Apple’s 3D Touch Is the Start of a New Interface | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s 3D Touch Is the Start of a New Interface

wired.com

24 pointscode_monster48 comments

One of the designers where I work added 3D Touch to a prototype of a website he was working on this week. During a Demo session no one knew the feature was there until he told them. That's the hard bit about UI design once you go beyond visual things - people are conservative in the ways they interact with devices, so unless there's an indicator, or instructions, no one will find the fancy new UI feature. And if no one finds, and thus no one uses it, what's the point in spending part of your budget making it?

The problem is further compounded by 3D Touch not really having an obvious use case in most apps. What it'll do will vary from app to app. That means a user has to learn what it does over and over again, and how much pressure to use in each thing. What 'light touch' is in one developer's app will be different to another's.

3D Touch is great, and has loads of potential, but it's going to be hard to make it genuinely useful.

Completely agree. Plus, you still have to design your ui so that the feature is accessible by other more obvious and available means.

Those new interactions will always only be the equivalent of keyboard shortcuts. Nothing more.

Ironically, flat UI MAY have made this problem more difficult to solve. Imagine if we were still on some sort of skeumorphism design on iOS, then we MAY be able to come up with some sort of layer/depth/texture visual hint that makes people want to press one area harder.

I have no idea what that would look like, but on a random note, a bubble wrap popping game with 3D touch support would be dope.

3D Touch is great, and has loads of potential, but it's going to be hard to make it genuinely useful.

I see one big exception and that is games. Phones are limited when it comes to controls and 3D Touch can be a welcome addition. Discoverability isn't as much of a problem for games, because there is usually a tutorial anyway.

Of course, it will be a while before games will be designed around 3D touch, because older iPhones and Android phones.

I wonder if the upcoming Apple TV remote is pressure sensitive, or if it just does touches. If it was pressure sensitive, that may drive a lot of games to adopt it in some fashion.

The touch pad is also a button but has no pressure sensitivity other than that

I always saw it as an interface like right clicking, which is genuinely useful.

Long press is a better alternative for that, and that's available on iOS (UILongPressGestureRecognizer) and Android (android.view.ContextMenu). The fact it's rarely used despite having been an available option for years might indicate it's not actually very useful.

Why is it a better alternative? And what makes you think it is rarely used?

Long press already has a meaning on iOS though.

It means "rearrange". For example apps on the home screen, movies in my streaming app etc.

Long press is annoying to use. It’s just so, so, so slow.

No computer interfaces are intuitively obvious without prior training, whether that's through direct teaching or indirectly from culture or advertising. This is painfully apparent if you ever have helped someone who has never used a computer to use a computer.

I've found the popup previews surprisingly useful across applications after expecting it to purely be a gimmick. It's especially useful on HN and other text heavy sites with links. I'm interested to see if web designers start designing for such previews - at the moment a lot sites previews are their banner adverts or other non-content related fluff. It'd be quite useful if you could make Safari popup previews in its reader mode to remove non-content items.

iOS 6 was definitely way more intuitive than its successors, though. Skeumorphism and depth helped quite a bit (think the unlock slider versus "swipe the entire screen up, for some reason, according to some hard-to-read text") and so did its commitment to keeping the home screen prominently in view when not in an actual app, sliding folders open from the screen itself and sliding it up to show the task manager rather than covering it with those same two views the way iOS7 and up do. Earlier versions of iOS had a physicality to them that worked well to increase discoverability of their interfaces.

The the "if it's not flat it makes me physically ill!" school of designers got ahold of it...

UI's are becoming overloaded. Apple insists on not adding buttons to iOS devices or mice. You end up with double click, triple click, click and hold, click hold swipe, the volume button takes a picture, four or five finger gestures nobody knows, gestures in general, etc. At the limit dicoverability starts to approach voodoo.

Not saying it's right or wrong, just stating a fact.

Wasn't this the exact reason Apple was so strict about the one-button mouse for Mac OS and the menu bar? In fact, obfuscation is the exact reason Google ditched the menu button on Android?

3D touch does resolve the iOS issue of not having a back button(without adding any of the ambiguity I hope). I sincerely doubt regular users would use it. It would be like multitasking or the does cool 4-finger gestures on the iPad, something only power-users use extensively.

I think the biggest reason that 3D Touch will take some years to get adopted by the users is, that it's not visible whether or not there are any 3D Touch actions available. It's simply not intuitive as of now, until apps get updated to take advantage of it.

Sure, I can preview a link in Safari or Mail, but what about when someone posts a link on Facebook or Messenger, I can't deep press on it to preview that link. So right now, everything is pretty fragmented. Do I want to try to deep press on something to see if it supports it? If not, I have to lift the finger and just tap it again.

Until everything supports it, I just won't find it natural. Right now it's pretty much hit or miss.

Well, it's been about a week, lets see how the fragmentation is doing in a month or two once people have had time to write the code :)

Apple blankets the world with ads. Apple has recognition. The iPhone is relatively focused in its additions and it's not like they added a million different things, all of which they have to tell you about. There is only one iPhone and not millions different models with different features.

Unlike many Android device manufacturers (except maybe Samsung if they were to focus for once and not be so overwhelmingly complex in all the stuff they put into their phones) Apple is in a unique position to actually teach people about this through marketing. And they will. They will teach people about it, devs will be on board real quick and it will just become a natural interaction. That's my prediction.

I find it interesting that both Apple[1] and Samsung[2] applied for patents early last year regarding pressure sensitive touch screens.

Apple at the end of January, and Samsung at the end of February.

I also noticed that the Android API has had a getPressure[3] call since really early API versions, so I assume they were aware this was an option a long time ago.

Any ideas why this is suddenly being touted as "the Start of a New Interface"? Has the accuracy / latency / sensitivity finally become good enough to be useful? Or is this just the Apple PR juggernaut pushing an old idea as a new feature?

[1]: http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140028575

[2]: http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140055407

[3]: http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEv...

>really intuitive

>the biggest interface innovation since multitouch.

Seriously ? I don't get the interest around 3d Touch. As long as the action is not immediately discoverable, it is not going to be used by most of your users. long press or nav drawers perform pretty badly, how is 3d touch any different ?

I'm unsure on this. Long pressing at least has the description of "press, wait for X".

"Press this, no, hmm try harder, no not that hard, no the other one you need to press lightly, wait maybe that's too light..."

Some things obviously lend themselves well to this. The piano example is good, as is drawing. However, things with a threshold sound less obvious.

> “There was a physical thing on the screen,” he says. “You had to select the button and move it over.” It was better than the existing ideas, sure, but what was that button? It moved too freely, you didn’t know how it would move or how to make it stop.

You didn't know how it would move or how to make it stop? Really?

Just press hard. That’s it. No need to differentiate. The interface does not make that mistake you are assuming it makes.

Doesn't the article talk about the interface doing something different if you press hard vs. pressing lighter?

Sure, but you don't have to hit that right pressure point. No matter how hard you press, when you first engage it you will always only be at the first preview step. Then you can press harder still, sure, but you cannot just skip a step.

It's very well thought out. This is all about the software implementation. Pressure sensitive screens by themselves are boring tech.

  "That’s technical speak for, it’s rock solid, it’s 
   totally accurate. You probably could build a sail 
   using that stuff." - Georg Petschnigg, CEO of FiftyThree

Can anyone explain that quote? I don't understand the "build[ing] a sail" part. I've never heard that before.

Is building a sail some kind of delicate, nuanced process? I guess it relates back to pressure somehow?

How does this feature impact users with disabilities? Long presses already seem a little iffy in this area - especially in applications where the long press needs to be nearly still for it to register (I've seen this pretty often). I'm also not sure how blind users would be able to make use of verbs that are only accessible via 3D touch. At least with press/long press you're just performing that verb on a particular screen region (that could be identified by a name).

It seems like carefully controlling the strength of your touch - or for that matter, pressing hard at all - could be outside of the capabilities of some disabled users. I've got slightly poor control over my hands and that already makes it rather difficult to use some mobile apps and games.

It works just fine for blind people at least. When you enable Voiceover you can hard press on an icon and it will read out the options in the contextual menu. Works well.

And you can adjust the sensitivity of 3D touch so it should be easier to use than typical long presses.

” When you want something else, you Alt-Tab, which no one does, or rely on some hacky workaround. “Now,” he says, “you can push things back... .... Things will change.”

I use Alt-Tab, it works on Linux Mint and Windows, I like hacky workarounds, I don't like when things change.

That said, 3D Touch is the best thing since Multitouch? Well except zooming nobody of my non-technical friends here ,could give me any usecase for using more than one finger. If anything with touch, I would need a keyboard that I actually can use.

It's a little ironic that an article detailing how you select or define words on a phone is on a website that has somehow disabled the ability to do both on an iPhone.

The problem that it's still a piece of flat glass. What I really want (and see as the next big thing) is not glass, but a material that can take form controlled by software. Imagine all those buttons that really pop up from your screen so you can feel them. Just think about how software defined tactile interfaces can benefit gaming, accessibility, music production, etc...

Too bad the tech isn't there yet :(

As much as I despise "flatness", it could actually now serve as a good way to distinguish regular-touch-only from force-touchable. Basically, they could introduce a 3D-ish button style that means "this can be push-previewed", that is not shared by buttons that only press normally.

My experiences with the musical Linnstrument have me quite excited about the amount of expression this will lend to software synths. Video synthesis as well, combined with a physics engine I think you could make some very pretty and dynamics interactions.

I went by an apple store today and I thought the force-touch on a Macbook felt much, much more realistic than 3D touch.

Anyone know why that is? I thought it was the same tech.

Same tech ? No completely different implementation and name.

You can change the sensitivity settings but they will always be different.

They call the MacBook Pro Force Touch and the iPhone 6S 3D Touch.

I have a MacBook Pro with Force Touch and honestly haven't used it much yet. I think it's for the same reason as another poster says. I'm not sure where it's available and what it will do? In safari it previews links and gives definitions.

The preview links thing is a bit redundant because clicking a link and swiping back is just as fast.

You've her clicked a link on your Mac? A normal click on activates the force touch to give the illusion of a "click"

I meant the second "click", but yeah you're right. I do use the new trackpad and it's awesome.

I guess it is because on the Macbook, the "Taptic Engine" (i.e. vibration motor) is directly under the glass of the trackpad, so it's actually gently moving the glass, which feels a bit like you've pressed it. On the iPhone, it is the whole phone that is vibrating rather than just glass, so it feels less like you are directly interacting with the glass, and rather that the phone is responding to your touch. I have to admit, I was hoping it would feel more like the Macbook Force Touch too, but I guess it's just not possible to build it so the vibration directly affects only the glass with the current design.

It will only become a truly new interface if Apple let Samsung et al implement it.

one button mouse strikes again, all 3D Touch does is try to work around bad hardware interface instead of introducing good hw interface (2 physical buttons maybe?)

No-one uses ALT-TAB? Really?

Its pretty silly people keep using the marketing terms as if they actually worked for Apple. It has a very high resolution display and pressure-sensitive screen.

It's not (just) the hardware, it's the software implementation. Certainly such a thing could have existed previously, but no one appears to have made it work as well as it does on iPhone just now, although that will likely change.

Marketing terms are used constantly for referring to specific flavours of technology. For example, Google Now, Cortana and Siri. Language and people are flexible enough to cope with multiple terms for a technology. Also, it's faster to type than "microphone which samples and uploads to an external voice processing server which returns system commands".

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