
iPadOS Discoverability Trouble - LaSombra
https://mondaynote.com/ipados-discoverability-trouble-488d2d40ee1
======
Ididntdothis
Totally agree. I have experienced several times that somehow I managed to get
two apps onto the split screen but I have no idea how I did it and it was not
obvious how to get back to normal. Same with things like undo and other text
input features . It seems there are a ton of features but there is just no way
of finding them.

I think around the time of Windows 95 and macOS back then they put a lot of
emphasis on consistent user experience and discoverability. The current state
of affairs feels like a big regression.

~~~
sixothree
I've been able to do split screen a few times. But mostly I end up losing my
original application. It seems some applications cannot exist in split screen
(?) and don't bother to indicate that you will lose your existing layout?

I learned about long pressing the space bar less than a month ago. Apparently
that has existed for years. Ugh. This thing is awful. Just plain awful.

~~~
ihuman
If an app doesn't support split screen, the screen won't split when you drag
an app to the right (before your let go). It makes a different animation to
show the new app will replace the running app.

~~~
sixothree
The problem is that it's just not responsive enough and the indication that my
current app will go away is not clear enough.

------
Someone1234
This was a large criticism I had of Force Touch ("3D Touch"), and why I was
not at all surprised when it "died."

Force Touch may have been an impressive technological showpiece, but at its
core it had no discoverability and you couldn't really even describe how to
use it, new users just had to experiment.

This resulted in apps being unable to use it for important functionality,
because it would never be found. Which ultimately resulted in most UI designs
ignoring it entirely and leading to its own irrelevance.

A mouse's right click has the same issue, and many users never "discover" that
either. I've met people who only know how to use the clipboard in Microsoft
Office applications because it has a UI for it (via the Clipboard section in
the ribbon). They simply don't right click, ever.

~~~
robenkleene
Curious what you think the conclusion should be from that? E.g., if 3D Touch
should be removed because not enough people used it, does that mean right
click should be removed for the same reason?

It seems really obvious to me that computers should scale from the most basic
of users to the most skilled of users, and features that only benefit a small
percentage of users are still important because they let skilled users be more
effective.

This is the fatal flaw in modern Apple's design approach of allocating
resources based on how popular features are (at least that's how it appears
from the outside), rather than addressing areas where the device fails to
scale to the needs to skilled users. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy to keep
the device from reaching its full potential. This is directly why the iPad,
while a great device for unskilled users, has failed to capture any market
share in any of the skilled tasks that people use desktop computers for[1].

There's so much backwards thinking that come out of Apple because they can't
seem to make anything for skilled users anymore, like Apple pitching the iPad
as the future ("what's a computer"), while _everything_ that Apple makes is
made using _Macs_.

[1]: [https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-
ha...](https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/07/apples-app-stores-have-failed-
creative-apps/)

~~~
ridiculous_fish
Right click should be an accelerator. Everything you can accomplish via right
click should be also be available via the menu bar, or other easily
discoverable UI.

3D touch should have been an accelerator for long press.

[https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-
fix-3d-touch-2f...](https://medium.com/@eliz_kilic/how-apple-can-
fix-3d-touch-2f0ca5ea589e)

~~~
ubercow13
Long press isn’t inherently more discoverable

------
close04
Some of the conclusions are only looking at a single factor and ignoring the
rest.

> The most natural explanation for the decline [in sales] is that the iPad
> failed to fulfill initial expectations that it would be a general-purpose
> device that could replace our Macs and PCs.

People didn't buy iPads in 2014 because they actually thought they would
replace their PC, or for the the promise that a future model will in 2021.
They bought them because they were leaps and bounds better than the one they
already had, they did _more and better_. My iPad 1 was woefully outdated by
the time the iPad 3 came out just 2 years later. You could feel it in the
performance, the screen resolution, etc. My 5 year old iPad Air 2 is still
kicking ass and has easily at least another year or 2 left in it. And when I
upgrade it's because of the lack of support, not that I can feel it buckling
under the workload.

As markets mature the improvements are getting smaller and smaller and the
product is more than adequate for longer periods. That's the real benefit of
the maturity of the market. Today it's harder to justify the upgrade even if
it would be perfectly able to replace your PC.

~~~
scarface74
You’re giving the iPad 1 way too much credit. It was outdated the day it came
out. It only had 256MB of RAM. The iPhone 4 released 3 months later had 512MB
of RAM.

The iPhone 4 ran up to iOS 7. The iPad stopped at iOS 5 and ran it badly. The
iPad 2 released a year later with 512MB of RAM ran up to iOS 9.

~~~
close04
I compared iPad 1 because I had it. The story of iPad 2 is not much different.
When the 4 came out it was faster, had more RAM, much better screen, etc.
Every product reaches a stage where improvements stop being so obvious year
over year and the upgrade seems less and less justified. What used to be a 2-3
year upgrade cycle can now easily be a 5+ year one.

~~~
scarface74
The difference being that the iPad 1 was already underpowered when it was
released compared to its contemporary. The iPad needed more RAM than the
iPhone 4 that was being designed at the same time but had less.

The iPad 4 was better than the iPad 2 but the iPad 2 was at least using the
best SOC they had at the time. The iPad 2 was sold from 2011-2014. It actually
got a bug fix update about 3 or 4 months ago.

By 2011 when iOS 5 came out, the original iPad was crashing because of too
little memory.

~~~
close04
This still supports what I wrote originally: there was a time when a 1 or 2
year gap brought massive improvements. Not anymore. Now it takes 4, 5, or
more. Which is why people bought more often then, and less often now. Same
thing happened to smartphones. Explosive evolution at the beginning and a
subsequent slowdown when the generation gap started being so small that you
can go more time between upgrades.

------
annoyingnoob
Just give it to a kid, with no instructions. I would have eaten it up as kid,
and figured it all out.

My first computer experience was on a PC with MS-DOS booted from a floppy.
There was no help and no documentation, discover-ability was based on your
ability to find commands and understand how they worked. It took a while but I
mastered MS-DOS. Comparatively, we've come a long way and the iPad is easy to
use.

I think I'm going to get my daughter an iPad Pro for her 10th birthday. She
can run all the apps she likes on her iPod and do all of her school work
(mostly on Google Docs). Its perfect for her and has everything she needs. She
will have no trouble with discover-ability, she will use her time and
intuition to figure it out.

~~~
jarjoura
I'd argue this is mostly because kids have the time to sit there and figure it
out. They also have zero expectations for the way things should work, so they
can try to do something until it does what they want.

Not sure this is valid argument for building a device that the majority of
users will find frustrating.

I think the problem I have with iOS/iPad OS 13 is that Apple went into this as
a zero-sum game. Replace how it worked before, because trust their designers
who know better, it's MUCH better now, right? Instead of giving people the
option to try something new, to see if it makes their lives better by removing
friction, they've instead added friction to some set of users. Inherent in
this is genuinely a smugness and lack of empathy, that's all. People will
adapt and learn to love the changes over time, but it's really not ok to do
this to your users.

~~~
pfranz
This isn't specifically speaking to your point about iPad OS 13, but I
actually think that example fits very well to the desktops of the 90s everyone
talks about those as thoughtfully designed and discoverable. Kids at the time
took the time to learn all it. Parents needed to take classes to learn the
basics to do their job. Even now, those former kids get called in when
something "breaks."

------
FerretFred
Files! I bought an iPad Mini 2019 and loved it - it replaced my iPad 2 which
was no longer getting updates and that still works fine as a music player.

But FILES! Gah! What a MESS. With 13.1.x it improved, but I still manage to
lose files that I mail to myself from the PC. They go to "My iPad" apparently,
but not always. I wanted to use MiniKeepass with a password and a keyfile, but
despite following the dev's instructions and some experimentation I just could
_not_ get it to find the key file. So it's deleted for now. I hope they fix it
soon..

~~~
dingus
Beware: don't share dot files with the Files app. I tried to sync a git
directory and now my Files app is filled with several hundred git object files
(bf13ee59588b878f1d780c5cc8cd2e3410eaba, etc) that cannot be selected, moved,
or deleted because they allegedly "do not exist" according to the error
dialog.

~~~
sjy
That sucks. Do you know of any way to fix it, other than backing up the data
in each app separately using means other than iTunes/iCloud backup, and then
restoring the iPad to factory state, which would take hours?

What did you use to sync? I've been able to sync Git repositories in
GoodReader and Working Copy, but I have found the Files app's SMB support, and
integration with apps like Secure Shellfish, to be buggy and unreliable.

~~~
dingus
The device needs a factory reset. Deleting the Files app itself does nothing,
even though this warns you that all associated data will be deleted. Which is
unsurprising at this point. The latest OS updates feel like I'm a beta tester
for Windows ME.

------
mark_l_watson
It does take some effort to learn how to use newer features. My biggest
complaint was figuring out how to activate “search everything on my iPad”
because they changed to location/gesture. An iPad is much less valuable if you
can’t simply search local content. Anyway, relief was had after twenty minutes
of web searching.

I use my iPad more than all my laptops and iPhone combined. It is my default
device. I use my iPhone much less since I tend to leave it at home and just
use my AppleWatch for getting calls, text messages, and listening to audio
books/podcasts/music on my AirPods. I only use laptops for deep learning (I
have one with a good GPU) and programming.

~~~
sjy
May I ask how you use the "search everything on my iPad" feature? Do you
depend on iCloud to store the master copy of all your files on all your
devices? I don't, and I assume that's why I've never been able to get anything
useful out of the system-wide search feature, but I'd be interested in making
it work if I could.

~~~
mark_l_watson
No, the search is active when on the desktop and you swipe down from the
center of the screen. The search functionality searches the data associated
with most apps on my iPad, and shows internet search results below results for
files in your iPad.

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sylens
Watching the WWDC keynote this year, I knew that I would never use 90% of what
they were showing. It's too esoteric to discover and I would use it
infrequently so it would never become a habit.

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trimbo
Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini said this years ago

[https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-
desi...](https://www.fastcompany.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-design-a-bad-
name)

~~~
dmix
> No more discoverability, no more recoverability, just the barest remnants of
> feedback. Why? Not because this was to be a gestural interface, but because
> Apple simultaneously made a radical move toward visual simplicity and
> elegance at the expense of learnability, usability, and productivity.

Bingo, this is the thing that designers always mistake with minimalism. It
doesn't just mean taking everything away, it's about minimal amount of
headaches and avoiding information overload.

But that ranks far lower on the problem totem pole than not knowing how to do
anything because it's all hidden or simply not obvious or explained.

------
baggy_trough
I've never discovered, and therefore never use, any features of iPadOS that go
beyond iOS. I probably don't even know half of the iOS features.

Discoverability is a huge problem. Another huge problem is slight variations
in gestures or press duration that have widely varying and confusing results.

------
ActorNightly
"he original Macintosh is a good example of great product. The mouse pointing
device took seconds to understand and just few more as it grew buttons and a
wheel. Technopriests argued, perhaps “correctly”, that they could do more with
the Command Line, but the Mac’s graphical user interface, with its pull-down
menus and movable windows, gave the Rest of Us a power we’d never known, it
did more — and did it better — than we initially perceived."

I dunno if just forgot or have a bad memory from childhood, but I specifically
remember things taking insanely long on a Mac compared to a Windows PC. Our
high school got new iMac G3s in 2002, whereas at home we had a Windows 95 as
our family computer. Applications ran way faster on our home computer, whereas
the iMacs would just lock up and not respond for the longest time.

------
idoh
As an iPad Pro user for work, here is one area where discoverability is better
on the iPad than the Mac - learning keyboard shortcuts:

On the iPad, hold down ⌘, then keyboard shortcuts show up. So much easier than
on a Mac. My tip is to gradually add these keyboard shortcuts to your Anki
deck.

------
tonyedgecombe
The iPad seems squeezed at both ends, from the bottom phones are nearly as
powerful and at the top laptops aren't much heavier.

They are good for ageing parents and grandparents though, my mother in law
loves hers and we like not having to deal with PC issues.

~~~
leggomylibro
There is still a bit of a gap in the market for small 10-12" laptops, but
Chromebooks are eating those customers pretty quickly.

IMO, tablets are still a decent choice for people who think that 13" is too
big for a laptop, although iPads may not work well for that because you're
stuck with the default OS.

~~~
pjmlp
Not in Europe they aren't.

You hardly see a Chromebook anywhere in most consumer shops, and when they
appear, it looks like testing waters, followed by endless promotions to try to
get rid of them.

It is all about Windows 10 over here.

~~~
leggomylibro
Exactly, it's like that over here too and that's the best part! They get
discounted all the time because people think they only run a web browser and
google docs, so you can get them for a pittance.

If you're willing to pretend like it's 2000 and tinker a bit, they make
fantastic general-purpose Linux laptops. I like the $200 10" Asus ones with
360-degree hinges; the ARM ones have amazing battery life. And some of the
ones that are designed for schools are almost indestructible.

------
baby
I still don’t have a clue how to do a lot of the splitscreen stuff with my
ipad pro. I sometimes do it by accident, or get stuck in a multitask UI.
Discoverability is horrible.

------
jccalhoun
After hearing about how great ios was I finally bought the new ipad after
being android only for years (I had an ipod touch years ago). Maybe I've just
been into the Android ecosystem too long but there are a lot of things about
ios/ipados that I just can't stand.

How is there no way on ios to just see a list of all the apps I have
installed? Having to spend time thinking about where an icon should be or if
it it should be in a folder or not seems to antiquated. Someone told me i
could swipe to search for an app but as the article says that is totally
undiscovered.

I can't install an app from a web browser on my desktop computer? I guess I
took for granted that you could just go to the google play store and have an
app installed on your phone or tablet.

People always talked about how bad apps looked on android tablets because they
weren't designed for tablets. I never noticed it but I can say the way ios
does it is not better. Having the app in a little window with a huge black
border? Ok, so you expand it but there are still black bars on the sides? How
is that better?

I know that with recent versions of android that google has been moving away
from dedicated back button but I am in the habit of flicking up to get the
back button and using that. I know you can swipe from the left to go back but
I'm just not used to that.

Is there a way to stop apps from begging for reviews and notification access?
I know I could do that on android but I don't know how to do it on ios.

~~~
freehunter
>How is there no way on ios to just see a list of all the apps I have
installed?

The default way apps are installed is into a giant list of all the apps you
have installed. If they're in folders, its because you put them there
manually.

>apps not designed for tablets

These kinds of apps aren't super common, but just scaling is probably the best
way to handle it. An iPhone and an iPad have different screen ratios and
stretching it to fit 100% would skew the aspect ratio.

~~~
jccalhoun
What I am looking for is like the app drawer on android where there is an
alphabetical list. It seems like apple just puts an icon on the screen in the
order that apps were installed?

I just looked at there are 13 apps on my ipad that aren't designed for tablets
including fast food apps, dating apps, and even google fit (which I use
because my phone is android). Maybe I just have bad taste in apps.

~~~
scarface74
I don’t have any apps that aren’t designed for the iPad.

