
The Failure of 3D Touch (2018) - Austin_Conlon
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-of-the-most-epic-product-fails/answer/Mills-Baker?share=1
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jacobkg
I used 3D Touch all the time for one specific feature: if you did a 3D Touch
on the keyboard it would turn into a touch pad for moving the cursor around a
block of text.

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.

~~~
Shank
> 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.

~~~
mstade
Add one datapoint to the discoverability argument made in the article: I have
had 3D Touch enabled iphones for a long time now and had absolutely no idea
that the feature you're describing existed. I just tried the new long tap
version of this feature on my iPhone 11 pro and it's just as you say kind of
awkward because of the multi touch requirement to select, I can definitely see
how 3D Touch would've made this better.

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.

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RodgerTheGreat
Force touch is even less discoverable than gestures. If it is used to
distinguish between "simple" and "complex" actions in the way right/left click
do with a mouse- as Apple attempted in several places in iOS- it's far easier
to activate accidentally than intentionally. Overall the feature was a
horrendous usability misstep, and it's not surprising it was quickly nixed.

~~~
coldtea
Initial discoverability is overrated.

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.

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
If it's a supplementary way to access functionality- a shortcut- poor
discoverability is acceptable. If it's the _only_ way to access functionality,
poor discoverability is bad design, full stop.

~~~
coldtea
Those are not the only 2 cases.

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...

~~~
RodgerTheGreat
There is no such thing as a user interface which is naturally "intuitive".
Discoverable user interfaces provide consistency and affordance. If a new
operating system or device uses similar affordances to things a user has seen
before, they can rapidly transfer their experience. This is usually what
people mean when they call a UI "intuitive": conventional.

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.

------
dandare
One navigation paradigm I miss on iOS that is very consistent on Android (and
all desktop browsers including some desktop apps like Spotify) is the back
button. The strong touch - a completely new and unoccupied mode of interaction
could have been consistently used to "go back", regardless of context.

~~~
yoz-y
I feel that the back button is only consistent in its position but its
functionality remains a mystery to me. Sometimes it goes to a previous page,
sometimes to another app, sometimes to the home screen... I like that on iOS
this is separated between the "go back to previous app/swiping on home
indicator" and app specific buttons.

Fortunately Android 10 has introduced gestures so trying to reach the back
button is no longer painful.

~~~
basch
theres one pattern, opening google photos, pressing share, choosing facebook
messenger, sending a photo to a group that ALWAYS causes messenger to get
stuck at the share screen. pressing back minimizes fbm but doesnt back out of
share, so when you reopen the app, you are buried back at that deep share
page. (one may ask why you would ever do it this way, with android 10 many
apps couldnt access the device photos directly. even though its fixed, this
still serves as an repeatable example of 'back' being confusing and broken.)

the inconsistency of the back button ranks very high on my "ios to android"
learning curve list.

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ninedays
The fact that iPad never had 3D Touch adds another argument as to why
developers never truly adopted the feature.

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manaskarekar
Count me in as a fan who's going to miss it. I use it extensively for a lot of
things. I hope it makes a return some day.

It's a pity that it wasn't marketed/documented appropriately.

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rpmisms
But it worked, and actually kinda worked well. One more case of apple bringing
a product to a market that's not ready for it.

~~~
dawg-
Exactly, it's a failure _for now_ , but apple now owns the intellectual
property to that forever. If anybody ever finds a better way to use it, they
own it and can jump on the opportunity. That's why when you are a company like
apple with mountains of cash, you can feel good about investing money
developing fancy aspirational things, even if they don't pan out immediately.

~~~
onion2k
_apple now owns the intellectual property to that forever_

The main patent on the 3D touch technology expires on March 3rd 2033.
[https://patents.google.com/patent/US9772721B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9772721B2/en)

~~~
nexuist
For the record, there are 14 years between 2019 and 2033. The iPhone has only
existed for 12. 14 years is basically forever.

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InTheArena
I'm not sure I would classify this a epic failure. This feature was enabled,
and used fairly widely. It didn't live up to it's potential, and the biggest
issue may be the weight / thickness requirements that it put onto Apple
products. Apple traded that weight / thickness for more batter on the current
phone, which is well worth it.

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.

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davidwitt415
Apple was not first with 3D Touch, Android had it since Eclair in 2009.

[https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-
for-y...](https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-years)

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.

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kristofferR
It's kind of a shame that 3D Touch was removed at pretty much the same time as
iOS 13 made it much more useful.

~~~
harrygallagher4
What's more useful in iOS 13? Genuinely asking, I love learning about new
force touch/3D touch features

------
gumby
I hadn't realized how much I used it until it went away.

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program_whiz
Seems like a costly mistake, surprised they didn't figure out whether this was
solving a legitimate problem, and/or filling a legitimate market need _before_
the costly development cycle. I literally cannot even imagine a UI that would
be made better by this feature -- so surely before all that investment, apple
had _some idea_ of how it would be used that would radically transform UI
forever.

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.

~~~
emsy
I’m a firm believer that this is a failure of educating the user rather than
the feature itself. With my next iPhone I will be forced to touch and hold,
causing me delays which I hate. In hindsight, it might’ve worked to have the
3D Touch features available by 3D Touch _and_ long press, causing users to
stumble upon it by accident. I just wrote this reply on my phone and had to
shake to undo, prompting a hint that I could achieve the same thing by double
tapping with three fingers. Something like this would’ve worked for 3D Touch
I’m sure. Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context
menus. This is what 3D Touch could’ve solved for touch UIs. Now where back to
UIs that are either dumbed down or crowded. Or we have long press delays,
punishing power users.

~~~
zozbot234
> Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus.

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.

~~~
Angostura
Haptic touch functions as right click. 3D touch is more like - what? Alt-right
click?

~~~
emsy
Haptic touch replaces 3D touch so I don't understand what you're trying to
say.

~~~
Angostura
3D toucj gives you the full peek-and-pop multi-strength experience. Haptic
touch is single level, is it not?

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harrygallagher4
I hope Apple isn't removing this from their laptop touchpads. I mapped force
clicking to ⌘+click to open links in new tabs, it changed my life.

~~~
ralfd
How can one map force click?

~~~
harrygallagher4
As rhinoceraptor said, BetterTouchTool. It has a ton of different trackpad
actions/gestures that you can map but this one is by far my most used.

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Tade0
I think it was just an example of a feature without a use case.

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.

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mensetmanusman
This was a major decision to backtrack on this implementation. It will take a
generational change before people are willing to try again. We may not see it
implemented on an iOS device for 20 years now.

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d-sc
I have an iPhone 11 Pro, the only part I don’t like on it is the lack of 3D
touch. The replacement tap and hold gesture is slow comparatively.

