Home United States USA — software 3D Touch on iPhone Is Broken and Here’s How It Can Be...

3D Touch on iPhone Is Broken and Here’s How It Can Be Fixed

227
0
SHARE

UX expert points to easy solution to major 3D Touch issue
That’s what user experience expert Eliz Kilic explains a recent analysis of 3D Touch, proposing a very easy way to address this problem, eventually making the feature even more widely-adopted.
First and foremost, the biggest problem with 3D Touch is that the icons that support it aren’t marked in an obvious way to let users that they can hard-press to bring up more options. In most of the cases, users have to manually try out each icon to see if it supports 3D Touch, though it goes without saying that this approach is mostly necessary when setting up a new iPhone or installing new apps.
But according to Kilic, this small glitch makes iOS mix icons that support 3D Touch with those that do not. Just imagine how it’d be to have links in the website not marked differently from regular text, the UX engineer explains.
“What would happen if we decide to make all links same color and style as the regular text? People would not know what to click on right? Why is 3D Touch be any different? We rely on our vision to decide actionability before anything else. If you can’t distinguish 3D Touchable buttons from those that are not, how are you supposed to know you can press on them?” she posted.
The workaround is much simpler than you’d be tempted to think. Kilic proposes small so-called Force Decorators to be used on icons that support 3D Touch.
Force Decorators are small visual cues that are placed in the bottom right corner of 3D Touch icons thus letting users know when they can hard-press an icon or not.
This is without a doubt an interesting idea that Apple should have in mind when designing future iOS updates. But at the same time, there’ve been rumors that the company could give up on 3D Touch entirely on future-generation iPhones, in an attempt to simplify the touch assembly, gain more room inside, reduce costs, and improve battery life, so it’ll be interesting to see how and if this feature evolves.

Continue reading...