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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

So exactly like right clicking on items to see if a contextual menu pops up in Windows 95?

It's easy to discover when there are only two buttons on your mouse. If it had one and pressing strongly did something else, you'd be right.

Originally of course there was only one mouse button, and you would ctrl-click for the context menu

Two button mice were for sure the standard on non-Macintosh PCs well before Windows was in popular usage.

And 3 wasn't rare, I think.

Originally, yes, there was one¹. But three were used quite soon after.²

¹ https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...

² https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY

It's just as easy to press harder "force touch" as it is to right click.

Sorry, but the Windows 95 user interface had the exact same discoverability issue.

Opening a Context menu was never a destructive action though, so you could click that other button on your mouse all day without risk. You have to be taught that a context menu exists once, but it's safe & consistent from then on

Force touching an item to see if there is a contextual menu isn't a destructive action.

That doesn't change the fact that neither interface gives you a way to know in advance which items have associated contextual menus.

But if you "hard-press" a button that doesn't support hard-pressing, won't it just detect a normal press? Depending on what the button is, that might be destructive or at the very least time-consuming.

Newbie Windows 95 users would quite frequently hide the entire start bar because they accidentally moved the mouse while trying to click on an item, and the system interpreted that as a drag intended to resize the start bar to a zero height.

At that point they could no longer use their computer at all until they got external help.

You still see a small bar even with "zero" height.

Which was of absolutely zero use to them now as it remains today; they don't understand what happened.

There is a different cursor when you hover it. At some point you can't help people anymore.

I agree, and like the right click, force touch options were always accelerators for more confidant users (rather than being the only way to complete some task).

Personally I loved force touch and a few months on iOS 13 I’m still struggling with transition to long press gesture instead.

The problem with long press as an accelerator is that it’s triggered by a deliberate pause. It might just be a few hundred milliseconds but the perceived time is very frustrating.

Um, ease of use has little to do with discoverability. Two buttons are there in front of you.

Yes. That was one of the worst parts of Windows 95’s interface because it wasn’t discoverable.

A context menu is fine when it provides shortcuts to functionality also discoverable elsewhere. Windows 95’s context menus were full of functionality only available through them.

I guess you love the extra menu items you only get with Shift+Right button.

Some things are, by design, not meant to be easily discoverable.

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