8 ms·

The Failure of 3D Touch (2018)

31 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

ninedays 7y ago
The fact that iPad never had 3D Touch adds another argument as to why developers never truly adopted the feature.
program_whiz 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - machello13 7y ago
    > Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus. This is what 3D Touch could’ve solved for touch UIs. This is still solved, and in a much better way, with the new iOS 13 context menus, which are standardized across every application and are on every iOS/iPadOS device, and have easy APIs for developers to create complex nested menus. I'm not happy about the delay introduced on the new phones, but I think it's an overreaction to suggest that the delay negates the entire concept.
    - emsy 7y ago
      I never argued that it negates the concept. I argued against the parent that 3D Touch is useless when it isn’t. Lag/delay is one of the worst things in UX. This fact is probably mentioned in the very first lesson on most UI/UX courses.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > 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 7y ago
      Haptic touch functions as right click. 3D touch is more like - what? Alt-right click?
      - emsy 7y ago
        Haptic touch replaces 3D touch so I don't understand what you're trying to say.
        Angostura 7y ago
        3D toucj gives you the full peek-and-pop multi-strength experience. Haptic touch is single level, is it not?
    - gumby 7y ago
      Apple touchpad have more than a single click action: they have had multitouch for many years. I use several multi-finger actions every day. The simplest is clicking with two fingers, which calls up the context menu (same as "right click" since the 1970s), but I also use three and four finger gestures, pinch-and-zoom etc.
rpmisms 7y ago
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- 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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
    - coldtea 7y ago
      Which, in internet years is forever and a few days.
    - nexuist 7y ago
      For the record, there are 14 years between 2019 and 2033. The iPhone has only existed for 12. 14 years is basically forever.
- wombat-man 7y ago
  Yeah, I liked it and used it when possible. Especially on the app screen where I could dive right into a specific in-app action. It's what nudged me into getting a 6s instead of another Android phone.
- dhritzkiv 7y ago
  And not only did it work well, but those who knew about it, loved it dearly and used it regularly.
InTheArena 7y ago
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.
RodgerTheGreat 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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 7y ago
        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.
mensetmanusman 7y ago
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.
d-sc 7y ago
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.
kristofferR 7y ago
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 7y ago
  What's more useful in iOS 13? Genuinely asking, I love learning about new force touch/3D touch features
manaskarekar 7y ago
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.
dandare 7y ago
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.
- nothrabannosir 7y ago
  Swiping the whole screen left to right is a pretty consistent back action on iOS. Coming from Android, it seemed a decent transition.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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.
- jorvi 7y ago
  > that is very consistent on Android I'm pretty confused by this statement since a near universal complaint about the Android back button is that it's more like a 'shuffle' button that chooses between going a screen back, going back to the previous app, undoing an action or exiting an app. And there is zero clarity on which of those it will do.
jacobkg 7y ago
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 7y ago
  > 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.
  - manaskarekar 7y ago
    Also, 3D Touch was almost instantaneous, "haptic touch" introduces a lag.
  - mstade 7y ago
    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.
  - pault 7y ago
harrygallagher4 7y ago
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 7y ago
  How can one map force click?
  - rhinoceraptor 7y ago
    BetterTouchTool is one way to do it.
  - harrygallagher4 7y ago
    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.
gumby 7y ago
I hadn't realized how much I used it until it went away.
davidwitt415 7y ago
Apple was not first with 3D Touch, Android had it since Eclair in 2009. https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-years https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-y... 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.
Tade0 7y ago
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.

31 points by Austin_Conlon 7y ago

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

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 7y ago
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.
- machello13 7y ago
  > Imagine how loaded desktop UIs would be without right click context menus. This is what 3D Touch could’ve solved for touch UIs. This is still solved, and in a much better way, with the new iOS 13 context menus, which are standardized across every application and are on every iOS/iPadOS device, and have easy APIs for developers to create complex nested menus. I'm not happy about the delay introduced on the new phones, but I think it's an overreaction to suggest that the delay negates the entire concept.
  - emsy 7y ago
    I never argued that it negates the concept. I argued against the parent that 3D Touch is useless when it isn’t. Lag/delay is one of the worst things in UX. This fact is probably mentioned in the very first lesson on most UI/UX courses.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > 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 7y ago
    Haptic touch functions as right click. 3D touch is more like - what? Alt-right click?
    - emsy 7y ago
      Haptic touch replaces 3D touch so I don't understand what you're trying to say.
      - Angostura 7y ago
        3D toucj gives you the full peek-and-pop multi-strength experience. Haptic touch is single level, is it not?
  - gumby 7y ago
    Apple touchpad have more than a single click action: they have had multitouch for many years. I use several multi-finger actions every day. The simplest is clicking with two fingers, which calls up the context menu (same as "right click" since the 1970s), but I also use three and four finger gestures, pinch-and-zoom etc.

rpmisms 7y ago

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- 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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
  - coldtea 7y ago
    Which, in internet years is forever and a few days.
  - nexuist 7y ago
    For the record, there are 14 years between 2019 and 2033. The iPhone has only existed for 12. 14 years is basically forever.
wombat-man 7y ago
Yeah, I liked it and used it when possible. Especially on the app screen where I could dive right into a specific in-app action. It's what nudged me into getting a 6s instead of another Android phone.
dhritzkiv 7y ago
And not only did it work well, but those who knew about it, loved it dearly and used it regularly.

InTheArena 7y ago

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.

RodgerTheGreat 7y ago

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 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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 7y ago
    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 7y ago
      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.

mensetmanusman 7y ago

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.

d-sc 7y ago

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.

kristofferR 7y ago

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 7y ago
What's more useful in iOS 13? Genuinely asking, I love learning about new force touch/3D touch features

manaskarekar 7y ago

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.

dandare 7y ago

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.

nothrabannosir 7y ago
Swiping the whole screen left to right is a pretty consistent back action on iOS. Coming from Android, it seemed a decent transition.
yoz-y 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
jorvi 7y ago
> that is very consistent on Android I'm pretty confused by this statement since a near universal complaint about the Android back button is that it's more like a 'shuffle' button that chooses between going a screen back, going back to the previous app, undoing an action or exiting an app. And there is zero clarity on which of those it will do.

jacobkg 7y ago

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 7y ago
> 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.
- manaskarekar 7y ago
  Also, 3D Touch was almost instantaneous, "haptic touch" introduces a lag.
- mstade 7y ago
  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.
- pault 7y ago

harrygallagher4 7y ago

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 7y ago
How can one map force click?
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  BetterTouchTool is one way to do it.
- harrygallagher4 7y ago
  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.

gumby 7y ago

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

davidwitt415 7y ago

Apple was not first with 3D Touch, Android had it since Eclair in 2009. https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-years https://pocketnow.com/force-touch-android-has-had-that-for-y... 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.

Tade0 7y ago

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.