Back, Home and Multitasking. The UX that does it best.

For almost a decade, there has been an unfavorable flaw with the navigation system of mobile OSes, that has largely gone unnoticed. I am not sure if the changes introduced in Android P was intended to solve this flaw (probably not) but it did for me nonetheless. But what was this flaw?

The Flaw

An extensive upgrade in phone specs these days is the RAM. One of the key ways to leverage this magnanimous RAM is, obviously, Multitasking.

Arguably the fastest phone in the market today, the OnePlus 7 Pro, is doing that by pre-loading some of the most used apps in the RAM. iOS has done that for years by pre-loading them within the phone storage (which also leads to 2x or more memory occupied by Apps compared to Android, something they are correcting with iOS 13.)

The whole idea of multitasking is to quickly switch between apps and pick where you left off.

Now, there are two ways you can switch between apps:

Go to Home and select from the shortcuts/pull out the App Drawer.
Launch the multitasking carousel, and swipe to find the app.

In the old 3-button navigation system (back, home and multitasking), choosing multitasking button to press is spatially a deliberate choice, competing with the home button which is naturally under the thumb. Here I find a critical flaw: I find myself opting for the App Drawer, even when I have the faster option of opening from the carousel.

This stems from a common bias: When presented with a decision, you instinctively tend to pick the familiar choice that has always worked over a new choice that has emerged. Here, you know the app you’re looking for is there in the app drawer, while it may/may not be there in the carousel.

Also, sheer muscle memory can remember the fixed location in the case of app drawer/home screen, while you have to attentively dig deep into the multitasking stack for the app, not knowing even if it’s there.

I find myself opting for the App Drawer, even when I have the better option of opening from the multitasking carousel.

The fully-Gesture navigation system is meh!

iOS, and now Android Q have the multitasking carousel appear mid-way through the process of accessing app drawer. As you swipe up from the bottom for home, the animation warps in and out of the multitasking carousel, on your way to the home screen.

Source: Apple

This happens so quickly that you won’t even notice. But if you stop mid-way, you can swiftly switch to another app in the carousel, but again: this is more strenuous as it requires the user to deliberately slow down, against the rapid fat-finger swipe up to go home. The plan to put the option of multitasking carousel always within your purviewfails.

Android Pie succeeds here simply by allowing you to access App Drawer from the Multitasking screen. This means you can access the App Drawer while always keeping the Multitasking carousel in your purview. (more on this later

In the full swipe navigation, you can swipe in a quarter curve from the bottom to the right edge which registers as a half-swipe for the carousel. The full swipe up is, still HOME. This is less strenuous, but the problem is still the same as 3-button navigation system: You are required to make the deliberate choice.

Sadly, Android will be switching to this in the upcoming Q, while Android Pie actually perfectly solved the problem. At least, more perfect than ever.

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Android Pie: The discarded perfection

The current Android P way has done something very interesting: Both App drawer and Multitasking carousel is accessed via a Swipe Up. The former launches when swiped on the dock, the latter works on the navigation bar.

This accomplishes a key thing: The user is programmed to always swipe-up to switch apps, no matter the way.

Add to this another clever trick: showing a dock of contextually relevant apps right below the horizontal multitasking carousel. You can directly swipe up on this dock to access the app drawer. So even if the carousel was the wrong choice, the number of steps still remain the same.

You can basically habituate to accessing app drawer this way, making sure the multitasking tasking is always in your purview, always an option to explore.

This fundamentally encourages the user to always use multitasking. Google further adds a Google Search bar above this dock, further reducing steps in various flows. There are two caveats though:

Many user, including me, have apps to open from the Home Screen shortcuts.
Some phones like the OnePlus don’t feature that dock below the carousel.

So moving forward, let’s assume there’s no dock below the carousel. This implies only the one accomplishment so far: The user is programmed to swipe-up to switch apps, no matter the way.

Unlike the swipe that allows you quickly swipe across to switch to the last app, Android P allows you the direct gesture to drag the home button across like a scroll button to switch multiple apps deep.

And ofcourse, Android P hybrid way has a dedicated back button.

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Your affective relationship with Taps and Gestures

A user must deliberately tap on the home button to access the dock vis-à-vis app drawer. Affectively, A tap can often feel like a switch. A tap is a full stop. A shift to a new paragraph, a new state, or a new app.

A gesture feels more like a comma. A smooth transition within a state. The passage to the next step in an ongoing task. So yes, a gesture is affectively the best way to traverse within multiple apps working together to accomplish a single task.

Gestures is the natural way to accomplish multi-tasking.

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Implications of Android Pie’s accomplishments

I prefer this discrete personalities of the home and the multitasking action, instead of being plotted over the same intensity gradient of half and full swipes. Affectively they don’t compete. And nor do they compete spatially: both of them can be accessed from the same place on the navigation bar.

Only Back and Home should compete, Spatially and Affectively.

The back button takes you one step back, the home button takes you all the way to the default home screen. It makes sense for home and back to compete spatially and affectively on taps, the app drawer and multitasking carousel to compete on gestures, while it makes not much sense for the home and multitasking to directly compete for user choice. Competing similar actions between two not so clearly similar options, is often gonna get a decision from the user that is familiar, not necessarily better. It’s either gonna cognitively slow things down or the user will randomly choose one.

You can tap to go home or swipe up to launch multitasking. Continue “swip-ing” across to navigate the carousel. No effort or time consumed switching between tap and gesture like in the 3-button navigation system. In fact, you can learn to simply dragging the home button across like a scroll button to move across the carousel. Google has designed a step scroll with hap-tic feedback to keep interaction controlled and deterministic.

And of-course, this implicitly supplies the quick & simple swipe switch between two apps.

Back is, for the most-part, a system-wide undo button. Back and Home, alongside an empty slot for (the newly introduced) contextual buttons like rotate screen, keyboard options, etc. is indeed the better way.

OnePlus 7 Pro allows the user to choose between all 3 navigation system. I have all 3 options and I discard the old TAP way and the new SWIPE way, in favor of the P’s Hybrid way. I am naturally always dragging across the home button and switching between multiple (not just 2) apps at a time. Taking into consider the multitasking carousel is second nature to my thumbs. Coming from a Blackberry KeyOne where I can program every physical key on the qwerty keyboard to 52 apps or just type the name, I despised having to dig through the app drawer. Dragging the home button is a fun, easy way of juggling between apps.

BUT… If my arguments doesn’t convince you, I can still see why you would want to mostly stay away from the new fully swipe navigation system: the undying love for the dedicated back button.

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