3D Force Touch was one of those features I feel would have only caught on, if it was one of the original iPhone features. Tacking it on later, with little to no support in apps, makes it forgetware. I actually really like the functionality, and I completely forget it exists. There needs to be some type of small indicator reminder that a button HAS 3D touch.
To me its real problem is that it's almost indistinct from long-press. Combine that with Apple's poor UX discoverability (I'm looking at you, swipe-from-the-side-to-see-iMessage-timestamps!) and 3D Touch is basically useless.
Yeah, Force Touch has really compounded their problems of overloaded and undiscoverable UX. I realized this recently when trying to tell a family member how to rearrange their home screen icons. It used to be "hold down an icon until it wiggles, then drag it". Now it's "hold down an icon, but not too hard, until it starts wiggling. What do you mean there's a popup?! Oh you pressed too hard. Tap somewhere else to close the popup and try holding down an icon again."
3D Touch should've replaced long press. I hate that I have to wait, I don't care that it's 0.4 of a second. A long press is a concession to the fact that there's no physical button, and 3D Touch should've solved this problem.
But instead I end up triggering a 3D Touch when I want to delete an app.
That sounds like emulating for the sake of emulating. I'm sure even you would hate it if you actually saw it in production. Typing on keyboard is shitty as it is. By making it force touch, it will be much slower to finish a sentence. When people use physical keyboards their fingers are by default resting on the keys. When most users type on mobile, they're not. It's easier to NOT rest fingers on the keys than resting for so many reasons, such as you not being able to see the keys if your finger is covering them.
the keyboard is of a known layout, and by marking by feel when you move from one key to the next you know where you are.
This allows the keyboard to be operated without looking, much like how most people use a ordinary keyboard today once they are past the hunt-and-peck stage.
A big reason for touch screens being a problem in many situations is that you have to actually look at it to operate it. Physical buttons, switches and knobs can be operated by touch alone.
Frankly way too much of modern computing relies on sight and sight alone.
Also, allowing someone to rest on the keyboard is why long typing sessions are not such a strain on the hands. Without it, the writs has to carry the weight of the fingers continually.
I'm guessing you downvoted me because you disagree with my point of view. I'll just tell you this: I have been thinking a lot about the stuff you talk about here and even prototyped a hardware device to try out the idea. I had the same point of view (It would be nice to have an input device I can use without even looking) but after experimenting I realized this isn't the case.
Also this "vibration" thing you're talking about--it's obvious you haven't thought deeply about this because if you took at least a couple of hours thinking more about how this would work you would realize vibration itself has nothing to do with this". I have had a phone that gave you nice tactile feedback using vibration (Prada phone), and while it does feel nice, it doesn't do anything in terms of letting me know my input was correct.
Anyway this all doesn't mean anything if you don't really believe me. So let me ask you a rhetorical question: Do you think you will be able to type into a blackberry absolutely without looking at the keyboard? Also, when exactly would you be typing while NOT looking at a mobile screen? Even on a blackberry people have to look at the screen to make sure they didn't mistype something (Even with all that tactile feedback). On a desktop computer typing without looking makes sense because that's the mode in which people use the device (whereas on a mobile phone the screen and the keyboard are attached so looking at the screen means also looking at the keyboard)
Anyway if you really believe in these ideas, you should at least try an MVP or any simple experiment (or maybe even some thought experiment) before being so sure about it.
The Steam gamepad and the Macbook's new touchpads can simulate tactile borders and shapes on the surface with controlled vibration.
Combine with pressure detection and you can make Swype / SwiftKey provide a sense of where you're dragging your finger when swipe typing, plus that you can put emphasis on the right letters easily when swiping across groups of letters that would make for different words, making for better precision in the word suggestions.
It would also be much easier to implement gesture support by having areas much easier to target that you start gestures from or end them in. You'd also instantly get tactile feedback telling you if you made the gesture right or not, like for switching character sets or for moving the cursor.
Lots of gestures could be supported, where you'd essentially be "asked" with tactile feedback to push harder after making the gesture to activate the particular action. Suddenly you solved both accessibility, discoverability and precision, while reducing the error rate.
What you say doesn't change anything significantly, which means it doesn't change the way we type on mobile phones--you still need to look at the screen. Also it's a bit of a stretch thinking because it works on a game controller with limited number of inputs, it will work on a keyboard with way more keys, isn't it?
As I mentioned above, I explored into building a mobile device that you can type into without looking, and my first hypothesis was "tactile feedback is key". And turns out there are many many other factors at play. Even if Apple built something like you say, that won't make more people buy iPhones, it's just an incremental innovation that doesn't significantly change any user behavior for the better.
Like you said, you still need look at the screen to see if you're typing in correctly. I am not sure if you read my original comment, but this is one thing I learned while experimenting that's obvious in hindsight. On your computer, you can type completely without looking at your keyboard because you are looking at the monitor/screen which is a separate device from the keyboard. On a mobile device, they are a single screen. Which means you still have to look at the screen portion of the "screen" even when you don't need to look at the "keyboard" portion. Which is why it doesn't make any groundbreaking improvements even if implemented. At best it's just some minor add-on convenience. Your steam controllers example is exactly the same as computer keyboards because you're looking at a large screen (which is again a separate device from your gamepad) when you're playing games.
Your assumption is that they only help accuracy. Instead they can allow you to visually hide important UX elements and yet keep them discoverable.
I'll have to think a bit longer to come up with good examples.
Edit: non-scrolling swipe gestures are where this is the most valuable.
Improved Google Photos app image selection: a hard press would start selection, and as you continously to drag to select it would provide tactile feedback for where the image borders are, making accidental selection less likely and quicker to detect. Selection would stop on release (to make scrolling easy). Hard press and swipe again to continue the selection.
If you trace this thread all the way back to its root, the guy said having tactile feedback will solve the problem of not being able to type without looking, and I said I have tried and it doesn't. Of course there are many ways tactile feedback can improve experience. But in any case, I don't think it's a significant change. Even if you could do all you mentioned it's just an incremental innovation. When iPhone first came out it changed everything by getting rid of physical keyboards because a "soft" keyboard that adapts to its container app is much more flexible than a physical keyboard. That started this entire app ecosystem. But I don't think these nifty little touch UI innovations will change anything further as far as iPhone is concerned. As an example 3d touch is an interesting and sometimes even magical technology but it hardly makes any difference in purchase decisions.
When you type in hardware keyboards, do you need to look at them? I hardly look at the SwiftKey keyboard except occasionally to confirm what keys I'm hitting.
A surface that can "project" arbitary tactile shapes with different strengths of feedback can let you orientate without looking. In fact it can even do Braille for the blind if the resolution was high enough!
Back when I used blackberry phones I absolutely could use the keyboard without looking. They used slightly different shapes/intersections for each key and it was all muscle memory and little looking.
The touch screen keyboards are more practical in many ways but they can never truly replicate a physical keyboard.
(I long ago traded the fidelity of the actual keyboard for the convenience of a touch keyboard.)
"little looking". Yeah you looked. There's a huge difference between 0% and 1%. I'm saying it's a nice to have feature but that doesn't make you ditch one for another--it's just an incremental innovation. Just like you moved away from it.
> This allows the keyboard to be operated without looking, much like how most people use a ordinary keyboard today once they are past the hunt-and-peck stage.
'Most people'? I must have had really bad luck in a number of financial/tech companies, as a disturbing majority don't touch type.
Note, my experience is with people aged 30-50. It's possible that this doesn't apply to millennials, but they certainly aren't the majority still.
I wonder if the pressure detection is localised enough to allow that to work without being annoying? If I'm resting my right thumb on a letter, but pressing with my left thumb on another letter, I don't think the tech is necessarily there to accurately detect which letter got pressed. And I think that's needed to make typing feel good, since in using my regular keyboard while one finger is pressing a key the next finger is on or hovering over the next key.
The problem with converting the keyboard to 3d presses, is that goes against almost 10 years of user expectations. If I had to press harder to type a letter, I'd think something was wrong.
Your not kidding, I've had iPhones since they came to Australia (Gen 2, Gen 1 iPhones were imported but not properly available via local channels) and I heavily use the iMessage app since my plan has had "unlimited" SMS pretty much the whole time I've had an iPhone... And I NEVER saw this until I tried it 60 seconds ago.
I've got one that might blow your mind. You can SEARCH pages in Safari, by typing in the top url/search bar, then scrolling all the way to the bottom. It will show you how many instances it's found, and you can touch to go to them!
Don't hit enter, just type out what you want, then scroll down to the very bottom. The top results will be google search, then bookmarks and history, THEN "On this Page". It's totally not intuitive.
>> "To me its real problem is that it's almost indistinct from long-press."
Are you saying this as someone who actually uses the feature? Because in my experience a long press and 3D are very distinct. In fact 3D touch makes it quite difficult to long press on home screen icons to delete them.
As a Windows phone refugee living in Androidland (seriously MS, was it so hard to make a worthy successor for the 930 along with not completely abandoning the rest of the range?) live tiles is the feature I miss the most :(
Only a minority of the apps have them (and even fewer of those are remotely good/configurable), absolutely no consistency in the design between widgets and how they're a mix of background and icon. WP just had fantastic design patterns all around.
That's my problem with widgets too, coming from someone who loved his Lumia 920. Widgets are ugly. Like seriously ugly. And why do some of them take up 4x4 and others only let me pick 1x4 or 2x4, and some are other stupid sizes... all I want is 2x2 tiles that match the theme of my phone.
What's the point in getting a really nice theme and then ruining it with AccuWeather's horrible widget and a calendar that looks like an HTML iframe?
Weird. I kind of always expected it to be there and found it forever ago. Maybe because I was developing on iOS and knew it was a table/list view, and expected it to have a left-swipe something?
The best 3D touch feature is the trackpad keyboard. It's also very not discoverable (who thinks to force touch the keyboard?)
Having said that, 3D touch is far from the only improvement on the 6S. If it didn't have 3D touch I'd still recommend the extra $100 to get MUCH better internals (processor, cameras, touch ID sensor) and a stronger body too.
The trackpad keyboard is huge. It greatly ameliorates how horrible touch keyboards are, and makes editing text not too much of a chore. I'm afraid no one will use it and the feature will get axed.
"In the early betas of iOS 9, Apple had activated this feature for older iPhones. Users would just place both their thumbs on the keyboard and it will act as a trackpad. However, Apple removed this feature for unknown reasons. Right now, no other iPhone other than the 6s and 6s Plus can perform this feature which is really annoying."
I forget that 3D Touch exists because I own an iPad, which does not have it. After using the iPad for a while, I stopped trying to use 3D Touch on my phone, because I got conditioned to the idea that it isn't there.
That's funny because i got used to the force touch application switching gesture of swiping from the left side. When I got handed an ipad, I found myself making the gesture and then remembering that I need the double press on the home button.
I mainly use press down on the screen's left side to invoke the app switcher, so that I can switch apps without using the home button. It's nicer for one-handed use. Apart from that I haven't seen a compelling reason to use it -- even within first-party apps for example.
EDIT -- I also use the keyboard trackpad thing. Not often though.
I wholeheartedly agree. I find 3D touch very helpful. But it really begs the question if you consider that unless I am consciously aware of 3D touch every time I interact with my phone, I am very likely to forget that it exists and go back to performing actions the way I am used to.
