Invisible details of interaction design (2023) (opens in new tab)

Personally, I really don't like the "swiping down in different areas does different things" that apple does, especially on a phone. The area is just too small for it to have multiple interactions. I much prefer how my android phone does it, with a single down-swipe area pulling down the "control panel", and swiping up to get to the apps menu/search area. I don't even know what top-left swipe down is on apple, is it just showing the time, but bigger?

Last week I bought my first iPhone, having been previously been only an Android user. The iOS gestures have this physicality to them; as described in TFA, it's clearly designed around a coherent metaphor for physical objects. In Android, gestures feel much more like easy-to-perform actions that have been mapped directly onto actions from desktop computers.

I'm not sure which I prefer yet, but I definitely know which is more comfortable, intuitive and premium-feeling to most users.

> Now here's a crazy one that I would not bet my money on being intentional. Although it is dope.

I had never seen that before (read the article to see the image, but it related to the Apple Pencil and the iPad's magnets.)

This article is far more in-depth than I expected when I opened it. Excellent resource. It has so many smooth illustrations - it itself is a wonderful example of great UI for an informational resource.

This excellent article is about user interface mechanisms and their physical metaphors, a pretty small subset of interaction design, despite the author's attempt to define the term.

More broadly, interaction design inhabits the elusive void that occurs between people, products, services and environments.

Once you're down to deciding between one interface mechanism or another you've abstracted the bigger, more important picture relating to what and why the interaction is taking place, or even if it should.

Just a reminder to zoom out every now and then.