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Comment by rkagerer | Hacker News Reader

What's annoying and counter to popular convention / user expectations is that you have to keep your finger in the established path to keep grip of the "ball". (S'pecially given your finger often blocks the view of it).

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I'm not sure that the game would work without this restriction. If you kept grip of the ball regardless of if your finger was on the path none of the game's puzzles would work since you could just move your fingers wherever you wanted without losing the ball.

Why is it annoying?

The feedback is immediate and highly discoverable.

The Lock Screen on your phone has totally different criteria (ease, muscle memory) than a toy that uses the same metaphor (fun/challenging)

Also: isn’t it more fun this way??

I actually liked it, but my daughters immediate reaction was “This is so annoying” (but in all caps).

Meanwhile, I find typing anything on my phone very annoying.

That's the whole point of the game, no? It was what I expected. Are some slide to unlock bars "ratchets" that stay where you left them?

I think it is less intuitive to non-iOS users... Android has "swipe up to unlock" and there isn't really a UI element.

Uhm haha. On behalf of our community I would like to say that I was perfectly capable of understanding this mechanism thank you. Pretty sure the reason for the unintuitiveness for some people must rely on something else entirely.

iOS has been "swipe up to unlock" for some time now, as well as Android vendors had "slide to unlock" lockscreens earlier.

Android stock maybe. Android as delivered by various vendors? It depends. I've seen variations of this mechanism pop up - including ones requiring to keep the finger on the path or else you "lose the ball", and that one was in the phone UI, where you needed to swipe to accept or reject a call!

For me it wasn't that the slide doesn't stay in place (that much is expected), but that if you deviate from the path it immediately slips back to the beginning. That's a bit anti-pattern w.r.t. typical slides that either have a forgiveness zone around the element or update to the point on the slide nearest to the gesture point.

Not a ratchet, but an imaginary rubber band.

Definitely one of the core challenges of the game, and understandably not to everyone’s taste. I learned that I inadvertently swipe in a slight arc on the first puzzle and enjoyed learning to move precisely.

It's the same as a one of those games with the wire and the buzzer, just with a different interface.

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