> Apple products, as far as I can remember, do not come with any sort of manual describing the nifty little shortcuts that they have
You would not have needed a manual in the past. Discoverability used to be a core tenet of the Apple HIG. Now that's apparently gone, and we're reduced to hunting through a "Tips" app or trying gestures until something happens.
Don Norman and Bruce Tognazzini (an original Apple HIG author) wrote a great article about this a few years ago. Here's the excerpt describing discoverability:
"Today’s devices lack discoverability: There is no way to discover what operations are possible just by looking at the screen. Do you swipe left or right, up or down, with one finger, two, or even as many as five? Do you swipe or tap, and if you tap is it a single tap or double? Is that text on the screen really text or is it a critically important button disguised as text? So often, the user has to try touching everything on the screen just to find out what are actually touchable objects"
I’m a big fan of Don Norman - I read his book when it was called “The Psychology of Everyday Things” while I was studying industrial design in the lat 80’s. I disagree with him on this. Discoverability varies between products depending on the complexity of the interaction model.
You would not have needed a manual in the past. Discoverability used to be a core tenet of the Apple HIG. Now that's apparently gone, and we're reduced to hunting through a "Tips" app or trying gestures until something happens.