A decade ago, the first-generation iPhone redefined the phone, and today it offers not only more variety, but, without a doubt, a better, more consistent, easy-to-use experience.
The biggest obstacle in mobile interaction design is the limited screen space: so much information needs to be adapted, necessary information, and navigation elements crowded under the hamburger menu, making it difficult for users to quickly find what they want.
Over the years, interaction designers have worked to achieve more by just tweaking gestures without sacrificing screen real estate. Unlike GUI elements such as buttons, gestures interact in a way that doesn't require a visual representation, freeing up valuable space for other content.
But another problem arises: new gestures have certain memory and learning costs.
Apps such as ToDo list App: Clear and Mailbox, which has been discontinued, use gestures to achieve all or most of its functionality. It is worth noting that this type of app is highly respected in communities such as design interaction, but it is successful for b2b data ordinary users, and gestures/interactions may be the problem.
The iPhone X experimented with gesture-based interactions on a large scale to maximize screen space efficiency. With this new device, the iPhone does away with the Home button, and to access the home screen, users must swipe up from the bottom edge of the screen.
What is the impact of this attempt at change?
The swipe gesture/swipe has played an important role in the iPhone, starting with iOS 7, it is used to return to the previous page in an app or to invoke the Control Center. With the iPhone X, Apple changed some of the existing gestures and redefined some. There will be different responses according to the three properties of swipe/swipe: left, bottom, top.
The position where the gesture was initiated;
the length of the slide;
sliding direction;
Changing design elements that users are used to is always unfriendly. If the new design is better than the old one, users will gradually adapt to the new way, and the aforementioned usability problems will eventually disappear.
Swipe left on the bottom edge of the screen to switch apps, and swipe left on the edge of the screen to return to the previous page, the same interactive gestures have different results. Is there a problem with this interaction?