
Perfectly Cropped - keehun
https://tyler.io/perfectly-cropped/
======
dpcan
"But I see them impact my aging parents all the time."

I've realized lately that I'm actually entering this zone. For the last 20
years I've been talking about how stuff like this is a nightmare for the
"aging" community.

20 years is a long time, and now I'm falling into it.

The big one for me in this new version of iOS was that:

1) I couldn't figure out how to move my cursor around. It used to be perfect.
I held my finger down, it let me move the cursor around in a word. Now you
have to swipe the cursor to "grab" it and move it around under your finger. It
feels like change for the sake of change when it worked perfectly before.

2) And I can't do a "select all" anymore. I don't even know where that option
is and I used it all the time. Something tells me I have to swipe somewhere
now.

We all become the "aging" population no matter how much we think we know tech,
design, etc.

I think my biggest problem with all of this is that things worked. I liked
that things worked, and I liked that I knew how to use things. I cannot figure
out why things have to change. Or at least, put an option in settings to
change back/forth from previous functionality. When I wake up one morning with
nothing to worry about except work, and find out I now have to relearn how to
use the same phone that has been in my pocket for 2 years.... this is
irritating.

~~~
andrewla
To summarize this thread (HN is still the best place to get IOS tips and
tricks):

Three ways to move the cursor, from most reliable to least:

1\. Hold down space bar and you'll enter a mode where moving your finger moves
the cursor.

2\. Drag it from its current location to a new location. This gets finicky,
especially if you move your finger out of the text area; the cursor will move
to the end of the text, but the highlighted bar that represents where you want
to place the cursor will move around on the last line of the text. If there
are non-text elements (images, etc.) in the block, then this will be
unpredictable in where the cursor ends up. Also your finger blocks the text
and there's no more magnifying glass.

3\. Single tap in the text to place the cursor -- but if you tap on a
misspelled word, it will go into "suggest replacements" mode. Double tap
selects a word, and triple tap selects a paragraph.

To select all, you have to have a free cursor (nothing selected) and tap on
the cursor itself. To avoid accidentally double-tapping (and thus selecting a
word instead of bringing up the context menu) you have to make sure that you
wait a beat before tapping again.

To paste (most to least reliable):

1\. Do a three finger unpinch gesture, and it will paste at the cursor.

2\. Enter the select all menu above and tap on the cursor (same caveats) and
one of the options will be paste. But very often the second tap will either
activate a double-tap (and thus select a word) or move the cursor a little
bit, making a precise paste difficult.

~~~
taneq
Was this announced anywhere in any fashion? Or did they just change things and
assume it was all "discoverable"? (Triple WTF's at the "three finger un-
pinch".)

~~~
reaperducer
It was in the WWDC keynote speech. The rest of the world else can "discover"
it the next time a bug crawls on their screen.

~~~
Liquix
Herein lies the problem: it doesn't matter how much 'better' or 'smoother' or
'consistent' the change is - or is not, in this case. It's a gross oversight
to _never inform end users of the change in any way_.

How many iPhone users attentively watch WWDC or read each update's (often
incomplete) release notes? 1%? 3%? 5% tops? Why roll out a feature when 95% of
your users will need to discover it through trial and error? A relatively
juvenile UX mistake for such a mature company, but seems to be their MO these
days...

~~~
rkagerer
While we're on the topic, those screen-masking "tutorials" you randomly get
when apps push out an updated UI are annoying. I always skip past them. When I
open an app, it's for a reason, and I want to start using it.

~~~
cgriswald
Then they try to cram the entire UI into that “tutorial”; as if you’re going
to hold that all in your head after reading it once while trying to do
something else. Then there’s no clear way to get back to it (if it’s even
possible). And often if you accidentally click through one part you can’t even
go back to that part.

Video games do this a lot, too. I’d play more games but it’s always a one-hour
commitment to get started between opening videos and tutorials.

~~~
eru
Some games manage to teach you most of what you need without an overt
tutorial. See eg Hollow Knight
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiDS8SUvds&t=55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWiDS8SUvds&t=55s)
or the classic first level of Super Mario Bros.

~~~
rkagerer
When they work new skill discovery into the natural evolution of gameplay it's
genius.

~~~
eru
In Hollow Knight, letting the player figure out how to 'pogo jump' is an
interesting example. They don't hold your hand, but you need to learn
eventually to progress.

------
rdiddly
It's charming how he goes out of his way not to step on any designer toes. _"
I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So I
don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs."_

No, yeah you do, you just said it in the previous paragraph: _" And since iOS
(and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual affordances like
scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content further below."_

I don't feel bad being critical of their UI choices, precisely because Apple
was the company that made a big deal about UI and how far ahead of the poor
hopeless gray conforming IBM Microsoft masses they were. And I mean, yeah I
would've bought it, back then. Their stuff at its best was always a holy union
of simple, functional and beautiful. But function came first, then simple, and
beautiful arose from that, kind of in the Zen sense. Kind of like how a well-
crafted hammer can be beautiful even though it's just a hammer. But at some
point they went whole-hog into putting "beautiful" first, probably because
that's where the money is. If you're not careful with that, you wind up being
beautiful and stupid like the popular kids in high school. A beautiful hammer
with no handle is just a crappy piece of shit. Even though it might be a great
hammer(head), it's crippled by its lack of a proper UI.

~~~
nothis
Leave poor “beautiful” out of it! It’s innocent! Apple’s shit is beautiful
_because_ it is simple and functional, not the other way round.

I think the issue is now that their products become weirdly tacky looking from
being functionally weird. The notch, the Touch Bar, the overladen gesture
menus... it’s all kinda aimless and floaty. Let’s not even go into how they
turned a MacBook workspace into dongle central.

~~~
Aperocky
I cannot for the love of my life understand why apple put a touchbar there. If
someone regularly uses them, please share your experience.

My next personal laptop will definitely not be a MacBook at this rate.

~~~
dmix
I'm curious if Apple has some data that people secretly like the touchbar
(I've never come across someone who uses it for anything). Beyond just being
fancy-looking when you're in the Apple store comparing laptops... which I
think is the whole point and makes you question the priorities of Apple's
recent leader.

I wouldn't even care about the Touchbar if they left the rest of the keyboard
alone, but apparently the escape key was seen as an unimportant key.

~~~
Aperocky
As a heavy vim user, I can’t live without escape key. One Of the fast way to
alienate an entire userbase. I know people sometimes map cap lock but my brain
is not conditioned to bimodal action and I don’t want to be tied to a certain
specific keyboard layout, not to mention the pain to overwrite muscle memory.

~~~
threeseed
So the escape key is there on the Touchbar.

It is always the same size. It never moves. It is always there.

And because the keyboard is already pretty thin the difference in feedback
isn't that significant.

~~~
leppr
If it's always there, why not just shorten the touchbar slightly and put a
physical key instead to get that sweet haptic feedback?

------
chias
I need to use a MacBook Pro for work. Discovering that there is an option to
make scrollbars always visible when there is scrolling to be done was, by a
significant margin, the best QOL improvement I have discovered.

This happens to me so often it's ridiculous. Maybe because I'm just used to
seeing a scrollbar if there is a Y-overflow, and people that grew up with this
system know to -- I guess just like try scrolling every interface and see if
it scrolls or something? I dunno.

For anyone else in my boat:

System Preferences -> General -> Show Scroll-bars -> Always

~~~
teetermld
Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a design,
calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one another thus
deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen.

I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for people
who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong.

~~~
bhauer
> _Checking to see if something scrolls is way easier than looking at a
> design, calculating in your head if the margins look equidistant from one
> another thus deducing that it must be the bottom of the screen._

I disagree, because you're not calculating anything. You just _see_ the
existence of a scrollbar and know immediately that the content exceeds the
viewport and you can scroll. That's it. It's at least an order of magnitude
faster than the alternative of "checking" because it happens instinctively
without the slightest motor movement.

"Checking to see if something scrolls" means _some_ form of finger or hand
movement.

I know what you're saying though, because I do see people do it all the time.
There is an awkward, to me, pattern of "I just started reading, so let's shake
the content up and down to get oriented." It's just as foreign to me as people
who highlight text as they're reading. Not my thing, but whatever. (On the
highlighting behavior, I always figured it's both a visual cue and at least
partially a matter of highlighted text becoming light-on-blue, which is easier
to read than most web pages' black-on-white.)

> _I always thought 'below the fold' was so overused or at least only for
> people who never use a computer, but I guess that's definitely wrong. _

That advice was commonly head in web design and it wasn't really about people
not knowing whether they can scroll or not. But rather, that visitors might
just decide _not_ to scroll before they leave your content because the first
page is so uninteresting to them. It's _because_ scrolling requires
interaction that you're motivated to make the "above the fold" content grab
their attention.

A behavior of "let's see if this scrolls by actually scrolling" is, in my
opinion, an anti-pattern of bad UX.

~~~
cr0sh
I don't know if this is still done in grade schools or not, but long ago when
I was in grade school, teachers would pass out strips of paper for reading -
and as a bookmark. The idea that the student would hold it under the sentence
in the paragraph they were reading so that they didn't get lost or lose their
place.

I had been reading since before I started school; it was something I picked up
early and that my parents encouraged in me greatly. So by the time I was in
school and we were doing these reading exercises (which were mostly utterly
boring to me at the time, because my favorite thing to read at home were my
various science encyclopedia sets), I had no need for such a placeholder.
Reading was natural to me, and I knew where I was in a paragraph, etc.

Of course, this upset the teachers, until they finally figured out that yes, I
could read, and not only that, I could read well above my grade level (that
said, my comprehension wasn't as great, unless it was geared toward topics of
science).

I always figured that people who highlight text as they read on a screen do so
for similar reasons; not that it's a stupid thing or anything - sometimes with
long lines, small fonts, bad color/contrast choices, etc in text on a screen,
you do need some kind of a marker to help you along...

~~~
appleiigs
Now you are supposed to put the strip of paper above the line you are reading.
It reduce re-reading, gives you context of what’s coming up next.

------
hemmert
On my iPhone SE, it is also well-spaced and perfectly cropped, omitting the
'copy' row and perfectly finishing below the second line of icons.

(I actually have a PhD in human-computer interaction and I'm a professor for
UX design. It took me a two days to figure out where all those functions,
which somehow appeared to be accessible 'only through apps' (or people ;)),
went. Oh well...)

~~~
whatshisface
Eventually, they will remove the display from iPhones entirely, reducing them
to a transparent touchscreen that speaks to you in whirs and beeps through
your AirPods. Then even the touchscreen will be removed, to be replaced by a
LIDAR chip mounted around your belt buckle. The design of the Great Wizards of
Old will have come to fruition, and men will call forth driving directions and
Amazon orders using mystic incantations and vigorous, unnatural hand
movements.

~~~
oehpr
And people think WH40K is silly.

Look at us trying to appease the machine spirits.

------
hurricanesugar
In design this is called “the illusion of completeness.”

“The illusion of completeness happens when the visible content on the screen
appears to be complete, when in fact more information exists outside of the
viewable area.”[0]

It’s a designer’s job to create cues that ensure this never happens.

[0][https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-
completeness/](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/illusion-of-completeness/)

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
This happens all the time with news articles. There's an enormous ad and call-
to-read-something-else in the middle of the article and you can't see below it
to know the article didn't end. It's happening more and more.

~~~
scarlac
Exactly. So much so, you'll often see each ad prefixed with a text saying
'article continues below' (for those wondering why that text is there).

------
coldcode
Our mainstream iOS app has tons of these kind of issues. Our designers seem
more interested in coolness than usability. I think a lot of designers are big
on artistry but low on understanding how to help people actually use things. I
did UI design back in the 80's when it was actually a programmer duty more
than an art thing. Of course back then were no phone sized screens and the UIs
were much simpler in desktop apps. But the concept of making a UI usable for
all sorts of people is still the same. Apple traditionally does not use user
lab testing (which is not terrible in itself, often I've gotten mostly useless
feedback when I watched them) but sometimes you work in an environment that
has too many people who know the app too well to notice issues.

~~~
Crinus
I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability in
UI was with Windows 95 - and even that wasn't free from form-over-function
issues. In Windows 3.0 it was meant that only elements you could interact with
the mouse would have a beveled 3D appearance, so people would know just by
looking at a screen what they would be able to interact with. However it
wasn't fully followed - checkboxes, radio buttons and input boxes were flat.
Instead of addressing that Windows 95 made everything 3D.

Still, every time i hear one of those issues with "modern" UIs, it always
gives me the impression that these are issues that wouldn't exist with a
Win95-styled UI.

Sometimes i fantasize about working on something like that for Linux (not out
of any special Linux love, just it is the only OS where thanks to X11 you can
make fully custom UIs and still be practical), but fix all these
inconsistencies.

~~~
dls2016
> I seriously believe that the last time any real thought went into usability
> in UI was with Windows 95

Way to throw Bob under the bus...

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
You know, speaking of Bob, one thing I've been meaning to experiment with is a
Minecraft-based desktop UI.

I'm completely serious. Minecraft is relatively intuitive, the space is
completely malleable, human minds are already tuned to navigating such
spaces...

There's even some precedent in Bob and PSDoom, among others.

~~~
mumblemumble
A couple months ago, after 5-6 years of not playing it, I installed Minecraft
again fiddled around for a week or so. It took me a good day or two to get a
solid grasp on all the UI changes that had happened since I stopped playing. I
had to get on Google just to figure out how to _eat_.

I agree that it's relatively intuitive. Emphasis on the "relatively" part -
I'm thinking here that it's intuitive compared to the UX changes and
kippleization that iOS, Google web apps, things like that have undergone over
the same time period. That's not exactly a high bar to clear.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I'm specifically talking about moving around and building things in the space,
not so much the specific "game ui" elements.

------
the_duke
I switched to Android around the time iPhone 5 came out.

Whenever I touch one now, I feel like a idiot and dinosaur. It can take me
minutes to figure out the most basic things, and often I end up searching on
the web.

In the pursuit of a "clean" UI, iOS has become completely unintuitive and
confusing.

~~~
jahbrewski
My favorite unintuitive iOS feature is “shake to undo”

~~~
jedieaston
They replaced/depreciated it in iOS 13 with some crazy three finger swipe
thing that for the life of me I can’t remember, so I still shake my iPad or
just hold down backspace.

They need to rebuild their software development team.

~~~
gumby
I think you mean “shake them up”

------
franciscop
This is a very common issue. The best and most common solution (besides visual
indicators for scroll) is to make sure you are always cropping some elements.
Which is very tricky to impossible in a fluid general-purpose UI container.

This is _very_ heavily used for horizontal scrolling e.g. in the Google Play
Store for instance. IIRC it used to show 3.5 elements, now it's more like
3.1-3.2 elements.

Edit: example, you can see how this is used in apps as well as screenshots:
[https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting-
material-d...](https://www.androidcentral.com/play-store-getting-material-
design-face-lift)

~~~
lonelappde
Or you could use the solution that's worked great for 50 years: scroll bars

~~~
sempron64
I thought about this and while it does work, there's not enough screen real
estate on a phone for this to be efficient. Phone screens are already very
narrow and vertical. So either the scroll bar would be too narrow to be useful
or too large.

~~~
moring
Keep in mind that this "scroll bar" would only have to indicate that there is
more content, or at most, which part of the content you are looking at. It
doesn't have to be interactive (tap/drag to scroll) because you can still
scroll by swiping. So a few pixels would be enough if the color stands out
enough.

~~~
regularfry
In general I'd much prefer a scroll indicator to a scroll bar on mobile.
Google Play Music gets this precisely wrong: the album list lets you click a
play button on the album cover as a shortcut, but the button is so close to
the edge of the screen that it's very difficult to avoid hitting the scroll
bar area and scrolling to a random section of the list instead of hitting
play. So you have to seek to the album you want again, and, because you are
optimistic beyond rationality, you try again, and whoops! Did it again...

------
aduitsis
This is certainly not an excuse for the clearly bad UI design the article
describes for iOS, but unfortunately Apple is not the only one afflicted with
that disease. The situation on Android is not exactly rosy either.

I get particularly aware of the serious UI problems when trying to use GPS
navigation (waze, here, google maps) in a car. Buttons with various colours,
contours and sizes, non-intuitive interactions where one has to swipe starting
from various confined areas, annoying dialogs or confirmation screens
appearing one after the other, sometimes even spontaneously. There is not even
a modicum of consistency regarding the most basic elements, e.g. a yes-no
question or a dismissible message.

I hate to say it, but the first iOS of 2016 was (and probably remains) a
champion of elegant and consistent UI design. Today, it's almost as if the iOS
and Android ecosystems are competing for who has the most unintuitive and
confusing UI.

~~~
nencrystation
Waze is indeed really clunky in places. It crashes less than it did last year
but the UI hasn't really changed.

------
SigmundA
My non techie friend experienced the same thing, upgraded to iOS 13, went to
see him and he started cursing about "how the f do I save a photo from my
messages why the f does Apple got to remove something like that WTF!!!!"

I immediately thought no way they would remove that he must be mistaken, I
just upgraded too and hand't tried to do that action. Looked at his phone and
sure enough it was gone, tried all sorts of things finally Googled it and oh
wow you got to be kidding me scroll down but no indicator you can, that's bad,
there is going to be a lot of confused people, why would they do that?

~~~
jchb
Tip: long press the image you want to save, tap Save.

~~~
SigmundA
I am pretty sure that was one of the first things I tried and nothing
happened. Just tried on my iPhone X and the long pressed showed that menu, is
there any difference there between models, he has like a 6 or 7?

Either way long press has the same non discoverability issue especially for
not techie people who are used to it working a certain way before.

------
rlv-dan
Grumpy Website deserves to be mentioned here:
[https://grumpy.website/](https://grumpy.website/)

~~~
DrBazza
Brilliant. Every single image that I saw is of an Apple product. The so-called
masters of UI.

~~~
dmitriid
We (the authors) are Mac and iPhone users, so yeah, our exposure to things is
skewed towards MacOS and iOS :)

And yeah, it pains us to no end :)

~~~
rlv-dan
1\. Please keep up the good work! 2\. Please add a way for visitors to submit
content. (Unfortunately) I have lots of content that I want to share...

~~~
dmitriid
1\. Thank you!

2\. It’s a challenge because someone would need to approve submitted content,
but I hope we’ll figure something out

------
lutoma
Semi-related: My biggest UX gripe with iOS is that the option to hide a
picture in the Photos app is part of the share menu.

Those are such diametrically opposed interactions, I really don't understand
the thought process that went into that. Usually sharing is the last thing you
want to do with a photo you're trying to hide, and with the share dialog open
it always feels like you're just one mistap away from sending it to whoever.

I guess with the "Duplicate" / "Slideshow" / … options the share menu has
become more of a general action menu, but if that's the idea, they should
really change the icon imo.

~~~
elfogati
The name “Share” is probably just a holdover from older iOS versions when it
actually was purely a share feature.

It ought to be renamed to something else now, like “Actions” or something to
reflect the fact that that one button is how you: open the file in a specific
app, run automations on it, share it with friends, save or bookmark the thing,
etc.

------
Lewton
Another iOS 13 ui issue I ran into today

I have a lot of tabs open on safari on my iPhone. Both because I continuously
open in new tab and forget to close the old one and also as a low tech “read
later” list. Today I went through cleaning up tabs, and while going through
the list pressing the x on some tabs, a pop up came up and asked me something
(didn’t have time to see what) and as I was on semi autopilot pressing x’es to
close tabs I accidentally hit the option Saying something About “1 day“. I
figured it had something to do with cleaning up tabs (which I don’t want) so I
go to the settings for safari and sure enough it’s now set to clean up old
tabs after one day

So when I went back to safari all of my tabs had been cleaned up

I always browse in private mode (because why not?) so I lost a ton of
“bookmarks”

Goddamnit

------
saagarjha
I'm personally torn on the new share sheet. It's actually fast now, which is
nice, and I like the fact that it (supposedly) can put contacts in the top bar
that I talk to frequently (which I guess no app has added support for yet?)
But it's still a bit confusing how it's organized, and now it has two planes
of scrolling and sometimes apps disappear off of them unless I pin them in
"Favorites" or something like that and the list only has a limited number of
items unless I go into the "More" option. But more on point, I don't get why
it doesn't flash scroll indicators…isn't that the standard way that iOS has
hinted at scrollable content for years?

~~~
kup0
I've seen the contacts in the top bar, though I can't remember what apps use
them. Maybe the share option in Photos.

I find it annoying that I cannot turn it off. It's very easy to accidentally
get _close_ to sending a contact an image I do not want to send them

~~~
machello13
Eh? There's still another confirmation step before it actually sends.

------
salex89
Had the same issue the first time I was using Uber, around 1.5 year ago. Uber
is not available in my region, and I was in the States, wanting to catch a
ride with my colleagues to the airport, so that was my first time in the app.
We were going long-haul and had a lot of luggage. First car that comes in is a
Corolla in which there is no way we could fit. The guy (in poor English) tells
us to choose a bigger car. We try to tap around, just to get a Jetta.

At the end we asked a guy in a shop near the spot we were waiting, for him
just to swipe the ride type right to left. Felt like an idiot, because the
three types available at were perfectly centered and aligned.

------
saurik
> Oh my god! This is just like the dumb new Music app. I didn’t even know I
> could scroll down!

I went a long time--months?--thinking Apple had simply removed support for
"repeat song" because of this exact same issue. When someone told me to
"scroll down" it was like someone said "just open that wall, the peanut butter
is inside" and I'm staring at a blank wall wondering who is insane.

~~~
mplanchard
Hey, thanks! I only just learned that the scrollable area exists thanks to
this comment.

------
AceJohnny2
Windows Phone 7 was really interesting because the OS UI _very intentionally_
did "bad crops" of items to indicate scrolling was possible

[https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+phone+7+ui&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=windows+phone+7+ui&tbm=isch)

~~~
bhauer
That still looks better, in my opinion, than the mobile operating of today. A
proper dark theme many years ago, and an elegant (IMO), simple, touch-oriented
UI. It avoided the "play skool/AOL" aesthetic that really rankles me with more
popular UIs: rounded corners, circles that should be squares, etc.

All that said, I agree with the article's point that UIs that do not more
clearly reveal the totality of their user interface actions are frustrating.
I've often found iOS to be especially bad at this for outsiders like myself,
especially with respect to hardware features outsiders are completely
unfamiliar with such as "press harder than usual."

~~~
AceJohnny2
Windows Phone's aesthetic was certainly a welcome, effective change compared
to iPhone's dominant paradigm. I suspect you'll pry rounded corners from Jony
Ive's cold, dead hands.

I agree that iOS's "discoverability" is awful. I wish Apple had some head of
UX like Android has with Matias Duarte. Instead, they put Ive in charge of
software UX and it's clearly not something he cared about.

------
ohazi
> And since iOS (and in some places now macOS, too) doesn’t offer visual
> affordances like scroll indicators, she had no idea there was any content
> further below.

> I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer. So
> I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.

Isn't it obvious? The solution is to _not get rid of visual affordances like
scroll indicators_ just because some designer thinks it looks "cleaner" that
way. It may surprise some, but they actually serve a purpose.

------
jarfil
Simple solution: add a blur gradient at the bottom so people know there is
"something more" going on down there.

------
AndrewStephens
I had exactly the same experience. It really is not obvious that additional
buttons lurk just offscreen in that dialog.

~~~
haasted
Me too! Until reading this article, I hadn't found the other commands. I had
been missing "Save image" and "Set as wallpaper" and wondered why they had
become so difficult to access. FYI, it's also possible to save a photo in
iMessages by long-pressing it.

~~~
stevewodil
Wow...this is TOO weird. I was helping my mom the other day with her iPhone (I
use Android so I'm not all that familiar), and I could NOT figure out how to
save the image. Now I know why...

------
tiglionabbit
A friend of mine got bit by this sort of thing when setting up their Amazon
Echo on their iPhone. When they got to the page where they were supposed to
choose a wifi connection, it was perfectly cropped and showed no indication of
being scrollable, so they thought those were all the networks it could see and
there must be something stopping it from seeing theirs. Being a curious
person, I walked through the process with them and when we got to this screen
I was also confused, but I tried touching and dragging the list and sure
enough it scrolled. Surprise!

------
cypressious
The author claims to be "a developer with an eye for design" yet the blog is
very hard to read with the giant images in between the text blocks.

~~~
notjustanymike
Yeah it's noticeable. I think it's because the site is a "mobile first" design
that accidentally became a "mobile only" design.

------
Udo
With the proliferation of different screen sizes and zoom factors, these kinds
of usability problems will continue to happen. The only way I see around this
is by re-introducing the 'obvious scroll bar' element, or alternatively a
different kind of indicator that advertises where the current view is in
relation to the entire content.

~~~
lallysingh
Like a tiny down triangle in the corner? This stuff is super not hard. You
just have to give a shit.

~~~
dean177
It’s incredibly hard to make a great user experience look great.

Lots of people can’t tell the difference between something looking awesome and
working well.

~~~
lallysingh
User interfaces are testable. There's a whole field of practice on this.
Considering how sloppy this is (and Apple's recent trends in slop) I bet they
didn't test it on all their screen sizes

------
toxik
An easy fix would be to do the gravity/pointmass type deal that Messages does
for the message bubbles, so when the sheet "shoots up", you see that they're
movable.

------
crazygringo
It's not just iOS, it's the web too -- buttons and error messages that are
off-screen with no indication.

A banking site I use commonly has a "next" button that is inexplicably about
3/4 of a screen's worth after the main page content which is only a few lines
long, with just blank white space in between -- so just below the fold. For
weeks I thought the site had a bug where there was no way to get to the next
stage of the operation.

Similarly, it happens regularly in a shopping checkout site that I'll click
"Complete order" at the bottom of a long form and... nothing happens. Click
again and again... still nothing. Finally think to scroll up to the _top_ of
the page and there's a tiny message in red that I didn't fill out the "state"
field or something like that.

Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.

~~~
TremendousJudge
>Off-screen indicators/functionality is a problem everywhere.

Yes, but an iPhone 8 costs at least 450 dollars, and Apple products pride
themselves in the "premium experience" they provide.

------
tomcooks
It only there was an indicator on the side of the screen telling you how far
you are from the bott of the screen, like a bar. On the side.

------
concordDance
So many UI issues like this could be fixed if we just brought back the bloody
scroll bar!

All those hidden scrollbars result in undiscoverable UI elements. They would
only need to be a few pixels in width and it wouls be easy to tell that things
are scrollable.

------
lux
The iCloud authentication issues are the real nightmare for me. I can't tell
you how many times I've been rejected using the correct email and password,
and how many times I've had to use the reset function only to have it mess up
again immediately after.

Now, on one machine I just habitually click to dismiss the iCloud window. On
another, I've just moved it as far into the bottom corner of the screen as I
can get it tucked away to just ignore it.

I'm also working on moving my web development setup over to Windows (with
their new Linux support, which is excellent) so my next machine won't have
this problem.

~~~
pault
I was a MacOS user since system 9. Every one of my computers was a Mac and I
never used windows for anything except the occasional game. A year ago I had
to use Windows for my dev environment at work (a dotnet core shop), and I've
since bought a Windows workstation for my personal dev environment and stopped
using my macs completely. It's absolutely mind boggling to me that windows is
now arguably a better dev environment than MacOS now that WSL is a thing, but
here we are! I haven't regretted the switch at all and having access to the
ocean of software for Windows has been great (minus a few things like Sketch
that are Mac only).

Edit: To preempt the "why not linix" comments, I have used linux on and off
through the years, but I didn't enjoy spending a large fraction of my time
fiddling with the OS instead of getting work done.

~~~
lux
Similar story to mine! I started on System 7 at my first industry job back in
1999. Used Linux exclusively on servers, and needed a personal laptop with a
usable command line. Mac was pretty much my only option, since I wasn't
interested in fighting with Linux's weak hardware compatiblity back then.
Bought my first MBP in 2000 or 2001 and I'm still on one now.

But since I also do a lot of VR development these days, I also have a PC both
at work and home dedicated to that. VR obviously dictates my platform choice
pretty heavily, so moving to Windows for web stuff makes everything simpler.
WSL pretty much sealed the deal, although I wish there were more VR-capable
laptops that didn't look like an army tank...

------
jakear
Ugh... it’s the same in Apple Music (as tfa mentions). Biggest iOS 13
complaint: going from a a song on a list to it either at the beginning or end
of your queue used to be:

Toich and hold on song, move finger to “play next” or “play later” button,
release.

Now, it’s: touch and hold on song, release when menu comes up. Scroll menu up.
Tap button.

Sounds small, but it’s such a usability setback for no gain. I want a full
screen modal, that’s why I’m going into the song options. Why would I press
and hold on the song, then only want half of its options?

------
mfer
Testing on older devices is something many (any it appears iOS) doesn't do
well enough.

I ran into this with an apps verification system. Because of the positioning
on an iPhone 7 you couldn't perform verification. When I contacted them I
learned they don't test on iPhone 7's because they are too old. This was prior
to the 11 coming out.

I've also had to help someone with this problem on their older device.

A casualty of always chasing new is design and QA for older devices.

------
kup0
This issue confused me too, on my iPhone SE. The top action is _copy_ and is
partially cut off on the screen, and I didn't know _save image_ was below it.
At least it being cut off eventually led me to scroll down. Apple has
destroyed UI intuitiveness by going too far in the minimalist direction.
Sometimes we need some damn scrollbars or indicators.

However, it appears this changes based on the app? If I long press an image to
save it from the browser or from the Toot! (mastodon) app, I get the regular
_save image_ dialog that I've always gotten on iOS.

If I long press an image to save it from Twitterific, I get the share sheet.

Ugh. The share sheet annoys me too. I get the convenience of having "most
common" contacts at the top to send things to, but most of the time this is in
the way for me and I'd prefer it completely off and as expected with Apple's
"features" they rarely provide options to turn them off.

While I prefer iOS over Android, it's stuff like this that I realize is a big
trade-off for me.

Edit: Looks like I can at least re-order so "Save Image" is the top option...
but it's still buried beneath the contacts and apps

~~~
techer
Pixel forces the Direct Share too. Can be removed if you root it apparently.
Samsung allows it to be disabled.

------
spectogarb
I don't how many options I've missed or hours I've wasted trying to figure out
for myself or others how to do certain things because there were no visual
indicators of those options... and I've even had people become disconcerted
with me or devices or tech people in general because of difficult-to-decipher
interfaces, sometimes to the point of someone panicking and making things
worse or getting angry and argumentative.

The false simplicity and "freshness" factor designers and developers are doing
to change or add interfaces that cause confusion just for the sake of trying
to get attention or change how something looks is a minor change for a major
disfunction.

If the change doesn't improve something's usability, DON'T DO IT. I just
noticed today iOS changed how some buttons look and menus operate, completely
unnecessarily, throwing off recognizability and flow. Totally disruptive to
the wrong people for the wrong reasons. Just stop, make interfaces that are
easy to understand, figure out, operate, and remember. It's much easier to
leave something as is than to change it unnecessarily.

------
bsenftner
It's that crappy "flat design" BS that provides minimal meaningless
indicators. An entire generation of designers needs to unlearn this crap.

------
ypeterholmes
This article focuses on the crop issue, but there's another issue with the UI
that is more important: broken hierarchy. Saving the image is almost as
important as texting it, but texting is given 90% of the share sheet.
Meanwhile emailing, airdropping, tasks(!) and copying(!) are all given more
importance than saving.

------
flavmartins
I've struggled with the update to the iOS Music app in iOS 13. Mainly the
shuffle button. I'll leave it on quite often but then want to turn it off
sometimes when I want to listen to a complete album. Couldn't find the
location for the longest time. It was easy before. Now it's 2 clicks away,

------
dredmorbius
"Who killed the scrollbar" was a rant I'd posted on this about three years
ago:

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq)

------
hnick
I had a similar issue in SQL Server Management studio when importing a
database from a backup file. The window was unnecessarily large and spacious
and couldn't be properly resized, and the 'OK' button was perfectly situated
just off my corporate laptop's piddling small screen.

For quite a while I had no idea what was happening, there was a verify/test
type option which was passing and I thought would prompt me to continue but I
didn't. Only after looking for tutorials online did I realise my buttons were
missing.

I think I fixed it by trying to resize the window. It didn't actually resize,
but did jumble around the UI elements just enough to get 2 pixels of the top
of the button to click on.

------
rootusrootus
I don't doubt that Apple has big teams of people who do nothing but try to
perfect the UX. Maybe this shows how difficult it is to get it right more than
any inherent problem at the company.

Aside from that, I don't really care much for iOS any more than anyone else.
Mostly because Safari is now buggy and once every day or so I have to kill &
reload it to get a page to display. And the new gesture implementation has me
going forward & back when I am just trying to get a page to scroll left &
right. And the touch-and-hold popup activates too easily. And ...

Well, I hope they are still tuning it. I admit to holding iOS to a much higher
standard than I do Android, but I can't help that.

~~~
gmac
_Safari is now buggy and once every day or so I have to kill & reload it to
get a page to display_

Yes, me too — hope they fix that soon.

 _I admit to holding iOS to a much higher standard than I do Android, but I
can 't help that._

Take both the price differential and Apple's historic UI quality into account,
higher standards seem pretty reasonable.

------
projektfu
It took me a long time to figure out in the first place that I had to “share”
to do actions that are not sharing, like saving to my photos. I was also
surprised by this new wrinkle on the iPhone SE. I’d use android if I had a
phone in this form factor.

~~~
gbear605
Yeah, the share button really means more like “send to other apps”

------
fortran77
It's funny he mentioned this:

> "My wife typically only charges her phone when she’s at her desk during the
> day. She doesn’t leave it plugged in overnight, which means iOS’s software
> update never happens automatically for her. So, she just recently upgraded
> to iOS 13 a few days ago."

About 3 months ago, I _finally_ got rid of my landline at home. I had it just
for emergencies, and I had a wired POTS phone on my nightstand.

So now I keep my iPhone on my nightstand. It's in the charger all day at work.

And I, too, stopped getting updates automatically! I just looked at my phone
and saw that there's been an alert up for a few days that I need to update to
the latest 13.1.3.

------
par
WOW. Ok I had no idea you could scroll that menu. wtf. I was also confounded
by the new iOS 13 update not being able to save photos, but I got around by
tapping on the pic from the conversation thread and getting a save action
sheet.

------
synlatexc
My mom had the same issue the other day. Even I didn't realize the save option
was concealed below the fold. My workaround was having her long press the
photo in iMessage, which reveals a prompt with an option to save.

------
martin-adams
Usability is getting harder, not easier. I thought there as a bug in iOS 13
that I couldn't turn the torch on or access the camera on the home screen.

I press the button, nothing happens. Go to my control center, and it works
fine there.

Is it a bug. Nope. It's user error.

It looks like a button. It animated when I press it like a button. It has only
one primary action like a button. But nope, you have to _long press it_ for it
to work.

[https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1184846835241967616?...](https://twitter.com/Martin_Adams/status/1184846835241967616?s=20)

------
techer
The contacts in the share sheet annoy me. Pixel also has this “direct share”
that can’t be disabled and simply uses up real estate while being a privacy
issue for me. Samsung has an option in settings to remove it.

------
floatboth
The simplest solution would be to group the Copy and Save buttons into the
group thingy that's been common on iOS since forever. So that the Copy's
bottom corners wouldn't be rounded.

------
MontagFTB
As an iPhone 8 owner, TIL. I was wondering where that capability went...

------
uptown
My primary complaint of the share sheet is that it’s suggesting I share things
with people I either never text or texted once for a specific purpose with no
reason to communicate with ever again.

~~~
techer
I’ve said elsewhere. Pixel also has this and can’t be disabled. Samsung allows
it to be disabled.

------
lowercased
half of the UI stuff we know would have been called "Easter eggs" in a
previous generation. I dropped out of gaming around the time of Pitfall! -
when controllers got more than one button, that was it for me. But I saw my
brothers and friends all geeking out of "left up down down left A B A BB A
down up left" and finding cool shit in their games. It sort of feels like
ios/mobile stuff has become that.

"3 finger long press, swipe down, dbl tap - oh sweet, I can save the picture
you sent me!"

------
mafuy
In e.g. Windows 95, there would often be a box around the text. Since the
bottom of that box would not be visible, it would indicate that something is
missing in that direction. Now that boxes (and other visual indicators) are
gone, this kind of thing can happen.

I've always considered this a tradeoff, but I also get the feeling that some
people did not even consider that the old designs had an actual reason in
usability (for boxes, the second big reason is preattentive recognition in the
human brain).

------
bpicolo
...This blog post explains an issue I have been experiencing that I didn't
realize I had.

iOS has always had some very explicit misses on affordances. Force touch led
to a lot of them.

------
cjsawyer
Maybe we could bounce all scrollable areas along their scroll direction when
you open an app so you can see they're hiding a control. Like a 0.5 second
tutorial.

------
carloswilson
> So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs.

Obviously a scroll bar should be an acceptable solution? Why do designers hate
scroll bars these days?

------
nnain
Apple could do something smart with the Tips app – if the phone 'notices'
someone not able to position the cursor, or doesn't know about the hidden
gesture. They can send a quick how-to via Tips. They can even do an overlay on
the screen to get people started.

This is only for things like keyboard. Even the OS won't understand that
somone wants to save a photo and isn't able to discover the save button.

------
_bxg1
I only figured out these new menus because I knew already that the top action
used to be in the horizontally-scrolling menu, and that some other things that
used to be in the latter no longer were.

For the record: overall I think this new structure makes more sense; it was
always weird having "Share to [App]" intermingled with random other actions.

But Apple has definitely gotten worse at designing things holistically to be
intuitive.

------
jonas21
> _I’m a developer with an eye for design, but I’m certainly not a designer.
> So I don’t know what the solution is to these types of accidental UI bugs._

The solution is right there in his screenshot. The list of contacts and apps
indicate that you can scroll along the X axis by showing a partial icon that
extends off the screen.

The fact that Apple didn't do this on the Y axis is an issue in this
particular UI that should be fixed.

------
chenster
I'm not one of those aging parents, but it definitely bothered me when I could
not find the other actions besides copy and share on my phone, then realized
one must scroll to reveal additional options. WTF, the first is "flat UI",
then this. Our UX is totally dictated by those no-talent ass clown designers.
Seriosuly why do they keep changing the UI when it is perfectly fine?

------
brownbat
If you're ditching the scroll bar, maybe just add a dark triangle to the lower
left corner of the screen, just a few pixels, as a "continued below"
indicator. Have it disappear when you're at the bottom.

That's the most minimal UI element I can think of that would people if they're
at the end of a screen or not.

------
peeters
Is there a solution to this in DOM+CSS? I had always wondered, we have the
same issue in some of our UIs and I'm never sure if there's some pseudo-class
that I haven't discovered that can style overflow without Javascript. Never
got to the point of researching it in-depth but quick looks didn't find
anything for me.

------
mberning
It’s not realistic that iPhones could have had the same screen size forever,
but this kind of thing and many others like it show that sticking to 3.5/4
inch screens for so long was not necessarily misguided. Consistency counts. As
well as not diluting your design, development, and testing efforts across a
plethora of configurations.

------
htfu
Seems to have already changed, because that's not how it looks on mine.
There's no whitespace between the buttons in the list, so (on iPhone X) the
first two and a tiny bit of the third are visible. I'm assuming their view
would now be the first and a small piece of the second.

Crazy something like that was ever released though.

------
pkamb
I too found that horizontal scrolling as a bit of an unintuitive change from
previous versions of iOS.

But the new feature above that is my favorite feature in _years_. Quickly
iMessage your most frequent contacts.

No more typing the first 2 letters of your spouse's name tens of times
throughout the day. Just tap their face to iMessage them.

------
jaredtn
The new iOS update would disable scrolling on Safari - but only on some
websites, and only about halfway through the page. You had to quit and reopen
to fix the effect. This bug was remedied in 13.0.1, but I have to wonder: Did
no one try opening Facebook in Safari with an iPhone XR? Seems like shoddy
testing to me.

------
JoeCianflone
Hmm. I’m on iOS 13 and I just clicked a picture in a message and my screen
looks slightly different. I see more options and I can tell from the design
there is more. What I can’t tell is if I’m the edge case or his wife is, but
for all the iOS 13 hating people enjoy doing, I’m not convinced this is a real
issue.

~~~
pwinnski
If you see more options, it's quite likely you have a taller phone. I use an
iPhone X, and my screen is tall enough that this issue doesn't affect me.

But Apple still sells iPhone 8, which is affected by this issue.

------
DrBazza
My favourite Apple UI 'enhancement' was to remove pinch-to-close from 'Books'.
You now have to fiddle around with a perfect touch in the right part of the
top of the screen to get the top menu to appear, to then press a tiny 'back'
button. Before, pinch anywhere on the screen.

Thanks Apple.

------
starpilot
Is OS X / iOS trying to be more like Windows? In mobile Safari, the icon in
the address bar used to go straight to Reader view, now it goes to a menu with
four items. It's a running theme; formerly concise, direct functions are
replaced with overloaded menus like the Microsoft world.

------
AnIdiotOnTheNet
Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone in today's UX culture. Hide all the
things, make them indistinguishable, it might not be usable but at least it
meets some designer's arbitrary definition of "beautiful".

Fuck. Every day I grow to hate technology more and more.

~~~
rdiddly
If only you could blame the technology. It's humans all the way down.

------
jakub_g
One way to design UI to make this discoverable without scrollbars would be to
do a transparency 100% to 0% gradient at the bottom. That way the copy button
would be semi-transparent/vanishing which might trigger the user to scroll
down.

------
conductr
This same bug hit me when I upgraded. I literally thought they removed the
feature. Then I thought surely not, and went back and tried again. Took me a
solid 2 minutes (which felt like way too long) of poking around to realize to
scroll like your wife.

------
larusso
I had the same issue with my mother in law. She said she isn’t able to share
to an iCloud group. She was used to the fact that the iCloud option was part
of the upper rows. And having an iPhone 6s she was also left with any
indication to scroll down.

------
yuchi
It has always been an iOS best practice to keep object sizes so that half an
item visible if an area is scrollable, so to let the user know there’s more
below the fold.

Since the first iPhone I never found them breaking this guideline. Not so
badly at least.

------
RootKitBeerCat
There’s also some really bad “ML” that reorders everything in very
unpredictable ways across different Apps / UI contexts that are very similar.
It’s not the worst, but it’s definitely not reminding me of a simple Apple
experience

------
punnerud
How many iOS NN Beta users are on the ‘old phones’? I think this is a serious
problem because then you don’t catch the problem before the iOS is out of
Beta.

Same at Microsoft (in Norway) where every developer is eligible for a new PC
every year.

------
admax88q
UX has been trying to remove scroll bars for ages. They are ugly as fuck but
they are also incredibly useful UI feedback.

I think UX is missing the grander design challenge of making scrollbars that
are both useful _and_ beautiful.

------
srirachafari
You can see the solution on that same screenshot. Make a sliver of the
subsequent button visible. Hard to do with all the variable resolutions, but
theyre smart people, im sure they can figure it out.

~~~
bityard
Or, and hear me out on this, they could have a widget off to the right that
signals to the user when content could be scrolled down. Heck, you could even
get _really_ crazy and have it display _where you are_ within the scroll
content.

On second through, nah, the world isn't ready for that kind of idea.

------
lloydde
Great article. It frequently occurs on iPhone SE for 3rd party apps with its
smallest dimensions.

SE seems to also have the unique problem of cropping of instructions and
phrases on the right of screen.

------
nautilus12
This is yet another product of magical thinking around scrum and agile. WE
NEED TO SLOW DOWN. Bar none, business needs to totally readjust their velocity
gauge, its totally broken.

------
winkeltripel
I have an ipad at work we can't sign into, since we changed the email address
on the iCloud account (months ago), and the old address is on a domain we
don't use any more...

------
dmitriid
> Here’s a fun, personal story about what can go wrong in an otherwise fine UI
> when things are redesigned.

writes the person whose blog is typeset with a nearly invisible thin gray font

------
kevinguay
I have heard complaints about this too in the form of "Whatever you do, don't
upgrade to iOS 13." (Me: "I've been running 13 since July..")

------
planetmaker
Aye, this is a pattern which indeed seems to become more and more common in an
attempt to "modernize" design and "making it more lean". Yeah, right

------
flqn
Minor nitpick: a "visual affordance" is called a signifier. A button affords
clicking, the visual style of the button signifies its affordances.

------
kirykl
On a related note, There's no reason the "find on page" should burried in that
share menu, and not in the "aA" menu on the url bar

------
rocky1138
It would be handy for apps to have some sort of method of showing how far down
you've scrolled on a given screen. Maybe we can call them scroll bars?

------
gcbw3
ITT: people who do not use OSS and use apple because "it just works" doing
free tech support and QA-via-tweeter to apple numerous bugs.

sigh.

------
bityard
This is what happens when designers fetishize minimalism... eventually, you
minimalize to the point that no one can use your product.

------
buyingarmor
I wish we could put contacts from different apps in the share sheet. iMessage
isn’t really s thing where I’m from.

------
olah_1
iOS 13 also completely butchered the screenshot editing interface.

It's approximately 4 times slower than the old one. The markup button is
hidden in the 3-dot menu in the far upper-right (such a strain to reach
this!). Oh and the "full page" safari screenshot feature? It only saves PDFs.
What a joke.

I'm moving to Android or PinePhone.

------
itsfirat
I miss the skeuomorphic design days.

------
m463
Don't they test on people?

Really, this stuff should have been caught before shipping.

------
notadoc
Design is how it works

If it's guesswork, or not working, is it good design?

------
ourcat
Bring back skeuomorphism.

A little bit of shadow would sort that out ;)

------
NKCSS
Wow, this site is horrible to read on a desktop...

------
danielovichdk
Loved the OMFGWTFBBQ in the message on the phone

------
ThomW
My god this has been confusing me for weeks.

------
chrisstanchak
The solution is Scott Forstall

------
oksawe
Nationalize it already.

------
unityByFreedom
Good callout of usability. Does it need to be presented so dramatically?

"she couldn't figure out how to share photos, so I called her"

Could this not wait until later?

~~~
luckylion
I very much agree. Valid point, bad presentation. Embedding screenshots of
dialogues and Twitter threads is something I'd really prefer not to get
widespread.

