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Comment by sacnoradhq | Hacker News Reader

There is an oversight in Apple's approach: it hides a lot of functionality as "magic" without affordances. Feature demonstrations are too often shoveled into product launches or OS update news and then never revisited. To remedy this, Apple needs current, comprehensive visual user manuals for each product demystifying every trick and function in pedantic, encyclopedic terms.

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Highly agree. Their interface is not intuitive. If it were then I (with my decades of computer experience) would be able to use an iphone after having never used one. The few times I've tried, I've walked away annoyed that there were so many hidden tricks needed to get basic things accomplished. And to that point, based on this article, it looks like animation is a key crutch in illuminating them. Of course android is following suit now, so once again new users are alienated.

I think there is a distinction between good interaction design and good functionality. If you look at the apple product as a toy to be interacted with, then the points in this article are fine. If you want to get something done quickly, then Windows 98 with a mouse and a mechanical keyboard was still quicker and less frustration.

I doubt it's an oversight, it's probably a conscious choice most of the time. I agree with you some pieces are highly questionable, as there's literally zero affordance and absolutely no way to discover them. But to be fair, you definitely don't need user manual to start using iOS. It's slightly more difficult to MacOS due to most of first time users coming from Windows environments.

Around the time of the iPhone 3G, they had a video on their website (around 30 minutes long, IIRC) showcasing every function and interaction.

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