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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

There things worse than toasts: hidden slide panels. They are basically hidden toasts that are necessary for some actions and are completely unintuitive, unfindable and undiscoverable. My worst experience was with waze using the cellphone of someone else; I had to do something (don't remember what) and just stared at the screen (like a retard) trying to guess what I had to do; the person eventually got the phone, slid the hidden panel from the right and showed me what I had to do.

I understand how much this saves space, but it is absolutely ridiculous! How does an UX expert expects someone to guess that? Are current UI's supposed to be used by people who behave like children poking everywhere to discover things?

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I think the slide left/right for sidebar is a nice UX, as long as the user knows about it, and as long as you don't go beyond 1 main + 2 sidebars.

Discord mobile app used to have it for both left and right sidebars, and then a while ago someone had a brilliant idea that the "slide to reply" gesture was more important than navigating the app, and now you have to click a tiny ambiguous button to see the right sidebar.

I remember installing Snapchat one and immediately realizing how awful it was. Different corners had different functions. It needs to be illegal

Fully agree. IOS of course, is full of them, even on tablets where screen space is abundant.

I think most "toasts" (now I know the word for it!) are redundant and useless. I usually completely miss them. I think they are generally "harmless," but they should not be used to convey crucial information.

As for the "hidden panel," I have always assumed that this is a bug, but someone may have thought it was a good idea:

I use the Apple Connect App (for managing apps on the App Store) frequently.

If I use it on my iPad Mini, in portrait mode (how I usually use it), and select one of my apps, the back button often disappears, which means that I can't select another account (I have several), or another app within the current account.

Until I physically turn the iPad sideways.

Then, a Navigator appears on the left, and I can select other apps, or change accounts.

Frankly, I'm really quite disappointed in the whole UX for the Apple App Store backend (I'm not so thrilled with the frontend, either, but I use the backend all the time). It's a bit jarring, when you think about how much care they put into the rest of the user experience on the platform.

Apple's non-hotpath UX (and even UI) is incredibly bad. The entire experience configuring icloud and family sharing on a Mac is like entering another dimension with no relation to the surrounding OS.

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