Apple: it’s time to bin the Home indicator when we’re playing games
I wrote yesterday, with a perhaps uncharacteristic lack of snark and cynicism, about Apple’s latest event. Much of my disappointment was in other people being disappointed about Apple having apparently done something entirely different in these people’s dreams from reality. (Such is life.) But I was largely happy with what Apple showed. I will however make one exception – and it’s readily apparent in a big chunk of the Apple Arcade section of the keynote video. Once again, I’m talking about the dreaded Home indicator.
Said indicator is the strip that appears at the bottom of every iPhone and iPad that lacks a Home button. It more or less replaces a physical control with a virtual one, providing a place to swipe that switches apps or takes you back to the Home screen. Given that Apple was roundly – and rightly – criticised for a lack of affordances in the overly minimal iOS 7 overhaul, this indicator is a necessary and useful piece of interface design.
The snag is that it’s in certain cases abhorrent. Apple wisely has it fade out when you’re watching video, because it would otherwise wreck the immersive experience, much in the same way your telly wouldn’t be the same if someone scrawled across the bottom of the screen with a fat marker pen. But video isn’t the only immersive experience on iOS. In reading apps – especially with comics – the Home indicator is a distraction. And in games, the indicator is an eyesore – the worst of interface design.
Whatever you’re doing, the Home indicator remains, scything its way across the bottom of the display, often in a contrasting colour that makes it the most prominent thing that’s visible on the screen. (Check out the bright white stripe in Capcom’s game demo at around the eight-minute mark of the keynote video.) Some games fade the Home indicator, and a few have somehow figured out how to turn it off entirely; but it always springs back to life when you interact with the screen. In videogames – and this might come as a shock to Apple execs, who probably don’t play games that often – this tends to happen rather frequently.
The Home indicator should be on by default. I have no argument with that. But reading apps and games should be allowed to disable this interface component. And if that’s too much for Apple to stomach, users should be able to delve into Settings and turn it off themselves.
I would argue that the home indicator isn’t necessary at all. On my iPhone 5s (which has a physical home button), swiping up from the bottom edge brings up Control Center, and swiping down from the top edge brings up Notification Center. Neither of these functions has a visible indicator. Likewise, I have an Android tablet in which swiping from various edges brings up various UI elements, again with no indicators.
In short, functionality that is triggered by swiping from an edge doesn’t require a visible indicator, once the user has learned that it exists.
> once the user has learned that it exists
I guess the question is when you know that a user has learned this.
I still remember getting my first Mac, decades ago, opening a game, and having no clue how to quit it again. The game itself didn’t have any kind of UI to bring up a menu or exit the game, it just expected users to know that they could Cmd-Q it. I ended up turning the computer off using the power switch on the back.
Similarly, there’s this video of Chris Pirillo’s dad using Windows 8, which was reposted on all fo the Mac blogs when it came out, with people making fun of how hard to use Windows 8 was. Pirillos’ dad was unable to use Windows 8, since he didn’t know how to do things like switch between apps, which required mouse gestures. Now, this is explained very clearly the first time you run Windows 8, but he was using a Windows 8 installation that somebody else had set up, so he never got to see that introduction.
So how can iOS know whether the user knows how to go to the Home screen?
You can use iOS without notifications and without the control center, but you can’t use it without going back to the home screen, so it’s probably somewhat acceptable to leave notifications and the control center completely hidden, but the same doesn’t apply to the Home indicator.
I guess the other question is whether the white strip actually provides any kind of useful affordance. If you don’t know how to go to the home screen, do you really understand that a random glitchy white thing at the bottom of the screen is trying to tell you to swipe up to go home? This seems weird, too.
I don’t think there’s a really good solution here, but I guess I agree that the Home indicator should not be shown, since it is incredibly ugly, and since I suspect that it doesn’t do much good anyways.
I like how Android solves this: it reserves space at the bottom of the screen for the back, home, and app switcher buttons. These buttons slide down, out of the screen, when they’re hidden. So if a game hides the buttons, it’s kind of reasonable to think that maybe swiping up on that edge will bring the buttons back.