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I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive. But there could be multiple assumptions on how it should work on first use. Covering all of those possibilities, and integrating them into a cohesive experience that works the first time, and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact, shows a strong attention to detail and design.

This is opposed to something that may be very intuitive for 30% of people, but the other 70% are lost, and the implementation doesn't scale.

I think in UX there is general lack of desire to properly explain how stuff works instead of relying on just "guessing user expectations right"

like if said knob just displayed a vertical bar with marks signalling up and down also works it would be very clear to person that tried to just spin it

Hmm, may be you're right about UX designers not wanting to explain. For instance, I certainly won't want that vertical bar for aesthetic reasons. It's just hard to defend objectively.

> and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact

That's the part that's questionable. Sometimes you just need to pick a way and the other 70% will get used to it. If you make something that tries to fit every intuition, the users can can get stuck with persistent random failures indefinitely, as people that understand one mode accidentally trigger a different mode and almost nobody has a full mental model of how it works.

> I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive.

That's what unintuitive means.

The problem of the knob is that it offers a large and precise control, but that large control remains invisible. There's no obvious clue showing that you can still interact with the knob by dragging the pointer / finger far away from it.

Adding a simple visual clue would help discoverablility a lot. Draw a faint halo on touch, when the mode changes. Draw a more visible trail when the touch point is dragged. Provide immediate and localized feedback, like good UX guidelines suggest.

Exactly. Based on this thing's depiction as a knob, every user is going to assume that you have to describe a ring around it by dragging the cursor in a circle... a fussy and awkward pain in the ass.

Agreed. There's a lot of self blaming going on here. "Apple cares about users so much. They work sooo hard" .. but also when things don't work well, they don't seem to update their world view.

Its quite fascinating behavior really. Reality distortion field.

If I had to guess, I think he may be trying to describe the behavior when you try to interact with the virtual knobs in a way that is based on assumption of how it would work due to other experiences in digital UIs, rather than the “level of detail” that Apple puts into UI and UX that is at first contrary to experience, but then actually amazes people when they realize it actually works with their human expectations rather than the human having to have to adjust themselves and their expectations to the poor UI and UX interactions of other experiences.

To be more concrete, if I had to guess, the author tried using the knob like a slider, trying to drag the visual slider down to decrease and up to increase the knob rotation, but that conflicted and caused movements in “random directions”.

The idea of local maximum means to get from one local peak to another, even if it is a higher one, you need to first go through a valley.

Somebody comes up with an acceptable solution to a design problem, people get used to it, then when somebody comes up with an otherwise theoretically better solution it is in practical terms worse at first because the user has an intuition for another one already. Having to relearn is worse than if there was no preexisting intuition yet.

This is why it is possible to say it is both not very intuitive but good.

ease of initial understanding is not the only definition of good UX. Some UX is optimized for one time use with no familiarity (wizards work well, like checkout flows). The opposite is designed for use every day. In real life professions it takes a lot of work to learn to use tools effectively. That’s not because they are poorly designed, but because they target optimal performance after an initial learning period.

Software has many successful examples of the latter but it’s not a paradigm that designers are familiar with or that startups tend to go after.

author here - fair point but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.

If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.

Reminds me of the Steam Deck's touchpad for scrolling. Some people are very confused by the default behavior which seems to scroll up and down randomly when you swipe. But for people who used an iPod it makes perfect sense, and you can scroll continuously by moving your thumb in a circle, rather than scrolling in increments by swipe swipe swipe.

Two fingers, leave one on the pad, keep swiping with the other?

For a laptop sure, but the Steam Deck's touchpads are on the front where only your thumbs are

"Apple’s attention to detail"

Such cringe-inducing, delusional fawning. You can find counterpoints to this oft-regurgitated claim all over Apple's products, with a cornucopia of them in the rightfully-scorned Tahoe release alone.

But back to the topic at hand: "knobs" in GUIs. They suck, for the very reasons demonstrated here. Audio software in particular is replete with this skeuomorphic failure, and why? Because people who work in music or audio can't understand more-effective GUI affordances? Because they'd be lost without something that looks like the physical knobs on a mixer or stompbox? What an insulting assumption, not to mention nonsensical in modern times.

"Apple employees work really hard to make products that are deceptively simple and just feel right."

This grand declaration is based on what, exactly? In a decade as a software engineer at Apple, I saw a wide range of dedication and aptitude in UI design and implementation. This varies within teams and between teams, with no set standards for research or testing of UI effectiveness. I saw the same amateur-hour mistakes made repeatedly, despite their being pointed out incontrovertibly... and some have come back to bite (and cripple) new generations of Apple products.

Design isn't getting better, folks. It's one thing to give bad design a free pass; but to LAUD it hurts all users.

I'm no apple enthusiast, but digital knobs solve a real UI problem. They:

- display a value compactly

- show that the value is modifiable by the user

- allow changing the value to use more screen real-estate than the knob itself

An abstract slider that works like a knob is jumping a knights-move away in design space from a traditional control. The user has to understand 2 things about the widget:

1. It's user-modifiable

2. It's manipulated by clicking on the widget, then dragging away

A knob is only 1 step away from a traditional control. You get the "user-modifiable" knowledge for free, because everyone knows what a knob is already.