Even little things -- the slider to unlock on the main screen. Incredibly obvious even after a minute of playing with it (my toddler at the time had no difficulty with the concept, despite not being able to read).
And the single button model was incredible as well -- "stuck somewhere? Press the button. Want to switch apps? Press the button." It was guaranteed that the button was not controlled by whatever app you were in; now all the gestures and sliding stuff means that half the time I'm stuck doing some in-app operation when I really want to do a "phone" operation. And I'm on an iPhone that still has the button! I dread the moment that I'm going to have to give it up.
Re:Perfectly Cropped
by scarface74 on Friday October 25, 2019 @07:55PM
(#21360407)
Skeuomorphism and pixel perfect design where the interface was tightly tied to the screen resolution doesn’t work when you have multiple screen sizes. Back then developers only had to worry about the 320x480 iPhone screen and the 1024x768 iPad resolution.
I fired up my old launch day iPhone a few weeks ago. The phone works great, though some of the apps no longer have services to connect to (Weather, for example).
What struck me is how intuitive iOS 3 was to use. Everything seemed more (to use the parlance of our times) "discoverable."
Maybe part of it was just remembering how things work, but it seemed like a much better experience than iOS 13.
Also, as much as people on HN enjoy bashing skeuomorphism, the fact is that it works, it's intuitive, and is 9,385% more user-friendly than a bunch of identical Playskool-colored squares with no demonstrable function.