Often, I find people struggle with the usage of press-and-hold gestures on mobile/web platforms. The mere thought of having a user press on a defined object and hold for an arbitrary amount of time before the product reacts seems overtly complicated and unobtrusive. My questions are:
- For what use cases do press-and-hold gestures best fit?
- Have there been published studies with regards to press-and-hold gesture intuition?
- Are there more viable alternatives to this system?
Answer
The press-and-hold (or long press) gesture on a mobile devices mimic the secondary button press on a computer mouse. It is supposed to give you the same alternative options as the secondary mouse click on a computer (even on Apple devices). From a UX perspective this behavior is kind of odd, since there are no clues that the long press exist on an object, and the user is left to trying it out if they haven’t read the manual. Reading the manual to the just purchased smartphone is something that one would wish happen more often, but chances are that users learn from friends.
Still, downloaded apps seldom tell you that the long press exist, and this is bad. There should be some indicator that the object contain a long press option by a different visual cue for the user to rely on. This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it’ll emerge soon since there will be more and more (real) user experience testing on mobile apps as they become more and more important in our daily life.
Too bad it isn’t here already.
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