Over the weekend, a video from Microsoft's Research Department demonstrated a new approach to a smartphone's interface. You already have touchscreens on your smartphone, and some handsets have pressure sensing '3D Touch' to go with it. Do we need to get ready for Microsoft's pre-touch?
Putting aside the use of a 'test bed' device in the video than many Windows followers (including Brad Sams on Thurrot,com) believe to be the rumoured Microsoft McLaren smartphone, Redmond's researchers demonstrated pre-touch in a video. The technology allows for inputs to be detected before there is physical contact with the screen. This allows for multi-touch to be implemented in the air above the screen of the device; sensing levels of grip on the side of a device; display controls that appear on-screen just before you need them and present different control schemes suited to the grip, orientation, and digits used to control an app.
It's clear that this is a research project and is not yet ready for prime time deployment just yet. Even though next year's Surface Phone is expected to ship with bleeding edge hardware and as much technology as Microsoft can practically pack into the phone, the level of integration and eduction needed to bring pre-touch to Windows 10 would be huge, and present significant risk to Microsoft from a software standpoint.
The trick to adding a new UI feature is to make it consistent across the platform, consistent across the built-in applications, and consistent in use across third-party applications (or at the very least ensure that third-party apps that don't use a new UI feature can fail gracefully when someone tries to use this).
Once you open up a platform to third-party apps there needs to be a regime to encourage this. While the use of official app stores and distribution networks such as the Google Play Store, the Windows Store, and the iPhone App Store can have compliance as part of the screening conditions for availability, the features need to be well documented in advance on developer websites. If I think back to the style guides and best practices for early mobile computing devices from Psion and Palm, it was always about ensuring apps looked consistent and had predictable functionality.
Next: Apple's failed introduction of 3D touch...
Take Apple's 3D Touch. This is an object case in how not to implement a UI function. While the technical details are simple (if you push harder on the screen, it registers in the code and a second function can be called up) in practice it is a case of guess where you can push, push, and see what happens. Pick up an iPhone and look at the home screen. Which apps have an extra 3D touch menu you can activate by pressing harder? It's impossible to tell. Open an app that has 3D touch on a feature? How do you know what you can hard-press or not?
These are fundamental UI problems if you want something like this to just work. Its implementation needs to be understandable, clear, and unambiguous. iOS is in the tricky situation where 3D touch is only available on a subset of devices - and the last three major releases (the iPad 12.9 inch, the iPad 9.7 inch, and the iPhone SE) do not feature the hardware. Why should developers sit and work out where 3D Touch is to be used and how to signal its presence, if Apple does not commit to the UI?
If you go back to the early days of Windows Phone, the utterly consistent interface was a joy to use, but it came at a price. Windows Mobile applications would not run, few developers made the jump to the new platform, and those that did were rarely behind the cutting edge apps out of silicon valley that drove the development of today's smartphone ecosystem. Windows Phone out of the box worked perfectly across all the apps because only Microsoft was coding apps for it.
Nether did Microsoft manage to have this utility continue through to newer Windows Phone devices. As time progressed the UI walked away from the striking simplicity of Windows 7 and moved closer to the Android paradigm. Now you have Windows 10 on mobile which has the hamburger menu, the settings menu, and a sprawl of options that has lost the power of consistency. On top of this Microsoft would look to add a new UI element that only a handful of new devices would be able to use? That path would surely leads to madness.
There is a possibility that Microsoft could follow Apple's approach and bring pre-touch to the Surface Phone as a technology demonstrator. It would certainly offer something new to the market. Given Microsoft has a much lower smartphone market share than Apple, any pre-touch applications on the Surface Phone would likely be those made by Microsoft, and nobody else. Redmond is already trying to get as many developers as possible to code universal apps that work over all the Windows 10 devices... isolating one part of that platform for a unique hardware feature on a subset of that platform is, in my opinion, asking far too much at this stage.
By all means show what the research team is up to, by all means make it clear this is still in the early stages and by all means keep working to find out the answer to 'what happens next'. But please be sensible and wait for technology to mature and for the ecosystem to be more receptive before ideas like pre-touch make it into production devices.
