actionable.

The button is actionable, it just takes a long press to avoid accidental activation.

Great, add that to the list of undiscoverable and incoherent design choices in the OP's comment.

As you hold your finger down the button grows. The designers considered that to be an affordance, whether successful or not (the swiping between tabs mentioned in the OP also has a fairly obvious affordance IMO)

The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)

>As you hold your finger down the button grows.

...like no other button ever does.

This only makes it worse.

Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen.

But growing a button?

Amazing.

Truly brilliant. On a touch UI, the visual feedback is on the thing your finger is currently obscuring!

I've seen this sort of long-press safety feature a couple of times, and elsewhere it's been accompanied by a helpful message which appears if I try to short-press the button.

Why does the flashlight button need the safety feature anyway? It's not a self-destruct button, if I turn it on I can turn it off again with no ill effects. That was a rhetorical question, nobody knows why.

So you don't turn it on accidently and burn out the lamp/burn through the battery. It's really not that hard or obscure. Tap and hold has been a 'thing' for a long time. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Literally everyone I know personally groks this particular feature. It's not nearly as unintuative as you attempt to make out.

I'm not making a mountain out of anything, I'm drive-by commenting on a particularly amusing Apple UI feature I wasn't previously aware of. Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect, and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.

Apple's design approach has been totally _un_intuitive to me for at least 20 years, and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.

> Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect

You’d be surprised.

> and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.

The information is out there. When you first run, when you upgrade, there are numerous prompts to show you “what’s new”. Many ‘power users’ (I really dislike that name) arrogantly dismiss these. Then there are the online guides, the offline guides (book in the books app, Tips app). If the user pays attention, there are affordances everywhere — the safari tabs example in the article being a perfect example.

> and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.

This is testament to the point I’m making. Sure some of it isn’t completely obvious, but this ain't one of them, and discoverability isn’t about obviousness. If that were the case, we’d still be hunter-gatherers.

Yous said all that, and it's still not a justification to introduce a non-obvious and unique UI/UX paradigm just in one place that prevents user from accomplishing the task they need to do.

It's obvious. As soon as you touch the flashlight button, there is haptic feedback along with the button growing, exactly like the camera button on the other side. And yes, the button grows beyond the size of a 95th percentile finger. Now, whether or not you pay attention to the physical and visual cues is up to you. The cues are there. The instructions are in the official online guide as well as "About 3,020,000" other pages. They are in the official user guide in the books app. It's 'discoverable' without much of cognitive load for anyone that has used a phone in the last 20 years, not 'immediately obvious'.

Hmm? If you accidentally turned on the flashlight and it was left on, you would be bummed to find out your battery had drained next time you picked it up.

That's justifiable on the home screen, but the protection for the button on the notifications screen that I can only activate:

1. unlocking my phone

2. swiping down from the top

3. clicking on a small button in the bottom corner

not so much

The reason it’s the same there is that that screen looks exactly the same as the Home Screen. So, if you know how the Home Screen works, you know how this one works. Making it different would be non-discoverable.

But, personally, I’d rather a UI that’s convenient to use rather than discoverable. Discovering a feature happens once, using happens forever.

There is, and has always been, haptic feedback too.

There is only haptic feedback if you hold it, not if you tap it.

The home button has like 11 different uses based on context and how you press it. It's just insane.

I kinda secretly judge UX people that enjoy iOS. And somehow almost all of them are Mac/iPhone users. I think that is a bit responsible for the uptick in form over function lately.

All those flashlight buttons are actionable, you just need to press and hold. I suppose this proves a point about discoverability.

> - seeing notifications requires swiping down specifically from the top left

Not really, swiping from anywhere on the top (except top-right) works. This is consistent with the other gestures: swipe up from the lock screen to unlock it (just like you would open a roller shutter); swipe down to lock it again -- and see the notifications. You can also simply hit the side button.

> - turning on the flashlight requires swiping down specifically from the top right

You can turn it on from the lock screen, as others have pointed out.

> - turning the phone off requires holding two unrelated buttons

Yes, so that you don’t turn it off by mistake. Smartphones are not devices you turn on and off; outside of OS updates they stay on forever.

> It makes me wonder if they intentionally design their products to be exclusively usable by tech-savvy people.

I would say the opposite. When I think of tech-savy people, I think about mouse and keyboard; when I think of non-tech-savy ones, I think about tactile displays and gestures (and voice).

My 92-yo grandfather barely knows how to make his printer work but has no trouble remembering the most common swipe gestures: it’s hard to forget about pinch to zoom or swipe down to 'close' the phone and swipe up to 'open' it again.

I've been using ios devices for a decade and half and empirically I'm worse than 50/50 in terms of successfully invoking the show-me-notification gesture. Hitting the power button twice in sequence (lock->wake) has been my heuristic.

I suspect that designers are tasked with too many features on too small of a device. On a desktop with a mouse + keyboard there is a potential for so many shortcuts ... you have to get much more creative on a touch-only device.

I don't endorse it however. I think pop-up menus (even the much maligned hamburger) are at least a way to make many more features discoverable. I dislike "gestures".

I think this constraint actually created some of the best UI ever. Desktop designers had gotten lazy and just stacked tool bar over tool bar and then sidebars too with hundreds of icons everywhere.

Was it really more discoverable to have the icon always on screen but embedded among so many other useless icons?

Drop-down menus with more or less standard categories were for discoverability. Toolbars were always meant for "quick access", representing the most common - and, usually, user-configurable, subset of commands in the menus.

I think many of these are inherently poweruser features though. Most non tech-savvy people will rarely have to turn off their phone or clear their open apps (really if the memory eviction system is good this shouldn't even be a concern).

Some of the other stuff you mentioned is discoverable in my opinion. Swiping down from home gives you a search bar. Notifications being accessible by swiping down from the left is admittedly not as good as swiping down from the top bar in the older iPhones, but I think still more discoverable than the Windows notification system that requires you to click a button.

From time to time you need to reboot the phone to get some nonworking app or system function unstuck. I regularly have to guide family members to reboot their phone or tablet, and have to google each time which button combination has to be pressed on the particular iPhone or iPad model.

Turning off the phone is useful if you are low on power and don't have a way to charge. I do this sometimes when traveling or in the city.

When I go through open apps, it is usually to get back to something I was doing, rather than to clear it. Finding what you were just looking at 2 seconds ago shouldn't be considered a power user feature.