User experience engineer Eliz Kılıç took to Medium this week to criticize Apple’s implementation of 3D Touch. Despite 3D Touch having been available for almost four years, Kılıç says many people don’t know about it, or they don’t know how to use…

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One of the biggest reasons 3D Touch is “broken,” according to Kılıç, is that it’s impossible to know which buttons offer 3D Touch functionality. She likens it to if all links were the same style as regular text – how would people know where to click?

What would happen if we decide to make all links same color and style as the regular text? People would not know what to click on right? Why is 3D Touch be any different? We rely on our vision to decide actionability before anything else.

If you can’t distinguish 3D Touchable buttons from those that are not, how are you supposed to know you can press on them?

Kılıç goes on to to say that Apple has only made things worse over the years by hiding certain options exclusively behind a 3D Touch menu, such as in Control Center:

3D Touch is not a gimmick anymore. You need to know you should be pressing hard on the “4 Button Control” to access “Personal Hotspot” or “AirDrop” toggles.

Her solution to this is to add small visual cues to areas of the iOS interface that are 3D Touch-able. As you can see in the screenshots above, these “Force Decorators,” as Kılıç calls them, appear when a user can use 3D Touch to access additional options.

My solution is adding a line on bottom-right of things that can be 3D Touched. Let’s call them Force Decorators (with reference to Force Touch). 3D Touch is missing the most obvious thing to be mainstream. Visual cues. I think this is the answer.

What do you think of this proposal? Is it something Apple should implement or do you have another idea? Let us know in the poll below and discuss down in the comments!

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