(Edit: You edited your comment so now I am forced to edit mine. Yours previously said something like "that's an intentional feature called 'ProView' described in the article".)
I'm disputing this part of the article:
> The best UI is usually as little as you can get away with
I think this is what designers honestly believe, and obviously you do too. I just don't think it's true. I know that undiscoverable UIs have been a trend for a while now, and I wonder how much damage they have done to human productivity and the reputation of software developers in general.
It's possible your goal is to make an intentionally difficult-to-use app, so that people are forced to learn the tricks and secrets, and then eventually feel "invested" in the app after they have done so, making it less likely for them to switch. Snapchat does this.
But this is a photography app, not a trendy social network for Generation Z, and so the decision to make it intentionally hide UI controls from you is, in my opinion, completely crazy.
"As little as you can get away with," includes a discoverable UI. We go to great lengths to make things discoverable. For starters, there's a chevron providing a visual affordance, reminding you the QuickBar and Honeycomb are expandable with a swipe.
But we go even further. The first few times you launch they app, the UI starts with the QuickBar expanded. After a few moments, it closes, which will likely draw the user's attention. Once you've used the app a few times, we don't show this helpful animation to remind you that the QuickBar is expandable.
The client also tracks if you haven't launched the app in a while, and brings back that helpful animation. (This is all tracked client-side in the name of privacy.)
> It's possible your goal is to make an intentionally difficult-to-use app, so that people are forced to learn the tricks and secrets, and then eventually feel "invested" in the app after they have done so, making it less likely for them to switch. Snapchat does this.
If that were my goal, I would be a moron.
Snapchat is successful in spite of its incomprehensible UI due to network effects and its value proposition. If you've watched SnapChat's UI evolve over the years, they've trended toward more discoverability. You can only go so far with the novelty of a mystery box.
We have no network effects. We don't lock away your data. We live and die by our UI. There are many other apps that have similar features as us, with many customers telling us they tried all the other apps before settling on us.
If you don't like the UI, that's perfectly fine. You're welcome to your opinion. It just doesn't line up with the opinion of our customers.
