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> Swipe from bottom to switch programs? Swipe from top left and top right to get different (IMPORTANT!) panels? Why are three lines a "Menu"? But sometimes it's dots, or a gear icon, and they're never in the same place. On iPhone, there's no real unified "Back" button - chase it down from application to application with different context and result every time. On Android, unified buttons (including reliable and predictable "back") exist but their location and icons are not intuitive either.

The single, physical home button was fucking genius and iOS6 and earlier were the only operating systems I've ever seen that my very-old-and-with-significant-mental-decline grandmother might have been able to use regularly without a ton of help.

Then iOS7 came out, and later they got rid of the home button. So much for that.

> On Android, unified buttons (including reliable and predictable "back")

If the back button's reliable, that's a recent development. It spent at least a decade being the "YOLO" button that might do any damn thing. Absolutely terrible, and complete usability poison for non-nerd users. Or maybe this was sarcasm and I'm missing it.

FWIW, the iPhone SE still has the home button - https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/

Although, they've overloaded it's use - single press for home, double press for app switcher, fingerprint sensor, etc. (Or maybe that's what you were referring to with iOS 6/7?)

Agree with you in general, though: the single, physical home button that always did what you expected was great.

Android's back button usually takes you back to wherever you were before, although apps can break this (instagram, for example: if you open a message from a notification, you have to press back 3-4 times to get out of the damn app.)

The need to press back multiple times to get back to where you were before entering an app seems to be becoming the norm in many apps of late. I'm pretty sure it is yet another 'engagement trap': the app makers don't want you to leave so they can show you more ads, collect more data about you to sell on, etcetera.

Yeah, I usually uninstall that shit. I keep Instagram around specifically because my wife likes to send me things and is disappointed if I don't notice them. But I ignore basically everything else in the app aside from what my wife sends me.

Hmm

That seems a valid and desired behaviour.

If I want to exit app, I press home button.

But if I want to go back one step... I press back button. It takes me back one step. It's like the Go-mode of undo :-). Previous page or form in a browser, back several layers of menu in app or game. I may be writing an email then press back to go back to main mail screen. Etc

Basically for me, Android back button does exactly what I want it to do, in OS, games, programs and Web, zero sarcasm. And home button to "take me to where I was before I entered the app".

The back and share pipeline of Android are like it's super powers as far as I'm concerned (and I say this as somebody forced to use iPhone for work last 4 years, so get to experience both daily)

Ah, I see now that I didn't make myself clear in my previous comment. I am not criticizing the back button functionality per se, but rather the way that many apps have things set up so that it requires more, sometimes a lot more, presses of the back button to back out than it took actions (taps, swipes, whatever) to get somewhere. While this may perhaps be useful in some cases, in my opinion it is often done in a classic 'nagware' fashion, to make it more difficult to leave the app.

When I press the home button, this often doesn't close down the foreground app entirely, so after a while of doing this I will end up with lots of apps running in the background, which I don't like because often they keep consuming power even when backgrounded and may also continue gathering data about me that way.

I am aware that apps can also install and run background services separately from the app, but in my experience, the apps that I use tend to also shut down these services, as long as I exit the app entirely, using the back button.

Basically couldn’t disagree more. The swipe up makes it faster to switch between programs and saves space for the screen. I guess I just don’t have much sympathy for old people. Everyone in family, including the 90 year olds figure out the new gestures easily enough.

I think we definitely transitioned into frog boiling a long time ago, but that has played out in other industries too. You just only get to see it first hand when you're working with an absolute beginner.

There are so many more buttons in cars now than when I first started driving. I've mostly adapted to them, except when I have to drive a friends car and everything is in the wrong fucking place. WE DO NOT NEED TO MOVE CRUISE CONTROL THANK YOU. And don't get me started about breaking the gear shift lever. There are hidden features in the old design that apparently the new designers didn't know about, but anyone who drives for a living or just cosplays at being an advanced driver knows about slapping an automatic transmission from reverse into drive...

Anyway, point is that I don't envy children trying to figure out all of the stalks and buttons on a modern car, and then immediately trying to figure out how to merge into highway traffic. It's no wonder everyone is waiting until they're older to drive. Smartphones feel categorically similar in their evolution.

"Intuitive" usually just means "what I'm used to and I can't remember when it was confusing anymore."

I'm not sure there is such a thing as an 'intuitive' interface beyond those where the physical action of the control is visible and obvious (turning the wheel rotates the gear that raises the gate type interface)

I think just about everything else requires context, which is just a fancy way of saying that someone taught them how it worked at some point or they played with it long enough to guess their way to enough breadcrumbs that they built up that context themselves.

Yes, but you can reduce the number of gestures required to use an interface. It wasn't that long ago when the only required gesture was tap, and it was quite easy for novices to figure it all out from there.

But then they added long press, so now one icon does two or more things depending on how long your finger is touching it.

Then they decided some things don't do anything at all if you tap them, only if you long press them.

Then they decided it should matter how hard you long press.

Then they decided you should memorize which quadrant of the screen you need to swipe to do something.

"intuitive" is a spectrum, and we are steadily moving to the less intuitive side. I think just giving users a bash prompt and a cheat sheet might be more intuitive at this point.

Intuitive might not be the perfect term; clear, unambiguous, predictable behavior might describe it better. There was a lot of research into such interfaces and improving functionality decades ago. But when users stopped being the customers it was quickly discarded.

My first encounter with a computer was somewhat unsuccessful until I was introduced to the concept of the double-click. You mean I have to click icons twice- and not too slowly- to make them do anything useful?

Trying to teach people how to double click, fast enough, and without moving the mouse was not easy back in the day. What I had already done millions of times without thinking was and extremely difficult task for some people.

There are times I want to set the 250k+ per year developers, and the board room committees arguing if 30 or 40 ms is the appropriate touch time down with one of these users and see if they can succeed in teaching them the interface.

I bought the iPhone SE partly because I find the swipes from the bottom confusing to use too.

Newer versions of android default to the gesture based app switching, back button, and home, but I dislike it.

Thankfully I'm able to change settings to bring back the dedicated bottom navigation "buttons" (they are virtual, on screen)

Not perfect but I'm glad that it's an option

IOS’s swipe from the bottom (and left-right for basically alt-tab) is genius in my opinion. Not sure how true is it, but the designers of the then new iphone caught themselves multiple times trying to swipe gesture on their older, home-buttoned devices.

While I don’t believe a sufficiently complex UX could be totally intuitive (it can at most depend on existing knowledge of similar devices), it does extend the app as a physical rectangle idea very well, the animation strengthens the memory, and the movement becomes second-nature in no time.

(Also, credit where it’s due, I believe this feature was first introduced by Palm?)

Was definitely a feature on Blackberry's BB10 OS

That's basically me using my husband's iPad or iPhone. So many different gestures, it's so confusing.

Thank you, I didn't know about "swipe from top left" until I read your comment. I've been using an employer-provided iPhone for about a year and never knew about this.