For novice users, they may not know to Tap and hold an a button or UI element. Is there any good way of hinting that there is a "Tap and Hold" action under a visual item?
+2
A:
There is no convention for indicating a touch and hold behaviour.
As per the user guidelines:
The touch and hold gesture should generally be used to display a context menu or options page for an item.
Try and make it clear from the design of your application where such behaviour is supported. This could be by only using this in the same way as the OS and built in apps do.
You also shouldn't put key features behind such an action. Always allow a discoverable way of doing things and then allow alternate, quicker, ways of performing actions behind actions like this.
Sorry that's quite vague but use of such a gesture needs to be carefully integrated with the application design.
Matt Lacey
2010-10-18 23:48:51
This is good advice. If you copy what the built in UI does then users will learn to use it pretty quickly. If you do something different then it is something else for the user to learn, so you should avoid that wherever sensible.
Stewart
2010-10-19 06:36:57