Wednesday, January 31, 2018

iOS Top Buttons Under Notifications

Karim (via Hacker News):

A split second before my finger touches the glass, a popup appears in the wild!

I accidentally tap the notification and I’m taken into an entirely different app, away from where I intended to be.

[…]

By the time I’ve navigated back to the Notes app and performed the originally intended action, I’ve experienced pure agony for about 2 seconds.

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This has irritated me for years, but I never took the time to analyze or articulate it to myself. I'm pleased to see Karim explain it well, and that I'm not the only one.

Another solution that would not compromise the width of the notification would be to require a force-touch to activate it.

Or to have a .25 second delay to respond to touches.

For those who experience this multiple times a day, please turn some notifications off. It's easy.

The issue isn't that it happens so frequently as to be burdensome, it's that on the rare occasion where it does happen there is no warning at all. It takes the user by surprise, and results in an unintended action.

Worse, the message is unrecoverable; once it's been acted upon, it disappears from history. (Often, depending on the design of the instigating app, it's not even obvious from the resulting action what the alert might have even said.)

I’m envisioning all the “why are my notifications sometimes squished?” confusion causing more trouble for more people than the problem he’s trying to solve.

I thought he was going to propose that Apple ignore taps on the extreme edges of the notification for the first .3 seconds of its presentation. .

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