As the world already divided to two people, which are android and apple users, I’ve been both in the last decade. I used iPhone 5s and have turned to Oneplus user a couple months ago. There are huge differences between both OS. Some user usually notice their big design differences. Nevertheless, both of them have the same way of long-press-gesture navigation feature. (or in iphone, force touch). I decided to ask around about what my friends or people actually think about this gesture. Is it really effective and functional?
Thus, the answer is still no. The force touch is functional in other area but not particularly on the app shortcut. Its the same with android OS that use long-press-gesture to do that. Me, myself, barely use it because I thought it will take lengthy time to open certain task compared to when I open the app itself normally.
While I’m curious on how I could make it better, I created a sketch in my diary about this navigation problems and any possible ways to solve it. Then, I tried to use after effect to make the first iteration.
The idea is quite simple. It is based on how I still hate the android/apple group their apps into one and takes quite a time to open the group, then the app itself. Hence, in the first iteration, I used force touch/long-press-gesture to open a mini group of apps. A user just have to move around their finger to the left or right next to the group. However, I acknowledged what I’m missing in the first iteration. Some of the existed problems are group logo that didn’t signify that it was a group, notifications, shortcuts, remove/edit choices, and group edit.
To solve the first iteration problem, I did it in the second iteration. You can see the prototype in the video below.
In the second iteration, I added names of the app and group. I also added the menu to remove, uninstall, edit, etc above the app menu. What’s missing is the notification and shortcut feature. I decided to just add numbers to signify whether the application has notification or not. Another reason is users actually can roll over their notification bar which is much easier. Thus, why they want to use force touch to do it over scrolling their notification bar? About the missing shortcut, I decided to remove it because users are rarely use it.
Quick summary of this little experiment is that this navigation still not perfect and lack of more conducted research.
