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Comment by Xuzz | Hacker News Reader

Think about everyone who doesn't see this post. Will they figure this gesture out? Did you? If it takes a blog post at the top of Hacker News for people here to find this, it's pretty far from discoverable. Is it really that great if most people can't use it?

On the other hand, you don't need any instruction for pinch-to-zoom. Intuitive interactions like that — or even double-tap-to-zoom — are much harder to come up with, but they're also accessible to everybody. This is a cool piece of trivia, but it's far from solving the one-handed zooming problem. I hope Google (or anybody else) is working on something to make this better for everyone.

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In usability tests you'll see that pinch-to-zoom is hardly discoverable, or even particularly easy. It's a learned behavior.

Once users "get it", it's powerful. They'll attempt to pinch to zoom all over the place. I guess I don't see how this is any different. It's a gesture, and I find it to be intuitive (it's been available on the Android version for a really long time).

Apple has been teaching gestures to people through marketing. I always thought that was brilliant. Gestures are not at all discoverable, but if you show them often enough they become natural. Most of Apple's TV ads, especially those for iOS devices, are little tutorials.

It is, however, a bad idea to rely on that. I see gestures as I see keyboard shortcuts: not intuitive at all, but potentially great time savers once you learned them.

For those making touch UIs this means, quite simply, that you always have to be able to do something without gestures or that if a gesture is essential, it has to be taught to you.

I agree. The intuitive way to zoom in is to move your face closer to the screen. Pinching a screen makes absolutely no intuitive sense. People learned it by accident or because they were shown.

Which usability tests? Anecdotal evidence - my 2 year old picked it up quite easily on her own back 4 years ago when iOS was a lot slower and buggier.

There's no "metamode" here and it's tripped over quite easily during normal interactions.

Test I've previously conducted as part of product development. I've, anecdotally, have heard similar reports from others as well when we've shared data.

Are you sure your two year old didn't watch you first?

My 18 month old niece was the same with my brother's iPad, being able to navigate back to the home screen, find the YouTube app, go to history, watch something from the list, full screen, rewind and go back to the history once the video had finished. She has now picked up using Android on Samsung Note II pretty kid. Kids are just really intuitive and learn very quickly by watching at that age, I was truly amazed since my 60 year old parents on the other end of the spectrum have great difficulty understanding this tech.

While I completely agree that the default controls need to be intuitive, I am also of the opinion that these little hidden gestures, these shortcuts, are not necessarily bad. I agree with John Gruber when he says that:

"... gestures are to iOS what keyboard shortcuts are to Mac OS — an alternative way to do something as a convenience for advanced users." [1]

I understand that this gesture doesn't solve the problem of one-handed zooming for everyone, and that the solution will need to be more obvious to include everyone. It's just that a more obvious solution may add unnecessary clutter.

[1] http://daringfireball.net/2012/04/obviousness

As long as it's not the only way to accomplish something it doesn't need to be intuitive--just like keyboard shortcuts.

There isn't anything particularly intuitive about the pinch to zoom gesture. Most of us already knew about it because we saw the iPhone keynote when it was originally released. I still meet people that own new-ish iPhones (4/4S etc) that aren't aware you can actually zoom in/out in the Maps/Photo etc apps.

People keep saying it's not intuitive, but stretching something by the exact distance you pull your two fingers apart seems pretty intuitive to me. It is a new gesture so it wouldn't have occurred to me to do it the first time, but that doesn't mean it's not intuitive. Something that's not intuitive would be a gesture that doesn't seem obvious even after you demonstrate it.

One of the biggest things I've despised about the mobile paradigm, and something I think apple helps foster, is that instructions and tool tips are mostly gone. Everything is supposed to "just work" but I wind up finding useful features I didn't know about months later.

There has always been a "one handed zooming" solution, but as we see in this thread, people don't see/like those buttons. http://i.imgur.com/TfaGExu.png

Those are also in an uncomfortable place to reach with your thumb when holding the device once-handed — and might even be covered by the thumb, depending on how you're holding it.

You can also zoom in by double tapping on the map. This gesture usually performs a "centered zoom" meaning that the current center of the screen will remain the center of the screen after the zoom has taken place (unlike when zooming with the pinch gesture).

I agree. You can do an unzoom using a two-finger tap as well, and it much more memorable. It still doesn't qualify for intuitive, nor does it solve the one-handed unzoom problem though.

It would be a lot more discoverable if this "mode" were indicated on use - ie, some zoom overlay (even just a highlight) that showed that they'd activated it, and when it disappeared. It's almost a quasimode [1] - since it disappears when you let go - still mode indicators would be very useful here.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(computer_interface)#Quasi...

It's like the double-tap-and-drag gesture on laptop trackpads, you just learn it's there at some point.

I suspect a great number of people here either don't use iPhones, haven't upgraded to iOS6, or don't use the special google maps app (I'm on 5.1.1 on a 4S, and the maps app that comes with the phone does not do this)

Or you could be completely wrong. This is hn, not some Amish blog. The hn crowd update their apps, compile their own kernels and don't use old hardware. Life's too short.

I personally did not update my phone iOS from 5.x to version 6 until Google released their Maps application about 4-6 weeks after the major version upgrade. I know of at least 2 other people that also did not update for the exact reason that they did not want to use the Apple/TomTom maps and directions.

"compile their own kernels"

The HN crowd compiles versions of iOS? If so, I'd definitely like to find out how that's done.

obviously not IOS kernels, it was a generic comment, linux kernels, compile from source, keep up to date, use chrome not the browser that came with their machine etc etc. It really wasn't that hard to understand.

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