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>Zuckerberg had a solution: Just display the usual thumbs-up button under each post, but if someone on her smartphone presses down on it a little longer, the ot

• kornish 11y ago
  Well, this design motif has been around long enough that I wouldn't necessarily call it a "recent fad". One obvious example that springs to mind is holding icons on the iOS home screen to move or delete them.
  • coldcode 11y ago
    Or the . key bringing up .com .org etc on iOS
  • bad_user 11y ago
    It's smart imho, as it leads people to what the default choice should be by artificially making the other choices harder. And you might disagree but studies have shown that choices make people unhappy. On the other hand these were needed let's say because some items are not appropriate to Like. Like say a piece of news for some tragedy. But I do think this will backfire as I think it will lower engagement. Right now when people cannot Like, they Share. And for other reactions they place comments. Many in the form of emoticons but still.
  • hayksaakian 11y ago
    At least that movement is natural. If your objective is to move an icon from A to B you will probably end up holding it for a second without anyone telling you about the secret icon moving feature.
• manachar 11y ago
  It's a touch focused pattern. With a keyboard and mouse you had the ability to right-click or use a modifier key while clicking to bring up more options. For more and more users touch is going to be their primary experience and eventually you are going to need some method to provide more options to the "power users". Longer-click seems the most obvious and common of the patterns.
  • deegles 11y ago
    Right-click in the browser is hardly more discoverable than long-press. I can't think of a website that uses right-click.
    • dawnbreez 11y ago
      Google Drive makes use of it, as do thousands of desktop programs.
      • JupiterMoon 11y ago
        Yes. Desktop programs use it and I expect it there. On websites I generally expect my browsers normal right click menu and won't think to try right click on your web-app (especially if your web-app falls into the large number that should be simpler websites). Most people won't even realise that a web-app can have a right click context menu (even those that use right click in their desktop programs all the time).
        • dawnbreez 11y ago
          However, Facebook's long-press function makes sense inside an app. It's less a webapp there, and more a desktop app--even though it's interfacing with the Internet, it's presented standalone, not as a place to go within another program. You don't expect to see the browser's long-press menu in the Facebook app, because there is no browser. As for desktop, if they're intelligent at all, they'll use a different method there. Perhaps all the new variations will be displayed side by side. Perhaps instead of only trigfering on a "long-click", it'll expand on a normal click.
• swalsh 11y ago
  ". I don't understand this recent fad of pressing harder/longer on a button to discover a secret hidden feature that's unavailable otherwise." No kidding, as a 28 year old I'm embarrassed to admit how long it took me to "get" snapchat's UI.
  • DominikR 11y ago
    You are not the only one, I'm building mobile chat applications for a living (6 years now) and to this day I don't "get" the Snapchat UI. I believe the UI has been tweaked for users that are more impulsive. I know it sounds strange, but you open the app the first time and you are immediately asked to make a picture of something and then send it to someone. (even though you haven't seen your available contacts yet)
    • sehugg 11y ago
      Getting someone to contact someone else ASAP is key to virality.
      • DominikR 11y ago
        Yes I agree, but it is an interesting choice to ask the user to send a picture even though he didn't yet have the chance to see who else from his contacts is using Snapchat.
        • CodyReichert 11y ago
          I think it's smart. You can break down this feature into two types of users: - A user that has friends on snapchat. For them, just sign up and snap a picture. You're off to the races. IMO, there's no reason to pick who I want to send it to until I take the picture. - Another type of user would be someone who does not have any friends using SnapChat. For those people - you don't want to just say, "Sorry, you don't have any people to talk to - but feel free to play around with the camera." That probably won't encourage them to do much more with the app. Instead, you get them to create something first. When it's time to send their creation, they don't have anyone to send it to, but they are way more likely to say, "Hey <other person in the room>, download SnapChat so I can send you this hilarious thing I just made." Both of those people are way more likely to download and use the app - but the chance of them doing so goes way down if they never invest any time and creativity into the app. Just my two cents, but I think it makes perfect sense.
• DominikR 11y ago
  This kind of unintuitive UI was once also frequently used in Android apps. The long press. But over the time more and more high profile apps removed these features simply because so many users never knew that they could long press on something to reveal additional functionality. Also the Android old menu button was removed for the same reasons. It was a hidden menu that could show different options depending on which screen within the app you were. I could imagine that it could be different for users with Apples force touch or 3D touch, but we'll have to wait and see.
• haberman 11y ago
  In Google Inbox I was looking for "mute" the other day in the mobile app. Couldn't find it anywhere. Turns out it's a long-press on the normal "done" button (the checkmark), which I found by Googling. I never would have found it on my own, but now that I know about it it seems convenient and intuitive.
• jandrese 11y ago
  It's because they don't want to add buttons, because buttons are "ugly", and usability takes a backseat to looking pretty in screenshots. My estimate is that the average person knows about maybe a third or a half of the features on their smartphone, because the rest are hidden away behind never-explained gestures or long presses on things that don't look like buttons. In terms of conveying functionality the popular smartphone and webpage UIs today are atrocious. Just today I was talking with someone who was really frustrated that they can't see webpages anymore because web browsers all got rid of the magnification feature. He was amazed to discover that it has been there all along but hidden away in a menu that doesn't even appear unless you hit alt. He thought all of that was moved over to the "hamburger" menu, and they just dropped it. He's been squinting for months (years?) because someone doesn't like the look of dropdown menus.
  • reitanqild 11y ago
    Yesyesyes. This as well as "everything needs to be done in JS", even static pages. Gnome (ongoing dumbification since gnome), Canonical (Unity, although HUD was a nice idea), Microsoft (ribbon, although it has some decent ideas) etc etc. There is room for huge improvements in UI: more search-friendlyness, a way to explain scary buttons in mobile UIs since they don't naturally seem to support hover etc etc Dumbifying things, both by assuming your users are useless and cannot learn new features, as well as just plain weird ideas like breaking alt-tab without checking (Unity) or hiding save button in Office behind what looks like a logo (MS ribbon early edition) should hopefully be less important.
  • whoopdedo 11y ago
    To risk getting sidetracked, what browser doesn't have zoom controls in the main menu? I just checked the default layouts of all of them and other than IE's cryptic "Tools" menu shaped as a gear, I wouldn't call the zoom feature hidden. Perhaps the problem was he was looking for the icon of a magnifying glass. That had to be abandoned because it conflicted with the standardish icon for "Find". But I generally agree with your sentiment. You can't rely on users to poke around and find features on their own. I recently talked to a teenager who despite having used Windows all his life said he only "just" learned about Alt-Tab.
  • 11y ago
• logfromblammo 11y ago
  It's because touchscreens can't right-click or middle-click. I'd prefer a halo ring around the button that appears when you touch or mousedown that presents additional options related to the button. If you touch, move your pointer, then release over a secondary function, it activates, otherwise a simple touch and release activates the main function. Similar functionality is available for gamepad devices, where a choice wheel appears, and a directional input can select any of the 1 to 8 available options.
• ksk 11y ago
  I agree with you for the most part. I also think that perhaps there needs to be someone willing to take a few arrows in the chest before new UI concepts become so common as to be generally accepted as 'intuitive'.
• joelrunyon 11y ago
  Feels a little forced that Zuckerberg had a solution to this himself. This has been a feature on most keyboards for a while for fitting in more characters.
• baby 11y ago
  > Talk about non-intuitive UI On the contrary, this is non-intrusive and discoverable. The user isn't presented with a dense interface and too many choices, but if he does want to do more advanced interactions he will find a way to learn about it.
  • taneq 11y ago
    It's discoverable in the sense that if you do the right thing, you discover it. It's undiscoverable in the sense that, even now with long-tap being a fairly common "right click" on touch devices, there's no indication (unless I've missed one) that a long tap does anything here until you try it by accident. It's not a question of "that's hard to do", but of "why would you even do that?" A horizontal pinch-zoom or horizontal drag would be arguably more intuitive as a way to expand the like button.
• city41 11y ago
  I think this style of interaction is fine if it's a nonessential bonus feature. For those who never discover the added options, they can still like something as they always have.