
A new way to interact
3D Touch was introduced as part of the iPhone 6S. It was a way to provide a new axis of interaction within iOS. I’m myself a big user of 3D Touch. Something that I think is really cool. I particularly love the Peek & Poke feature. But the problem is that I’m not a typical user. Most of the people don’t know about 3D touch. Why? Because there is no easy way to know that it even exists within an application. There is no visual cue about its existence. 3D Touch agony is Apple’s own making. This is half baked user experience in my opinion.
Compare this to the visible “handle” at the bottom of the iPhone X or the 2018 iPad Pro. The visual handle is easy to see and act on. People can remember to pick it up and do something with it like swipe it up to dismiss the currently facing app. The user can even swipe from left to right to switch applications without invoking the dock or the application switcher. This is really cool and a well thought out user experience on Apple’s part.
Haptic Touch
Now, back to 3D touch dismissal. The iPhone XR is already lacking
I do have a few questions regarding the lost of 3D touch and the apparent rise of Haptic Touch. If 3D Touch was suffering a discoverability problem, in what ways does Haptic Touch is not suffering the same discoverability problem? Is it because we don’t need to hard press the screen to invoke it? Is it easier to remember the long press interaction? As of this writing, iOS 12 didn’t bring any visual cues for Haptic Touch. And I suspect that Apple won’t fix this in iOS 13 either. So I go back to my question: how will Haptic Touch have more change to succeed if implemented more widely on iOS compared to 3D Touch? Could this be related somehow with Marzipan has ported apps on macOS couldn’t support it anyway?
In conclusion, I do think that Apple is about to make a big mistake. Again.
[Update]: Take a moment to read comments from John Gruber on this matter. Spot on.
3D touch has some cool uses. Like peaking at links. But Gruber is right. Since it never came to iPad, it was half-baked, and developers couldn’t count on it.
Really, I don’t think the tech added any new capabilities to iPhone. It just made existing features easier or quicker to access, in most cases.
So technically it’s superfluous. Add to that the fact it’s not discoverable to most users, it’s easy to see why it didn’t catch on.