They do not leave any affordances to even suggest the presence of something hidden for those who won't know it (or have forgotten).įor the scroll bar issue, I think they could introduce an affordance in the form of, say, a couple small horizontal bars at the top of the page that kind of indicate "you can pull down on this". They assume prior familiarity among groups who won't have it.Ģ. Where Apple fails in this regard is two things, I think:ġ. Computers used to feature tons of skeuomorphic design to make it obvious what everything was (so you could think about your computer with the same lens as you thought about your desk, for instance), and now we've mostly done away with that because the vast majority of users don't need it. I think that, at a general level, this principle of development is reasonable: things that used to require being extremely explicit can become more implicit over time as users become adapted to it. Over time, they started hiding it by default and require you to scroll up to access it. When you first opened an app (like Messages), the search bar would be visible by default and you had to scroll down to hide it. Pretty sure the Apple search bars used to be discoverable. You need to guess their initial meaning, and translate badly in conversations, like recently with my mom: "press the rectangle with four arrows pointing out of it" (fullscreen or whatever it was). Second, icons are something which is wrong. Hidden menus, press-and-hold, and so on is secondary. My one year old is discovering that sliding fingers across a screen, touching and pinching (the three basics) does stuff. I think there's one thing platforms in general got very right: simple touch controls. Just to point out, a part of discoverability I guess is familiarity with the underlying principles the UI follows as well. Whenever I use my wife's iPhone or Mac for a couple of minutes, I get frustrated because everything is all over the place, none of the apps work well together, and everything is hidden.īack on Android, (or Windows, or Linux), it makes sense, whereas she loses her way. I was planning to reply to your parent comment that discoverability has always been an issue for me when I work with Apple devices.
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