The Failure of 3D Touch (2018)
quora.com
quora.com
For anyone else who was devastated to lose this feature, I was happy to learn it’s still there! Now you do a long tap on the space bar to activate it.
It's not though. The feature implemented with haptic touch only lets you long press on space bar and move the cursor. You have to use a second finger to start selection and control the bounds, and it's far less accurate.
With 3D touch, you could press down once to start cursor mode, again to start selection, and again to stop. You could also reset the selection while staying in cursor mode. I was able to, quite frequently, change entire sentences and edit text really efficiently with a single hand holding the phone. That's impossible now.
I'd be really happy if Apple went back and improved the spacebar cursor system, but right now it's objectively worse as it requires two fingers rather than one to select text.
Now I wonder what other actually useful 3D Touch features I missed because I never discovered them. The only ones I did find where pretty useless and more often than not just got in the way, e.g. rearranging home screen icons.
You can also long hold on the backspace key, then swipe left to delete whole words. Similar to ctrl+backspace on windows.
May need to go to settings to enable these features IIRC.
Some actions are not discoverable, but are very handy and much faster than anything discoverable could be when we are once shown or taught them.
An issue deeper than initial discoverability is "where can I do this", but this could be solved with e.g. a small mark/hue change/etc consistently shown on items that allow for force touch.
1) supplementary way to access functionality
and
2) only way to access functionality
there's a 3rd option, which is the case here, for which is acceptable:
3) supplementary way to access _secondary_ functionality
Major functionality is still accessed by touch, menus, etc.
But even for primary functionality, I'd take fast, convenient, powerful over discoverability, any day of the week. The idea that users should not do any learning, and we should constrain our UI to stuff that's readily and immediately discoverable is incredibly limiting...
Users always have to learn, and as user interface designers we must give them a path for learning. If there's no path to learning about a feature, it might as well not exist, irrespective of whether you consider it "secondary".
Gestures, by design, have no afforances. Pinch-zoom is nearly the only multitouch gesture that has been so universally accepted and applied that it can be taken as given.
Pressure-based shortcuts, in the absence of corresponding visual cues (as implemented by Apple), likewise have no affordances. The 3d-touch hardware was great, and worked as intended. iOS used it in an opaque, undiscoverable manner, and the result was a total dud.
Fortunately Android 10 has introduced gestures so trying to reach the back button is no longer painful.
the inconsistency of the back button ranks very high on my "ios to android" learning curve list.
I'm pretty confused by this statement since a near universal complaint about the Android back button is that it's more like a 'shuffle' button that chooses between going a screen back, going back to the previous app, undoing an action or exiting an app. And there is zero clarity on which of those it will do.
It's a pity that it wasn't marketed/documented appropriately.
The main patent on the 3D touch technology expires on March 3rd 2033. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9772721B2/en
I miss 3D touch with the newest IOS builds. All that said, the discoverability aspect is huge here. It either needed to be built into everything, or nothing. Lukewarm adoption here was a major issue, because it meant that users had to experiment to discover what was actually possible.
https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-y...
Apple's version is novel and more robust. What doomed both is the uneven implementation across apps, lack of affordance, and differing skill of applying variable force among the population (aka 'hitting the sweet spot') Press and hold fulfills pretty much the same function, though not as elegantly.
As a UX designer, I wouldn't advocate deprecating force touch features but rather, leave them in for advanced users, work on onboarding and affordances, and let the masses 'tap tap tap..' for the same functionality. Imo, there is too much Lowest Common Denominator design out there, and advanced UX shouldn't be eliminated because some people don't get it.
Maybe this comes down to a human brain / body form thing, where the best thing is just to have a simple point-and-click interface because it aligns well with human intuition and natural behavior.
This is still solved, and in a much better way, with the new iOS 13 context menus, which are standardized across every application and are on every iOS/iPadOS device, and have easy APIs for developers to create complex nested menus. I'm not happy about the delay introduced on the new phones, but I think it's an overreaction to suggest that the delay negates the entire concept.
I mean, they might have to use hamburger-menus or menubars (which are functionally equivalent), just like desktop UIs did back when Apple mice only came with a single button! (and this is coming back in style, now that touchpads come with only a single physical "click" action, and no separate buttons) Why can't touch UIs do the same? It works just fine on a detachable tablet PC when running GTK+3 apps, I could easily imagine doing quite involved work there.
The home "button"(actually just part of the screen) in my Galaxy S8 is pressure-sensitive.
I have immersive mode on, so the back, home etc. buttons are normally not visible, which becomes a problem when an app hangs, because you cannot swipe to invoke them.
Enter the pressure sensitive area - one angry push and I'm back to the home screen.