I’ve first used an iPhone and iPad before I experienced using an Android (particularly a meager Samsung Galaxy Y with Android 2.3). The very natural controls of Android were the static/consistent position of Back and its context menus (long pressing certain items particularly lists).
Then I had to use iPhone again and kept on tapping on the wrong places. Yes, it is all about habit and conditioning but I’d still find that back button useful for iPhone (instead of having it on the top toolbar).
And the context menu. Why do I need to take extra steps in deleting or editing an item? For example, I would like to delete a contact; in Android, long pressing a contact would bring up a context menu while in iPhone you would need to find the Edit button and find out what is available to edit.
I remember in the era of DHTML, right-click customized menus in webpages were made available. But it was against the norm and it was new and people just wanted to stick with what’s recognizable.
That shouldn’t happen in these times. We should be innovating towards what would make the lives of people easier and better (or at least not harder or worse).
A time will come when everything would have context menus. You would have an option to do something to anything you right-click on or long-press on. Or maybe to anything you point your Wikipedia gun at.
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