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polymathwannabe comments on Open thread, Nov. 3 - Nov. 9, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Years ago a friend let me try his Zelda videogame to have a chance to poke unabashed fun at my clumsiness with console controls, but had a funnier time with my in-world cluelessness. At one moment, I was trapped in a cave whose exit was too high for walking, and I was armed only with a ranged weapon. Atop the exit was a ladder. I was lost. Exasperated, my friend showed me how to get out of there. Never in a million years would I have deduced that I was supposed to shoot the ladder so it would fall to the floor and let me climb to the exit. I was about 23 years old.
More recently, I helped my boss install some applications in Android tablets. I had (and have) never received formal training in the Android OS, and after testing several applications I found the problem of how to close them. I ended up developing the habit of going into the task manager to manually terminate any program I wanted to close. It would never have occurred to me that going into the open programs list and swiping them off the screen would close them, which I only learned two years later by accidentally watching someone else do it.
Programmers and I have clearly different ideas on what is intuitively obvious and what is not, but maybe it's just me being a clueless 1980s dinosaur. Opinions?
What you are talking about has a name and is a well-known issue in user interfaces. A related concept is POLA.
IME, "intuitively obvious" is a red herring for any halfway interesting interface. This was best captured by a coworker of mine decades ago about a feature: "It does what you expect, but you have to expect the right things."
What I strive for in an interface is consistency (both internal and with existing conventions) which maximize the chances that someone will already have learned the relevant interface conventions (or trained their intuitions, if you like).
Video games will often teach you as you go along. It doesn't sound like you played that game from the beginning, so you didn't see all the earlier rooms where shooting something above a door was the solution to a puzzle.
I have an intuition that there's a trade-off between intuitiveness and efficiency. The most efficient ways, e.g. hotkeys, to use an application are usually not the most intuitive, but I'm glad that they exist in parallel with the more intuitive control features and the best apps employ both approaches.
I usually find apps that try to be both maximally efficient and maximally intuitive at the same time overly simplistic.
Swiping applications off the screen doesn't actually close them. It just removes them from the list.
The Android OS transparently closes applications based on memory pressure. You're never supposed to have to do it yourself, and it'll transparently reopen them to their previous state based on persistence files.
It usually works. Of course, sometimes apps get it wrong.
It does seem to send a message to the app to which the App can listen with "onTaskRemoved()" and the default behavior is closing the App. If something really want to close an App the app can do it's cleanup under "onDestroy()". Because onDestroy doesn't get called directly it's up to the App to decide whether it wants to close.
My self written app with doesn't do anything specific to handle the case closes automatically based on what the console says.
I think this is not actually true. The OS can close applications behind your back, but swiping an application off does remove it from memory, quite reliably. Things are done this way because Android devices have comparatively limited RAM and no swap space, so the system must proactively avoid memory pressure. This state of things might improve somewhat as recent Linux versions have added things like swap-to-compressed-memory and volatile memory that help save on RAM usage.
As far as the Zelda game goes, seeing the ladder means that if you don't get out of the cave it's probably the solution. From there you can think of possible ways to interact with the ladder. Given the tools at your disposal trying to shoot it with the bow becomes one thing to try.
As far as closing programs go, the obvious first step is to search a list for open programs. Then you try the various ways you can interact with them. What does swiping do? What does long-clicking do?
In general there no closing applications in Android in the way that exists on Windows. The average user is not supposed to need that functionality. Android applications are supposed to be designed in a way that doesn't need the user to close them.
I am highly resistant to mouse gestures. I prefer to use keyboard combinations for routine tasks.
When it comes to routine tasks, often useful to Google around. If you don't find an easy answer, posting a question on Superuser.com usually get's you the answer very fast.
Googling [program name] cheat sheet, is also useful to get to know the keyboard shortcuts for various routine tasks.
You would probably find either extremely frustrating or very rewarding side all of the solutions are very opaque and require you to get pretty creative with things to try.
I don't think that swiping is obvious either, but I just googled "how to close an app" and voila.
Also, portal 2 is another puzzle game with very cleverly hidden solutions.