Dan Moren, writing on Six Colors last week:

Over the past few days, I’ve seen a ton of people on Twitter (including plenty of folks I’d describe as pretty tech savvy) have their mind blown by a tweet explaining how to move the cursor on the iOS keyboard.

[…]

This points to a larger, more fundamental issue cropping up with iOS as the platform becomes more mature: how do you add functionality and make it easily discoverable?

Some of the challenge here is simply because of iOS’s constraints: Where on the smaller screen can you add more features that would be easy to discover? But another challenge is how the OS is architected. The Mac nearly always treated the menu bar as a “safe” zone to which you could always retreat if you needed to find a command. There’s no real analogue to that on iOS, with the exception perhaps of the status bar, which isn’t, aside from the aforementioned “jump to the top” feature, an interactive element.

I think this is a big part of the challenge Apple is dealing with as it continues to evolve and push iOS forward. iOS has made easy so many things that used to be difficult or require a lot of technical know-how, but as we ask more from our devices and as developers deliver it, we lose some of that initial pared-down elegance that Apple sought.

Sometimes I wonder if we’ll eventually end up with a tooltips-everywhere approach again, iPhoto for iOS-style.

See also: Fixing 3D Touch, from June 2018.

Eliz Kılıç:

I should start with the obvious. 3D Touch is broken! The user experience is far from great. Apple introduced 3D Touch and its new related interactions Peek and Pop in 2014. It’s been almost 4 years since its first introduction, yet people don’t know/use 3D Touch. Why would they? Even tech-savvy users don’t know which buttons offer 3D touch. Let alone regular users.

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? Look at this screenshot and see if you can tell which of the buttons can be 3D Touched.

I couldn’t agree more with the idea of “decorating” buttons with 3D Touch visual cues.

Here’s the thing: I use 3D Touch a lot, and I love the fact that it’s the modern equivalent of a contextual click, but, anecdotally speaking, I’ve never seen any of my friends or relatives use it. Not the quick actions on the Home screen, not peek and pop. It’s like 3D Touch just isn’t there for them. It’s hard to say whether the very concept of 3D Touch is flawed or if iOS’ design prevents discovery of this unique interaction. However, the argument that an interface with little depth doesn’t lend itself well to a gesture built around pressing into UI elements is a compelling one. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with future iPads and iPhones, too.