Talk about unintuitive UI. I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise.
Also I liked yay the best, too bad they axed it.
No kidding, as a 28 year old I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to "get" snapchat's UI.
I believe the UI has been tweaked for users that are more impulsive. I know it sounds strange, but you open the app the first time and you are immediately asked to make a picture of something and then send it to someone. (even though you haven't seen your available contacts yet)
- A user that has friends on snapchat. For them, just sign up and snap a picture. You're off to the races. IMO, there's no reason to pick who I want to send it to until I take the picture.
- Another type of user would be someone who does not have any friends using SnapChat. For those people - you don't want to just say, "Sorry, you don't have any people to talk to - but feel free to play around with the camera." That probably won't encourage them to do much more with the app. Instead, you get them to create something first. When it's time to send their creation, they don't have anyone to send it to, but they are way more likely to say, "Hey <other person in the room>, download SnapChat so I can send you this hilarious thing I just made." Both of those people are way more likely to download and use the app - but the chance of them doing so goes way down if they never invest any time and creativity into the app.
Just my two cents, but I think it makes perfect sense.
Snapchat's confusing interface complements the way their users interact. Users tend to learn about features from social interactions with their friends (face to face, or digital), which builds a sense of ingroup. Additionally, the confusing interface tends to filter out older users, who lack the social guidance of the younger users. This keeps the userbase heavily skewed young, which further reinforces its branding as a fun app for the cool kids. After all, nothing is less cool than your mom doing the things you like.
I'm not sure that this is what the company wants (they've had screenshots of a redesigned UI leak this week), but it makes logical sense to me.
Just... why???
For more and more users touch is going to be their primary experience and eventually you are going to need some method to provide more options to the "power users". Longer-click seems the most obvious and common of the patterns.
Most people won't even realise that a web-app can have a right click context menu (even those that use right click in their desktop programs all the time).
As for desktop, if they're intelligent at all, they'll use a different method there. Perhaps all the new variations will be displayed side by side. Perhaps instead of only trigfering on a "long-click", it'll expand on a normal click.
Desktop applications are a different story.
Overall I agree with the parent comment. Right click and long-press are hard for non-power users to find/discover.
On the other hand these were needed let's say because some items are not appropriate to Like. Like say a piece of news for some tragedy.
But I do think this will backfire as I think it will lower engagement. Right now when people cannot Like, they Share. And for other reactions they place comments. Many in the form of emoticons but still.
I'd prefer a halo ring around the button that appears when you touch or mousedown that presents additional options related to the button. If you touch, move your pointer, then release over a secondary function, it activates, otherwise a simple touch and release activates the main function.
Similar functionality is available for gamepad devices, where a choice wheel appears, and a directional input can select any of the 1 to 8 available options.
My estimate is that the average person knows about maybe a third or a half of the features on their smartphone, because the rest are hidden away behind never-explained gestures or long presses on things that don't look like buttons.
In terms of conveying functionality the popular smartphone and webpage UIs today are atrocious. Just today I was talking with someone who was really frustrated that they can't see webpages anymore because web browsers all got rid of the magnification feature. He was amazed to discover that it has been there all along but hidden away in a menu that doesn't even appear unless you hit alt. He thought all of that was moved over to the "hamburger" menu, and they just dropped it. He's been squinting for months (years?) because someone doesn't like the look of dropdown menus.
Gnome (ongoing dumbification since gnome), Canonical (Unity, although HUD was a nice idea), Microsoft (ribbon, although it has some decent ideas) etc etc.
There is room for huge improvements in UI: more search-friendlyness, a way to explain scary buttons in mobile UIs since they don't naturally seem to support hover etc etc
Dumbifying things, both by assuming your users are useless and cannot learn new features, as well as just plain weird ideas like breaking alt-tab without checking (Unity) or hiding save button in Office behind what looks like a logo (MS ribbon early edition) should hopefully be less important.
But I generally agree with your sentiment. You can't rely on users to poke around and find features on their own. I recently talked to a teenager who despite having used Windows all his life said he only "just" learned about Alt-Tab.
On the contrary, this is non-intrusive and discoverable. The user isn't presented with a dense interface and too many choices, but if he does want to do more advanced interactions he will find a way to learn about it.
I also think that perhaps there needs to be someone willing to take a few arrows in the chest before new UI concepts become so common as to be generally accepted as 'intuitive'.
But over the time more and more high profile apps removed these features simply because so many users never knew that they could long press on something to reveal additional functionality.
Also the Android old menu button was removed for the same reasons. It was a hidden menu that could show different options depending on which screen within the app you were.
I could imagine that it could be different for users with Apples force touch or 3D touch, but we'll have to wait and see.