As you hold your finger down the button grows. The designers considered that to be an affordance, whether successful or not (the swiping between tabs mentioned in the OP also has a fairly obvious affordance IMO)
The search discoverability nfw2 brings up is fair but has been entirely fixed in iOS 16- a prominent search button was added to the Home Screen (thankfully can be disabled if you prefer the old way)
Something like a progress bar going around the button in a circle, I could give them a pass for - at least you get the indication of beginning and end, and a suggestion that letting it fill would make something happen.
Truly brilliant. On a touch UI, the visual feedback is on the thing your finger is currently obscuring!
I've seen this sort of long-press safety feature a couple of times, and elsewhere it's been accompanied by a helpful message which appears if I try to short-press the button.
Why does the flashlight button need the safety feature anyway? It's not a self-destruct button, if I turn it on I can turn it off again with no ill effects. That was a rhetorical question, nobody knows why.
So you don't turn it on accidently and burn out the lamp/burn through the battery. It's really not that hard or obscure. Tap and hold has been a 'thing' for a long time. You’re making a mountain out of a molehill. Literally everyone I know personally groks this particular feature. It's not nearly as unintuative as you attempt to make out.
I'm not making a mountain out of anything, I'm drive-by commenting on a particularly amusing Apple UI feature I wasn't previously aware of. Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect, and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.
Apple's design approach has been totally _un_intuitive to me for at least 20 years, and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.
> Of all the things one might accidentally turn on or off I think the flashlight is one of the most easy to subsequently detect
You’d be surprised.
> and we're here talking about it because one HN (thus probably somewhat technical) user and iDevice owner did not know how it works.
The information is out there. When you first run, when you upgrade, there are numerous prompts to show you “what’s new”. Many ‘power users’ (I really dislike that name) arrogantly dismiss these. Then there are the online guides, the offline guides (book in the books app, Tips app). If the user pays attention, there are affordances everywhere — the safari tabs example in the article being a perfect example.
> and roughly everybody I know with an iPhone uses a mix of luck and barely explainable superstitious rituals to get where they're going in the UI.
This is testament to the point I’m making. Sure some of it isn’t completely obvious, but this ain't one of them, and discoverability isn’t about obviousness. If that were the case, we’d still be hunter-gatherers.
Yous said all that, and it's still not a justification to introduce a non-obvious and unique UI/UX paradigm just in one place that prevents user from accomplishing the task they need to do.
It's obvious. As soon as you touch the flashlight button, there is haptic feedback along with the button growing, exactly like the camera button on the other side. And yes, the button grows beyond the size of a 95th percentile finger. Now, whether or not you pay attention to the physical and visual cues is up to you. The cues are there. The instructions are in the official online guide as well as "About 3,020,000" other pages. They are in the official user guide in the books app. It's 'discoverable' without much of cognitive load for anyone that has used a phone in the last 20 years, not 'immediately obvious'.
Hmm? If you accidentally turned on the flashlight and it was left on, you would be bummed to find out your battery had drained next time you picked it up.
The reason it’s the same there is that that screen looks exactly the same as the Home Screen. So, if you know how the Home Screen works, you know how this one works. Making it different would be non-discoverable.
But, personally, I’d rather a UI that’s convenient to use rather than discoverable. Discovering a feature happens once, using happens forever.
