Of course menus don't translate well to touch devices, and menu systems can quickly become unorganized junk drawers for functionality, but it feels like discoverability was never fully solved on touch devices.

And it also has the same problem you describe - you don't know how to find something unless you know what it's called. And even if you do find something, there's no breadcrumb trail to learn how to find it without using search. You have to look at what's on the current page and like some kind of reverse engineering sherlock, think about where a designer could possibly have put this page. It's insane.

When that phone stopped working I got a decent Android phone and it felt so much more comfortable.

Sure, discoverability is good to have, but it is not a failure that you need to be told about it as long as it only contains features useful to power users.

Requiring experts to undergo some training to make the most out of their devices is acceptable UI if the final interactions are optimized for their use; double so if it doesn't interfere with usage by untrained users.

I wonder if it's kinda a stockholm syndrome or if it caters to one's ego somehow. After discovering a feature, one feels smarter / more connected to the device, compared to if it was actually easier to use from the get go.

For example, he texts frequently but doesn't know how to check his email. Because I am the tech support child, he reaches out to me for iPhone help. However, since I am not an iPhone user, I always struggle and sometimes fail to solve his problem.

Perhaps this is a sign I have not dedicated enough time to learning this new OS in my family ecosystem, but I do feel it is the least-similar to the other OS's I have used. It's like if my dad was learning programming and asked if I'd help him with his Lisp program. No thanks.

Though maybe I am just a luddite and the universe is written in iOS.

Not just unfamiliar, difficult.

I will say that when it first came out the direct manipulation of the iPhone UI was a qualitatively different experience compared to any other touchscreen for a very long time. Back then most Android reviews included caveats like "stuttery", "janky", or "low resolution", and these had the cumulative effect of spoiling the illusion of direct manipulation.

Today the gap is much smaller and easier to ignore, and the iPhone has added lots of hidden affordances like swipes and double, triple, and force taps to cater to expert users at the expense of novices.

One danger is if the affordance is triggered accidentally. For example, my kids like pushing buttons and swiping when I wouldn't think to do those things and accidentally switch apps or enter into guided access modes without meaning to. In my case I occasionally trigger things like sticky keys unintentionally.

Another danger is if application developers start assuming that they can rely on users knowing hidden affordances and use swiping, double-tapping, force pressing, right-clicking, etc in the core application workflow. Not an Android iOS example, but last night one of my kids started playing Stardew Valley as their first non-tablet game. It has a steep learning curve since it relies on multiple different keyboard keys and on differentiating between right and left-click, whereas I wouldn't consider right-clicking to be a novice skill.

For complete novices, the first thing they do is click the mouse, and since there are only two buttons it doesn't take long to figure out that left-click is the primary button, and right-click brings up a menu with handy options (practically everything has a context menu in Windows). But with the Web, where context menus are rare, I wouldn't be surprised if it's not as well-known anymore.

I have theories -- maybe it's because most web apps do not bother with context menus (outside of text operations), maybe it's because more people have developed their mental model from touchscreen devices where context menus are less commonly used, maybe more people are on laptops with trackpads that do not make right-clicking as obvious, maybe because there's no visual affordance indicating which onscreen elements have a useful context menu and which have the standard webpage context menu so it's a guessing game. I don't honestly know. But I am confident that if you place key functionality in a context menu of a web-based app that most novice users will not discover it on their own. As per Jakob Nielsen: "...be warned: less skilled users rarely use these [context] menus." [1]

Once end-users learn how to use your app (and therefore are no longer novices) then they seem to have no trouble remembering and using context menus, so it's a great way to expose expert affordances.

In the case of my kids I can also say that the Stardew Valley user interface (such as keeping right-click and left-click actions straight) has been the most difficult part of the game so far. And it doesn't seem like it was particularly necessary distinction to make -- there seem to be few cases where both right- and left-click actions are equally appropriate.

[1] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/feature-richness-and-user-e...