Irony: it only looks like it's slide up to unlock. It's actually slide sideways. My twitter stream right now is full of people pointing out how deeply confusing that little arrow at the bottom of the screen is.

See it in action:

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2013/06/slide-to-unlock-appadvice...

This is something that really, desperately confuses me. Apple is supposedly the king of intuitive design, and yet here, you have literally the first interface people will see on the phone, with an interaction model which is completely impossible to intuit, and only works for people who are already trained in how to complete the action.

I get the desire to eliminate depth, but that little slide gutter and right-pointing arrow tell you exactly what you need to know. The iOS7 UI instructs you to do the wrong thing!

The text slide to unlock has a shine animation that moves from left to right.

I get that, but I think it's very difficult to make an argument that given a new user, it would be interpreted as an interaction cue rather than just visual polish.

The presence of the up arrow is actively misleading, from a UX perspective. It's like having a slide toggle that you have to double tap to activate!

iPhoneOS/iOS has been around for 6 years. 600 million devices have been sold that all have the same ‘slide to unlock’ mechanism. Now that the majority of phones being sold are smartphones, Apple must’ve felt that it’s OK to remove some of the training wheels. Whether that’s wise remains to be seen. Microsoft finally removed the ‘Start’ button from Windows, but that has been met with quite some resistance, from new and experienced users alike.

Few people read user manuals, which Apple knows. It doesn’t even ship a physical user manual with their iOS products (just a thin quickstart guide). There are in-depth user manuals available for download[1], but the percentage of iPhone owners who read it must be negligible. I often meet iOS users who don’t know that double-tap on the Home button brings up the app switcher.

As the OSes on these mobile devices become more capable over time (and the interaction model grows more complicated), users may need to start treating them as computers that require learning beyond trial and error.

[1] http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/iphone_user_guide.pdf

Once people treat them as the complicated computers they are, we can start the countdown to post-post-PC devices.

Especially because there is no reason to drop the visual slider, or to make all the visual hints on the screen super low-contrast (on the new starry sky background at least).

The up arrow is to indicate sliding up - but for the control center, not to unlock. I agree that a new user may be surprised. But having seen all three work once - slide left-to-right to unlock, down for notifications, up for control - it makes sense to me.

I've been running iOS 7 for a day now and had some co-workers give it a try -- all of them current iPhone users -- and literally every single one of them tried to swipe up to unlock.

Unfortunately, in my experience so far, this isn't the only case of misleading and unintuitive design in iOS 7.

iOS 7 is beta software. If it was finished, they wouldn't call it a pre-release beta for developers only.

That doesn't mean the criticism is invalid, particularly given the preening that Apple did on stage yesterday about the precision and thought that they put into every pixel of the OS.

I'm not saying its not confusing, but that up arrow is there for a reason - a swipe up from the bottom opens the control panel over the lock screen.

- Except in the bottom right corner where it will jump to the camera. Even after I'd noticed all the visual hints for this, I got it wrong for the first few times. I wonder if they should have dropped the direct camera shortcut in favour of the control panel, which is a swipe and a tap.

How do you know this if you haven't physically used it?

And why on earth do people assume Apple hasn't thoroughly tested this? They may get many things wrong, but it's insane to thing they overlooked that part.

One possible explanation - because thorough usability testing with outsiders would have led to leaks.

Interesting - the animation for the unlocking is somewhat similar to the animation when swiping between pages in the app list on Android Jellybean (I'm not criticizing the copying, just noting the similarity). Given the focus on layers in the rest of the design (the control panel and notifications center, for example) I would have thought the unlock screen would slide off like a layer, as well (since they are using the visual metaphor of dragging the whole unlock screen, rather than sliding a specific unlock element, as in previous version of iOS).

Any thoughts as to why they did that differently? Am I just totally off base?

Particularly ironic since Apple made such a big deal out of their slide to unlock patent, being a competitive advantage etc. and specifically tied to moving something from two explicit points along a predefined path. Now after all that fuss they just threw it away and copied their competitors?

> Now after all that fuss they just threw it away and copied their competitors?

No, you're not using the right lingo. If it's Apple, they do not throw away; they "evolve". They also do not copy, they "refine the experience".

What in the ever loving hell is that arrow for then?

edit: I guess it seems obvious now...

It brings up the control panel.

It's there for the quick settings toggles.

It starts a thermonookular war on Android.

My two year old daughter figured out how to unlock my iPhone by sliding her thumb across the slider. Interested to see how she'll find the iOS 7 interface. Toddler usability testing :)

My son, also two years old, can unlock iOS6. He cannot, however, unlock my Galaxy S3, which offers no visual "unlock" slider. It's insane how well a two-year-old can interact with touch devices.

My 2 year old did it on my winphone, which uses a full-screen slide to unlock.

Actually, I think Zune HD was the first Microsoft product with the slide up to unlock. (Obviously close enough)