These are helpful features, and someday most third party apps will have some 3D Touch capabilities that will make interacting with our phones a more enjoyable experience. In the first couple days I've had the phone, however, I've just been jamming on everything. Most apps have no 3D Touch features, and the (admittedly customizable) sensitivity of a 3D Touch isn't all that different from the one that lets you move around or delete apps on the home screen.As a result, a not-insignificant number of 3D Touch attempts result in the screen temporarily fuzzing out or all the icons shaking (and it's not just me). Much of this is user error, of course, but my short experience with 3D Touch makes passages like this one in Matthew Panzarino's 6S review for TechCrunch seem totally outlandish.Using 3D Touch isn't allowing us to connect more deeply with the date we're ignoring to open the 'new tweet' dialogue in one press instead of two
Thing is, using 3D Touch isn't saving us any "cognitive load," and we're not banking the fractions of a second saved here and there and using it to Learn How To Code or speak a foreign language or connect more deeply with the date we're ignoring to open the "new tweet" dialogue in one press instead of two.The feature is a great one, and it's certainly a useful innovation that's probably going to change mobile gaming (imagine the possibilities for even more frustrating and terrible endless runners) and will probably make using phones a little more like using a regular computer.3D Touch is not automating breakfast or responding to our emails for us, and that's fine.For a feature like this to actually save us time in the way Panzarino theorizes, it'd require people to use their phones flawlessly, all the time, then use that time to do something useful and productive. Anyone who has ever typed anything on a smartphone knows that first bit is not ever going to happen; anyone who is human knows that we all waste bits of time on, well, everything, all the time."I did some admittedly very sketchy math based on just email and Twitter usage and came up with an average of 840 interactions taking an average of a second each to complete. That's around 14 minutes a week I spend just tapping around. If you slice that into thirds then I'll save just under 5 minutes a week by using 3D Touch — note, that's only email and Twitter, and doesn't take into account the cognitive load it takes to find a button on the screen once the app loads.
Doesn't seem like a lot, but once third-party apps get on the bandwagon and you're able to 'deep link' to explicit functions within apps, this has enormous time-savings potential. Slivers of time saved across trillions of interactions on hundreds of millions of devices."