It's funny how I've witnessed a complete 180° change from how, in the 1990's, software was supposed to be entirely discoverable and it also came with a manual that documented literally everything, to now there's a ton that's hidden, often without any manual whatsoever... but you can Google everything you need to know.<p>Probably the single most useful skill I've had to learn in my life is, whenever you wonder something, just Google it. If you don't think your software does X... don't just assume it. Look it up.<p>I've been astonished at how often a feature was added 3 years ago to a program I've used for 8 years, or there's a secret swipe that avoids a bunch of menus, or an unofficial command-line flag.<p>And it really leaves me feeling deeply conflicted. Because on the one hand, I still believe in the virtue of learning your tools inside and out. I would read the manual and be proud I knew exactly what every program/language could and couldn't do. But on the other hand, is that really just a waste of time? Programs have <i>so</i> many features now, that instead of learning all the things via discoverability or a manual, we just learn them by... querying how to do things when we need them.<p>I don't really like the idea of so fundamentally relying on Google and forums and tutorials and Reddit and YouTube videos as the main way of learning how to use software. But at the same time, software does so much now and adds new things so quickly that it appears to be the only reasonable way.
The Back Tap feature is my favorite "hidden" action on the iPhone. You can double (or triple) tap the back of the phone to trigger whatever action you want. For example, toggle the flashlight or lock rotation. Show Spotlight or run a Shortcut.<p><a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-tap-iphaa57e7885/16.0/ios/16.0" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/back-tap-iphaa57e7885...</a><p>I think Apple does a decent job telling people about iOS features across the User Guide, Tips.app, and the Apple Support YouTube channel.<p>The "undiscoverable" features in the article are all there.<p><i>Delete the last digit: If you make a mistake when you enter a number, swipe left or right on the display at the top.</i><p><a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/calculator-iph1ac0b5cc/ios" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/calculator-iph1ac0b5c...</a><p><i>Turn the onscreen keyboard into a trackpad.</i><p><i>1. Touch and hold the Space bar with one finger until the keyboard turns light gray.</i><p><i>2. Move the insertion point by dragging around the keyboard.</i><p><a href="https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscreen-keyboard-iph3c50f96e/16.0/ios/16.0" rel="nofollow">https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/type-with-the-onscree...</a><p><i>To access other open tabs, you can swipe left or right on the tab bar.</i><p><a href="https://youtu.be/30tfnCxLWSg?t=21" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/30tfnCxLWSg?t=21</a>
The actions listed in the article are fairly non-essential, but many fundamental iOS functions also have discoverability issues, as well as some head-scratching design choices. For example:<p>- seeing notifications requires swiping down specifically from the top left<p>- turning on the flashlight requires swiping down specifically from the top right. Swiping down from top left also gets you a flashlight button, but it is not actionable. The flashlight button on the home screen is also not actionable.<p>- universal search requires swiping to the left of the app pages. Swiping past the right end of the app pages also gets you a search bar, but it will only show you apps<p>- Seeing your open apps requires swiping up slowly from the bottom of the page.<p>- turning the phone off requires holding two unrelated buttons<p>Mobile UX generally is heavily-dependent on gestures, which inherently creates discoverability challenges, but it seems like Apple goes out of its way to hide every basic function behind a very specific swipe. It makes me wonder if they intentionally design their products to be exclusively usable by tech-savvy people.<p>Another possible explanation is that design requires users to develop muscle memory over time that will improve experience in the long run and makes competitors feel unnatural.
What I find most annoying in iOS UX is how much information is tucked behind the "Share" icon. Having to click the share button to access "Find on Page" is super unintuitive.
It's a little ironic how at the advent of the iPhone, the desktop os was mocked as being clunky and full of those things you just have to know, rather than being discoverable. The iPhone was limited and simple. And it really helped adoption of smartphones. Now it's assumed everybody is already familiar with smartphones and welcomes yet another shortcut or gesture to make usage quicker. Take Android and the removal of the three buttons at the bottom, in exchange for some gestures. Just so the interface looks cleaner. Imagine someone who has never used a smartphone before would be starting out with that. Just hand them the phone and see how long it takes them to return to the home screen after opening the first app.<p>Not to say this is good or bad, just an observation mostly.
I moved to iOS over a year ago after using Android exclusively, and I agree that this was a discoverability downgrade. Editing text with various multi-finger gestures, shaking the device, or even putting the entire Photos app into a different mode to select multiple items are outright downgrades to what Android does.<p>The iPhone innovated finger-touch-based on-screen keyboards while everyone else was still typing with a stylus on a tiny keyboard, but since then, they seem to stagnate. iOS 16 just got haptic feedback on its keyboard in 2022(!), and I am still making more typing errors compared to Android with Gboard.
Well, the screen estate on a mobile device is limited, so the number of actions that are easy to discover needs to be limited too - otherwise the UI would be cluttered. I find Apple good at balancing this. Notice how actions that he mentions are just quicker alternatives to stuff that one can already do in another way.
The worst degradation for my UX with my iPhone has been when they added some Siri smart search stuff to searching. I'm someone who's given up on memorizing the layout of my apps and I always just swipe down and search by the name of the app. This used to be extremely efficient. Usually a single letter is enough to have the app be in the top 3 results<p>Now they also search a bunch of other apps and I think Siri does something with your searches, possible even looking for web results. All I really want is for the app results to show up first and not have them bogged down by all the other stuff being searched<p>Edit: Seems I'm not the only one.[0][1] Also what I was talking about was called "Spotlight search" now its in "Siri & Search". Doesn't seem like there's a real solution<p>[0] <a href="https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7887520" rel="nofollow">https://discussions.apple.com/thread/7887520</a><p>[1] <a href="https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1483913" rel="nofollow">https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1483913</a>
I love articles like this because they make me feel like a super-genius even though I am completely average.<p>Every single one of those esoteric morsels of forbidden knowledge is in the Tips app, which I read from top to bottom when it was first released.<p>Here are the instructions on how to delete a number in the calculator, the first arcane incantation the author discovered through his or her intense study of the dark arts: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/3BgTg1K" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/3BgTg1K</a><p>Something which I've known for years, because I RTFM.<p>I'm willing to bet, but not bothered enough to check, that every single "TOP TEN FEATURES APPLE IS HIDING FROM YOU" is thoroughly documented, with full-color illustrations where warranted, in Tips.app.<p>It has been a long time but I believe that Tips.app comes preinstalled and there are some nag-notifications for you to read it.<p>I am sure many people smarter than I instantly deleted Tips.app the second they set up their phone to which I can only say "Careful, Icarus".<p>And yeah, I read the manuals that come with my all of my products, usually while on the toilet. Who doesn't want to know the amperage a NES Mini draws from its AC adapter?<p>I grew up in the technology era where if you didn't read the manual you were screwed, and my Apple IIgs Toolbox book, which I read from cover to cover to learn how to program my IIgs is still on my shelf surrounded by hundreds of other reference books.<p>Tips.app is just the 2022 Apple IIgs Toolbox and I'm not haughty enough to look down on it.
> Going back after opening a new Safari tab<p>I like this feature, but what annoys me is that unlike the regular use of Back, you can’t Forward to undo the Back in that situation, even in the common case that the original tab is at the top of the history (i.e. has no current Forward target of its own).
I was very late to the smartphone game, transitioning somewhat suddenly from a Nokia to an iPhone SE. I found the discoverability to be against everything I was taught as a programmer. It really felt like I was expected to have grown up with the iPhone from the first generation.<p>Worse yet, the <i>gestures</i> ... I searched in vain for a decent printable sheet of the commonly used gestures, only to make my own set of diagrams for an iPad I tried to get my mother to use, leaving her with a set of laminated sheets: the green one detailing the parts of the iPad, the red sheet showing the different screens and how to get there, and finally a blue one with the gestures.<p>I think iOS really needs a "Tutorial mode" app bundled with it. This of course requires that someone resist the temptation to interject with all of the bundled apps that Apple wants you to know about but aren't needed to do the basics. No Focus, no Stocks, no Apple TV ... just show me how to get around in some Settings, practice locking and unlocking a screen, drills for <i>all</i> of the basic gestures.
> I don’t think any of these are intuitive or easily discoverable.<p>Then again, perhaps they don’t need to be universally intuitive / discoverable; i.e.: the users who need these features may instinctively search for them and eventually discover them.<p>Anecdotally, I’ve been able to discover three out of four actions mentioned in the article (the fourth one was about the calculator app, which I don’t use that often).
I would say most people don't know 90% of how to use the iOS interface but ppl are in general not interested in learning it and wouldn't read a manual if the box included one or even watch videos of it. People just what Apple to read their minds, to get their stuff done in as little effort as possible and people are willing to pay a lot of money for that experience
I fail to see the flaw here. When catering to large groups of diverse people, I don’t expect homogenous use of a product. Everyone should be able to find their own high-value solutions within a product, according to their real needs.<p>We could call the presented paradigm needs-based discovery.<p>It inherently means that some people won’t be aware of solutions that benefit others – that is, until their need or exposure evolves. And that is okay. More than okay, it’s great. To return to the basics… people don’t like being inundated with features they don’t want and they do like discovering solutions to problems.<p>This is excellent design.<p>Could those features be better presented? Always.<p>The iPhone interface has an incredible array of constraints: it needs to serve literally every type of person on the planet. That’s beautiful. I have huge respect for designers capable of connecting with such diverse stakeholders. It is masterful design in the most pure sense.
I used iPhone 2008-2012, Windows Phone 2012-2015, Android 2015-2022, and then recently bought an iPhone again to see what it's like these days.<p>I was baffled by how unintuitive it has become. So many "secret codes" you need to know these days to use an iPhone. Swiping down from the top on the left or the right bring you different dashboards? Swiping up from the bottom and hold to switch between tasks? How is anyone supposed to guess guess this stuff?
While I also hate the "undescoverability". It's possible that all (maybe not all) usecases of an app are still available to anything visible. For older or less tech interested people, this is actually perfect.<p>The problem lies in the following cases:<p>1) Person accidentally does something<p>2) Edge case / state / scenario, which cannot be solved without knowing some shortcuts.<p>I think iOS became too complicated for some people. At the same time the UI is a pretty messy and inconsistent at times.
I was surprised when I needed to use my partner's iPhone I had no idea how to complete certain basic actions, despite using a similar Android smartphone every day. Maybe I had gotten used to the undiscoverable features on my phone, but I felt that a modern iPhone was borderline unusable for me without learning about certain hidden actions like swiping from different edges of the screen and knowing where certain settings are.
What this article misses is that a lot of these features are shortcuts for things that are not essential or you could achieve in other ways.<p>These are generally referred to as accelerators, and are by design harder to discover as they are targeted at expert users. You trade learnability for convenience and efficiency (also less clutter, which should not be underestimated).<p>Good article on this: <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ui-accelerators/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ui-accelerators/</a><p>Just to clarify, there are indeed also some places in iOS where it’s maybe less ideal, but my point is that there is a place for undiscoverable features.
Where I work we've been developing mobile apps since the first iPhone, and we still have these "How the hell was I supposed to know?" moments quite often.<p>A couple of my friends who don't work in tech. are sort-of hobbyist iOS fanboys, and they always get a kick out of it when they show me some feature or gesture that I wasn't familiar with.
This drives me mad too. However, not sure it’s the end of the world. In many cases these are extra shortcuts, analogous to key bindings. Power users are (should be?) aware of the existence of such things and look them up. It’s hard to make keyboard shortcuts discoverable (though IntelliJ does a good job).<p>I think it’s extremely problematic when these are core UI actions instead of shortcuts. Manipulating long form text is quite annoying without the space-bar trick for example. Hard to see how you’d make that discoverable though. (An interesting UX thought experiment!)
My least favourite “feature” of iOS now is shake-to-undo. I’ve never triggered it intentionally. It’s too weird of a thing to remember when I actually want to do it. It would also feel ridiculous even if I remembered it. The only times I trigger it, it’s by accident, and then I need to cancel it.
Yeah it’s hard! Kind of the flip side but related to the text navigation: <a href="https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/my-favorite-iphone-feature-was-removed" rel="nofollow">https://technicallychallenged.substack.com/p/my-favorite-iph...</a>
Today I learned the calculator app allows character deletion. Weirdly you can swipe both left/right and they both behave as backspace. That’s pretty weird!<p>I knew the other gestures, which are nice conveniences. The lack of clear controls in the calculator is a good example of poor discoverability. The other examples are actions which all have more obvious alternatives, either visible in the UI (tab switching of various sorts) or more directly interacting (caret placement). I think it’s fine that those are less discoverable because you don’t actually need to know they exist unless you want to, and they become obvious when you find them.<p>With, uh, one big exception: the new tab/back button thing is an excellent idea, and I even remember it being announced as a major new Safari feature (on macOS! It might’ve even still been called OS X it’s been around so long). But it’s horribly buggy, leaving phantom tabs and history behind at every turn, and has been the same since it shipped. I <i>think</i> I have a mental model of how it works and its failure modes, but just imagining the explanation is exhausting.
The article argues that blue text is obviously a clickable link, but that swiping from the left to navigate back isn’t. While I do think it makes a difference that the link is visually different, I also think that what is affordable or discoverable is ultimately a subjective thing. You could argue that for anyone born in this millennia, swiping down to refresh is just as intuitive that blue text being clickable.
I don't think the Safari "swipe the URL bar to switch tabs" example is unintuitive. There is a strong hint at their swipeability because you can see the neighbouring tabs poking out on each side. I remember discovering this almost immediately when it was introduced!<p>(It's perhaps slightly less intuitive that you can also swipe the bar UP to access the tab switcher interface)
I found swiping on the Safari URL bar to switch between tabs a bit <i>too</i> “discoverable”: I was constantly performing it by accident when trying to switch between apps. I quickly switched back to “Single Tab” mode in settings.
There are also some actions only available via Siri, such as removing all alarms from Clock app.<p>"Siri, delete all of my alarms" is the only way to do this with a single action, since UI only always deleting one by one.
Because Apple cannot deign to offer its users even basic physical documentation of how their glass slab works, publishers have filled the void with books with large pictures and screenshots of iOS functionality:<p>1) iPad for Dummies (they need to get rid of that name)<p>2) a bunch of random publishers selling magazine-style paperbacks like "iPad OS Guide for 2022". You can find these on mag-sharing websites, as they're low-volume and usually only available at checkout counters at grocery stores, or airport shops.
I can forgive the URL bar swipe to change between tabs, because there is a visual cue that the other tabs are there - the URL bars of the adjacent tabs peek onto the screen.
I actually like the way Apple is doing these things.
There is almost always a way to achieve the same things using established patterns, that takes slightly longer and is a little less convenient.
It's not like you can't use an iPhone without knowing about these little "shortcuts".
Admittedly, most users won't discover these hacks, because of poor discoverability.
They could add a ton of UI like dedicated buttons for all these hidden gestures, even label them to make it more obvious what they do. The downside is, that the UI would quickly become a complete mess.
Another way would be to have the user sit through a tedious tutorial upon opening the app for the first time and then remind them from time to time how to do things. This gets annoying really fast.
The real alternative Apple would choose however is to simply omit these little features and "streamline" their apps.
Because they aren't core the usability of the phone, I consider them welcome extras, which means I'm delighted every time I learn a new one rather than bummed out about the ones I don't know about.
Discoverability isn’t important to shortcut functionality like this.<p>You don’t have to navigate text with the spacebar, you can touch the text directly and touch and hold.<p>You don’t have to delete numbers in the calculator, you can hit C to clear the current number and retype it (a lot of people think that doing this will totally clear your operation, which isn’t true: C is different than AC).<p>You can hit the tabs button in Safari to switch between tabs, swiping the address bar is a shortcut.<p>I would also argue that the safari address bar swipe is very discoverable. You can see the next tab’s address bar on the side of the interface, so it’s implied you can scroll to it.<p>Basically, an analogy to this argument is that the author of this article should be telling us that keyboard shortcuts should be banished because they’re not discoverable.<p>Also, I don’t think discoverability is the same on touch screens as in desktop operating systems. Nobody complains about the discoverability of pinch to zoom or tap and hold because it’s so obvious and intuitive. On the desktop, drag and drop is a similar feature that could be seen to be not so discoverable.
I've been an Android user since day 1 and had never used an iPhone until about a year ago when my company replaced my work phone (Android) with an iPhone. It took me two months before I realized there is a difference between swiping down from the top on the left and swiping down from the top on the right.<p>I don't think Android is necessarily better though - I simply have more experience with it.
These features aren't nondiscoverable; discovery just takes place outside the operating system, in communities like this one. Good designers know that communities are a constant of the power user UX just like a settings menu or instruction manual. You don't have to pollute the UI with hints and copy about every little thing because power users are their own discovery engines.
> You’ll sometimes see these features pop up in life hack or “I never knew this hidden feature existed” tweets<p>I collect these: <a href="https://nitter.net/umanghome/status/1283074787175092224#m" rel="nofollow">https://nitter.net/umanghome/status/1283074787175092224#m</a> (Click Earlier replies to see all tweets, and then scroll down).
It's important to make features as easy to discover as possible. Especially the basic features.<p>The actions in this article are _shortcuts_. Like a single swipe to switch tabs. It's hard to make it more discoverable (there's a tiny hint on the hide, but that's it). At this point, there's two options:<p>- Overload the UI showing the possible action. Results in overloaded UIs and worse UX.<p>- Leave it as-is and just mention it online or in "did you know" pages.<p>The second option usually makes sense the most. I see a big online trend of "let's remove right click options because they're hard to discover", and I think it's ridiculous. Actions hidden behind right click should be visible elsewhere (e.g.: the options on a file manager are all in the menu bar too), but right click is a fast and convenient *shortcut*.
I do find myself regularly saying things like -<p>>Ah yes, the three finger force press double tap right swipe, of course.<p>What bothers me about these is how non technical people who don't search will never find them. On the other hand, it might be good to have things hidden so someone non technical can't get their phone into a bad state.
Another example of a very hidden feature is "export/print as pdf". If you do share => print, you don't get a pdf option, but you can do a zoom gesture on the preview and then +poof+, it's a pdf you can save. How was I supposed to discover that?
My favourite is the “double tap with three fingers to zoom in the display”. This happened to me by accident while my phone is in my pocket. The first time it happened, I had to borrow someone else’s phone to look up how to undo it.
I think the swiping back on new tab feature is a very well thought out piece of UX.<p>If a user taps a link that is set to open in a new window/tab, while the bottom/top (depending on user config) URL bar does animate to show the transition, the user may still expect to be able to navigate back to where they came from (especially in such a case where they haven't deliberately made the decision to open in a new tab).<p>I'd argue it would be worse UX for the back swipe to not navigate to the previous page in such circumstances than that it does but closes the tab (which is reasonably signalled by the URL bar animation).
It was even worse with the force touch" - sometimes I found myself pushing the screen, with finger turning white, trying to summon some functionality I was expecting to have there.
Even the basic spotlight search is pretty hard to discover. I'd say about half of the iPhone users I meet have never heard of the feature, and are surprised when I swipe down on their screen and show it to them. With iOS 16 though, they've finally added a button, so that should help on that front.<p>Another feature that isn't well known is swiping between recent apps by swiping horizontally along the bottom of the screen. I didn't know about that feature until somebody posted about it on HN a while back.
Data centers hate this one neat trick:<p>The best one is the kinetic (inertial) scrubbing they brought to videos on iOS 16. For example, open a YT video from Safari (don’t open on the YouTube app), go full screen and the flick to scroll backwards and forwards! I bet we’ll all consume more data as a result of this UI addition. I certainly use the YT mobile web version as a result.
The worst was when I had to Google how to delete a contact (I think it was the contacts list view, or something very similar), I have to swipe it to the side, then a big red delete button appears?? But dont swipe the wrong way because then it's something else?<p>It's probably different now, I ditched the Apple boat long ago.
I kind of want some way to record myself using my computer or phone, and have an expert look at the recording and point out things I’m doing the hard way.<p>Preferably software instead of human so it’d be slightly less embarrassing.<p>I’m afraid there’s a shortcut to something that would save me X minutes per day but that I’ll never even know to ask.
> I also think about the category of things that aren’t intuitive and require some guidance, like... putting together IKEA furniture. Woe is the fool who tries to discover a complicated IKEA piece through action!<p>Do people try to do this? I've never considered not using the IKEA instructions.
I’ve found watching the WWDC keynotes where they announce a new version of iOS or MacOS a good way to learn many of the new gestures and features.<p>For your average user many of these features will remain hidden and I suspect that’s partially by design. They want such users to have a simple experience.
I never understood the cliché about Ikea furniture being difficult to assemble. I always admired how they sidestepped the problem of producing directions in many languages by just using pictures. It's a marvel of clarity to me.
I'm a seasoned software developer and UX specialist and iPhones scare me. I have no idea how to use them and try to get them out of my hands as fast as possible. Interfaces like that give me serious anxiety.
Just a few days ago I learned that iPhones come with a built-in image scanner in the notes app.<p>Interestingly: It was a senior citizen in a local shop who pointed that to me when I needed to scan some documents for him.
Finding little gems like these by accident gives an impression of something bigger, something mysterious and grand. Seems like the author wants a giant red arrow saying gem here on a treasure hunt.
A factor in all of this is how familiar we get with our phones.<p>An app or website we only use once a week or once a month needs to be more obvious and discoverable than the iPhone we pick up 100 times per day.
I like the surprise of finding these nuggets when I do discover them over time. Why does everything have to be so freaking obvious that even a toddler can discover it with eyes closed?
The Apple Books app has a iPhone User’s Guide for download that has all of these tricks documented. Apple should make it more obvious that there is official documentation there.
one thing I discovered just now, four years after switching to iPhone:<p>you can actually tap and drag the scrollbar! You need to find the correct time for it to appear, and you need to tap it <i>just right</i> - not too much on the top or on the bottom. And then you can very quickly go up or down, without stupid scrolling like idiot.<p>Very useful if you want to scroll more quickly. Scroll like it’s 1998!
these features may be hard to discover but they are all really useful. Imagine if Apple just didn’t add include because they couldn’t find any way to do so intuitively. And once you know them, they’re not complex or hard to use.<p>“Intuitive and easy” > “unintuitive and easy” > “intuitive and hard” > “unintuitive and hard” > “non-existent”