Can’t Wait for “Force Touch” on iOS
Apple recently unveiled two products featuring a new technology called Force Touch. Augmenting standard capacitive touch with pressure sensors and haptic feedback, Force Touch enables these new devices to distinguish between a normal Tap and a deeper Press. Watch OS and OS X already have support for new gestures based on that distinction, and many are confident that iOS will follow suit.
Life Before Force Touch
One of the new features I just introduced in HoursTracker for iOS is the ability to Pause a running job timer or incorporate Breaks into your time entries. A core assumption in the design of HoursTracker is the idea that the easiest way to track time is with a simple Tap-to-Clock-In and Tap-to-Clock-Out. Any change that complicates this core interaction needs to be implemented in a way that does not violate that fundamental simplicity.
The new Pause and Break features introduce new transitions in the app:
- Clocked Out → Clocked In → Paused → Clocked In → Clocked Out
- Clocked Out → Clocked In → Paused → Clocked Out
Adding Pause and Break buttons everywhere you see a Clock Out button would compromise the overall simplicity of the app. For many users, the simple Clock In / Clock Out functions will suffice, and those extra buttons would be confusing. Plus, buttons must be large and easy to tap, and it would be annoying to have them there wasting so much space.
With this in mind, instead of adding more buttons onscreen, I tried adding more buttons “behind” the existing buttons.
Inspired by a mix of the Force Touch menu in WatchOS and the Android Action Overflow, the buttons are marked with three small darkened squares in the upper-right corner. This indicates “you can do more things like this.” The extra buttons appear when the user performs a long-press gesture.
During the gesture, the darkened corner squares ramp up to white, one after the other, until finally the buttons present themselves. If the user lifts their finger before the buttons appear, the squares darken in reverse. This reinforces the notion that continuing to long-press will cause something to happen. This gesture takes about half a second, and I think it is worth the compromise.
Force Touch to the Rescue
An iPhone with Force Touch-enabled screen would allow users to simply press a little harder on these buttons to instantly reveal the additional features. Giving the user a visual indication that “Force Touch is possible here” will probably still be necessary, so maybe those corner squares will remain. But I love the idea of doing this without the need for a long-press gesture and the associated tap delays.
There are so many new interactions possible with the addition of Force Touch on iOS. I can’t wait to experiment with them next fall (right, Apple? winkwink).
