
Apple’s 3D Touch Is the Start of a New Interface - code_monster
http://www.wired.com/2015/10/3d-touch-pressure-sensitive-display/
======
onion2k
One of the designers where I work added 3D Touch to a prototype of a website
he was working on this week. During a Demo session no one knew the feature was
there until he told them. That's the hard bit about UI design once you go
beyond visual things - people are conservative in the ways they interact with
devices, so unless there's an indicator, or instructions, no one will find the
fancy new UI feature. And if no one finds, and thus no one uses it, what's the
point in spending part of your budget making it?

The problem is further compounded by 3D Touch not really having an obvious use
case in most apps. What it'll do will vary from app to app. That means a user
has to learn what it does over and over again, and how much pressure to use in
each thing. What 'light touch' is in one developer's app will be different to
another's.

3D Touch is great, and has loads of potential, but it's going to be hard to
make it genuinely useful.

~~~
mnem
No computer interfaces are intuitively obvious without prior training, whether
that's through direct teaching or indirectly from culture or advertising. This
is painfully apparent if you ever have helped someone who has never used a
computer to use a computer.

I've found the popup previews surprisingly useful across applications after
expecting it to purely be a gimmick. It's especially useful on HN and other
text heavy sites with links. I'm interested to see if web designers start
designing for such previews - at the moment a lot sites previews are their
banner adverts or other non-content related fluff. It'd be quite useful if you
could make Safari popup previews in its reader mode to remove non-content
items.

~~~
ashark
iOS 6 was definitely way more intuitive than its successors, though.
Skeumorphism and depth helped quite a bit (think the unlock slider versus
"swipe the entire screen up, for some reason, according to some hard-to-read
text") and so did its commitment to keeping the home screen prominently in
view when not in an actual app, _sliding_ folders open from the screen itself
and _sliding_ it up to show the task manager rather than covering it with
those same two views the way iOS7 and up do. Earlier versions of iOS had a
_physicality_ to them that worked well to increase discoverability of their
interfaces.

The the "if it's not flat it makes me _physically ill_!" school of designers
got ahold of it...

------
jafingi
I think the biggest reason that 3D Touch will take some years to get adopted
by the users is, that it's not visible whether or not there are any 3D Touch
actions available. It's simply not intuitive as of now, until apps get updated
to take advantage of it.

Sure, I can preview a link in Safari or Mail, but what about when someone
posts a link on Facebook or Messenger, I can't deep press on it to preview
that link. So right now, everything is pretty fragmented. Do I want to _try_
to deep press on something to see if it supports it? If not, I have to lift
the finger and just tap it again.

Until everything supports it, I just won't find it natural. Right now it's
pretty much hit or miss.

~~~
arrrg
Apple blankets the world with ads. Apple has recognition. The iPhone is
relatively focused in its additions and it's not like they added a million
different things, all of which they have to tell you about. There is only one
iPhone and not millions different models with different features.

Unlike many Android device manufacturers (except maybe Samsung if they were to
focus for once and not be so overwhelmingly complex in all the stuff they put
into their phones) Apple is in a unique position to actually teach people
about this through marketing. And they will. They will teach people about it,
devs will be on board real quick and it will just become a natural
interaction. That's my prediction.

------
Intermernet
I find it interesting that both Apple[1] and Samsung[2] applied for patents
early last year regarding pressure sensitive touch screens.

Apple at the end of January, and Samsung at the end of February.

I also noticed that the Android API has had a getPressure[3] call since
_really_ early API versions, so I assume they were aware this was an option a
long time ago.

Any ideas why this is suddenly being touted as "the Start of a New Interface"?
Has the accuracy / latency / sensitivity finally become good enough to be
useful? Or is this just the Apple PR juggernaut pushing an old idea as a new
feature?

[1]:
[http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140028575](http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140028575)

[2]:
[http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140055407](http://pdfaiw.uspto.gov/.aiw?docid=20140055407)

[3]:
[http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEv...](http://developer.android.com/reference/android/view/MotionEvent.html#getPressure\(int\))

------
on_and_off
>really intuitive

>the biggest interface innovation since multitouch.

Seriously ? I don't get the interest around 3d Touch. As long as the action is
not immediately discoverable, it is not going to be used by most of your
users. long press or nav drawers perform pretty badly, how is 3d touch any
different ?

------
IanCal
I'm unsure on this. Long pressing at least has the description of "press, wait
for X".

"Press this, no, hmm try harder, no not that hard, no the other one you need
to press lightly, wait maybe that's too light..."

Some things obviously lend themselves well to this. The piano example is good,
as is drawing. However, things with a threshold sound less obvious.

> “There was a physical thing on the screen,” he says. “You had to select the
> button and move it over.” It was better than the existing ideas, sure, but
> what was that button? It moved too freely, you didn’t know how it would move
> or how to make it stop.

You didn't know how it would move or how to make it stop? Really?

~~~
arrrg
Just press hard. That’s it. No need to differentiate. The interface does not
make that mistake you are assuming it makes.

~~~
IanCal
Doesn't the article talk about the interface doing something different if you
press hard vs. pressing lighter?

~~~
arrrg
Sure, but you don't have to hit that right pressure point. No matter how hard
you press, when you first engage it you will always only be at the first
preview step. Then you can press harder still, sure, but you cannot just skip
a step.

It's very well thought out. This is all about the software implementation.
Pressure sensitive screens by themselves are boring tech.

------
toBuildSails

      "That’s technical speak for, it’s rock solid, it’s 
       totally accurate. You probably could build a sail 
       using that stuff." - Georg Petschnigg, CEO of FiftyThree
    

Can anyone explain that quote? I don't understand the "build[ing] a sail"
part. I've never heard that before.

Is building a sail some kind of delicate, nuanced process? I guess it relates
back to pressure somehow?

------
kevingadd
How does this feature impact users with disabilities? Long presses already
seem a little iffy in this area - especially in applications where the long
press needs to be nearly still for it to register (I've seen this pretty
often). I'm also not sure how blind users would be able to make use of verbs
that are only accessible via 3D touch. At least with press/long press you're
just performing that verb on a particular screen region (that could be
identified by a name).

It seems like carefully controlling the strength of your touch - or for that
matter, pressing hard at all - could be outside of the capabilities of some
disabled users. I've got slightly poor control over my hands and that already
makes it rather difficult to use some mobile apps and games.

~~~
threeseed
It works just fine for blind people at least. When you enable Voiceover you
can hard press on an icon and it will read out the options in the contextual
menu. Works well.

And you can adjust the sensitivity of 3D touch so it should be easier to use
than typical long presses.

------
Bouncingsoul1
” When you want something else, you Alt-Tab, which no one does, or rely on
some hacky workaround. “Now,” he says, “you can push things back... ....
Things will change.”

I use Alt-Tab, it works on Linux Mint and Windows, I like hacky workarounds, I
don't like when things change.

That said, 3D Touch is the best thing since Multitouch? Well except zooming
nobody of my non-technical friends here ,could give me any usecase for using
more than one finger. If anything with touch, I would need a keyboard that I
actually can use.

------
unfamiliar
It's a little ironic that an article detailing how you select or define words
on a phone is on a website that has somehow disabled the ability to do both on
an iPhone.

------
szastupov
The problem that it's still a piece of flat glass. What I really want (and see
as the next big thing) is not glass, but a material that can take form
controlled by software. Imagine all those buttons that really pop up from your
screen so you can feel them. Just think about how software defined tactile
interfaces can benefit gaming, accessibility, music production, etc...

Too bad the tech isn't there yet :(

------
makecheck
As much as I despise "flatness", it could actually now serve as a good way to
distinguish regular-touch-only from force-touchable. Basically, they could
introduce a 3D-ish button style that means "this can be push-previewed", that
is not shared by buttons that only press normally.

------
flycaliguy
My experiences with the musical Linnstrument have me quite excited about the
amount of expression this will lend to software synths. Video synthesis as
well, combined with a physics engine I think you could make some very pretty
and dynamics interactions.

------
wodenokoto
I went by an apple store today and I thought the force-touch on a Macbook felt
much, much more realistic than 3D touch.

Anyone know why that is? I thought it was the same tech.

~~~
eecks
They call the MacBook Pro Force Touch and the iPhone 6S 3D Touch.

I have a MacBook Pro with Force Touch and honestly haven't used it much yet. I
think it's for the same reason as another poster says. I'm not sure where it's
available and what it will do? In safari it previews links and gives
definitions.

The preview links thing is a bit redundant because clicking a link and swiping
back is just as fast.

~~~
wodenokoto
You've her clicked a link on your Mac? A normal click on activates the force
touch to give the illusion of a "click"

~~~
eecks
I meant the second "click", but yeah you're right. I do use the new trackpad
and it's awesome.

------
SixSigma
It will only become a truly new interface if Apple let Samsung et al implement
it.

------
rasz_pl
one button mouse strikes again, all 3D Touch does is try to work around bad
hardware interface instead of introducing good hw interface (2 physical
buttons maybe?)

------
djaychela
No-one uses ALT-TAB? Really?

------
ilaksh
Its pretty silly people keep using the marketing terms as if they actually
worked for Apple. It has a very high resolution display and pressure-sensitive
screen.

~~~
mnem
It's not (just) the hardware, it's the software implementation. Certainly such
a thing could have existed previously, but no one appears to have made it work
as well as it does on iPhone just now, although that will likely change.

Marketing terms are used constantly for referring to specific flavours of
technology. For example, Google Now, Cortana and Siri. Language and people are
flexible enough to cope with multiple terms for a technology. Also, it's
faster to type than "microphone which samples and uploads to an external voice
processing server which returns system commands".

