It’s All In The Details

A Genius Interaction For TV

When Apple showed off the latest TV I was immediately enthralled like any good fan should be. The list of additional functionality was impressive and the many fancy effects dazzled my eyes. Perhaps the visuals were so dazzling that I forgot one of my biggest gripes — gesture based television navigation.

You see, I’ve longed for the Remote app for the iPhone (and then for Watch) to return to the simple virtual button tap-based navigation of yesteryear. The gesture-based “touchpad” introduced years ago has felt awkward and mysterious to me. How much do I move my finger to go to the next item. I could never control the damn thing. I was always going past the item I wanted to select or making too small a gesture for the selection to change at all. There just wasn’t enough feedback.

I’m a big proponent of thoughtful gestures, animations, and transitions. I worship the likes of Loren Brichter (Tweetie/Twitter, Letterpress, pull-to-refresh) and Mike Matas (Paper, Our Choice, and a whole bunch stuff at Facebook and Apple). I too have had the rare opportunity to make a dent in the interface world having come up with and implementing the now famous “swipe” mechanism used in Tinder.

As an iOS developer and designer I give talks from time to time about UX related development. There is a slide I’ve used a couple of times which simply states:

UISwipeGestureRecognizer = Evil

UIPanGestureRecognizer = Good

If you’re an iOS developer, then you’re familiar with those words (though perhaps not my statement). Apple has been kind enough to provide us with some pretty great tools to create some wonderfully engaging applications but I wish they’d taken the day off when they came up with UISwipeGestureRecognizer. If you’re a designer then you can think of it as clipart or powerpoint templates. It’s a lazy tool for adding gestures to an application. This prebuilt swipe is a delayed gesture. Only once the device has registered a full swipe does it trigger your code. This misses the point to what makes gestures on a touchscreen so powerful and intriguing. A gesture should visually adjust the interface the entire time your finger is in movement. Doing this has several benefits:

• Delight: encourages and excites animals to manipulate their environment; it’s practically the definition of life. Humans, with our opposable thumbs and heightened curiosity, are an even more extreme case. We like to touch, move, push, throw and catch things. Interactive gestures and transitions feed into that desire by allowing us to do the same things to app interfaces on our phone.

• Confirmation: provides the user with confidence that their touch is being recognized and they’re not just tiring out their finger for no reason. Without this, we might want to throw our actual phone against a wall in frustration as opposed to throwing the intended virtual object.

• Definite Results: shows the user that when they continue doing what they’re doing, this immediate movement will likely end in some result even if by accidental discovery. Not only does this keep us from writing endless user manuals but it often makes the user feel special, thinking they’re in some special club for uncovering lost UX artifacts.

Rumors that the new physical TV remote would rely on a touchpad forgoing the former buttons I loved had worried me. Could Apple possibly be so happy enough with the poor experience in the Remote.app that they were going to force it upon every TV owner? As an avid user, I’d hopesd not. Having cut the cord, my TV’s input is permanently set to my TV. Surely Apple was smarter than this.

It turns out that Apple was smarter than that. The reality is that those inside Apple were certainly wise to my complaint because they came up with a brilliant solution. During this recent September 2015 event, they showed off a 3D tilting effect for selected items on the screen. In traditional Apple fashion, they added a shine/sheen as well as a very pretty parallax effect to provide a sense of depth. Louis Mantia on Twitter described Apple’s design choices on the new tvOS as “whimsically fun”. This is certainly true but many people, generally Apple-haters, would/will dismiss this as showboating and stupid. Even in the Tinder office watching the event, I heard some grunts when Jen Folse showed off the tilting of the selected item. While delighted, I too initially dismissed this as fluff. However, I was wrong.

The tilt is far from fluff. It’s the interactivity is what makes the touchpad on the new remote work while the one in the Remote app did not. All this time it wasn’t the app that was the problem but instead it was the interface on the TV. Here’s how it works. Large swiping gestures, just like before, will send your selection flying across the screen. However, with smaller more deliberate gestures create a more visible tilt or pull of the currently selected item before moving on to the next item. Do it slow enough and you really get to see how the selected item reacts to your finger movement.

This tilt was the missing key. It accomplishes all of the benefits of an interactive gesture I detailed previously. This is the interactive gesture animation needed to make the user feel delight; like their finger movements were connected to the television’s interface. It provides an adequate level of confirmation and feedback to allow the user to gauge how much he or she must swipe in order to reach their result, i.e. change his/her selection.

It’s this sort of thought and attention to detail that makes Apple so special. I wonder if this specific interaction is what Steve Jobs was referring to in his biography when he said they’d “cracked it”.