Double Tap: A Game Changing Device for the Age of Wearable Computers, Tablets, and Smartphones – An Analysis of a Case Study in the Apple Watch Sector
When I reviewed the Series 9 and Ultra 2, I got a rundown about the double tap, but it doesn’t work as well in your day-to-day life. Controlling gadgets with gestures is often gimmicky — tech that seeks to show off rather than solve a problem. But double tap does solve a genuine problem and is born from accessible design that serves real needs. That made me curious about what went into creating the gesture and how it will change the future of watches.
Double tap isn’t designed to help you navigate anything. It’s like the mouse to your computer, the best way to describe it is Assistive Touch. It chooses, scrolls, and is highly programmed. The portion of a mouse’s double-click that is referred to as double tap is very similar to that of double tap. You use it solely to perform the main action of an app. To do that Apple had to research what people wanted and how they would do it in a single double tap.
Apple Watch’s Double Tap Gesture Points at a New Way to Use Wearable Sensors: Revealing Anomalies in Wrist Data
If you know anything about wearable sensors, that’s not as simple as it sounds. Wrist data is incredibly tricky to work with because there’s a lot of noise in the signal. When figuring out how light reflects off of blood pumping through your veins, a smartwatch has to account for your arm being physically moving around during different activities. There are no two people with the same body. Wrist size and limb length have to be taken into account.
Clark saysReliability means when you do the gesture we are able to detect it. Reliability means we are not making a gesture when we do things that are close to a tap. By tuning these things with the appropriate scenarios, we can detect the right thing.
If the watch is used with features that are not in motion, it will also have to be able to differentiate when someone is doing activities that are not in motion. The noise caused by subsystems likeLTE must be able to be taken into account by the second tap, despite the fact that taking calls and streaming music are unrelated. That’s harder to do well when everything is done on the main CPU.
That’s the technical side of the equation. Since you can try both double tap and Assistive Touch, it’s easier to see which one is better.
“We don’t think of it necessarily as ‘Hey, there are four available gestures here.’ The ability to modify those gestures goes further than what your audience can do, therefore the audience needs the ability to change them in a way that you don’t.
“We did a lot of testing internally, and one of the things we learned is that when you tell someone to pinch, they hold the lower part of the gesture more than they release. Charles said that the simple name change led to more accurate performing of the tap gesture.
It is clear from the conversations with Clark and Charles that Apple went through a very long process to get this feature.
Source: The Apple Watch’s double tap gesture points at a new way to use wearables
Double Tap to Skip to the Next Track: How Smart are Third-Party Apps? The Impact of iTunes and Google on Media Control and Apps
The media controls are an example. Should you either stop or play your music? Or should you just go to the next track? The former makes more sense if you use your watch to control your smart speakers. If the wrong song pops up on your music player, it’s more useful. I’ve run into this in various scenarios, but this happens to be one of only two instances where you can choose what double tap does. I decided to double tap to skip to the next track.
That lack of choice is also apparent in third-party apps. My email app lets me double-tap to start a quick reply using Siri, but even in 2023, I am not dictating my emails. Double tap doesn’t work with apps like Pocket Casts. Most third-party apps that do work with double tap just let you dismiss notifications. It’s helpful but still limiting.
With the Smart Stack, choosing Advance will allow you to scroll through your list of widgets. That is pretty straightforward. It’s possible that Select may require a bit of thought. It’s made so that you can launch the app associated with the first one in the Smart Stack. Apple is hoping that it will be able to surface the most relevant Widget to the top spot at a given time. The kind of artificial intelligence often comes with limitations and it takes a little time to lear your patterns.
Double Tap: Scroll Wheels and Trackballs for Simple and Customizable Apps and Media Apps in the Windows XBox Live App Store
Clark says that a lot more complexity can come into the process with customization, even though it can be a really powerful tool. I get what Clark means. Not everyone has the time to set up dozens of Focus modes. You inevitably have to narrow the focus if you want to keep things simple.
It isn’t always easy to work that way. Sometimes the primary action doesn’t suit my goals and I have to use my other hand. If I ask to access the app, I might have to use the crown to find the info I need. But it’s not hard to imagine future iterations of double tap can both scroll and select. It doesn’t have the same comprehensiveness but it still strikes a delicate balance of simplicity and customizability, without relying too much on Apple trying to figure out what you want to do.
There is a reason computer mice have left and right buttons, scroll wheels, single clicks, double clicks, and trackballs to help the sickos. There are single and triple taps if the S9 SiP can handle a double tap. And then we could have some real fun.
This only works within Apple’s Music andPodcast apps. Skip moves forward 30 seconds in an episode. A third-party media app does not do anything if you try to use it. Double tap with third party apps is limited to notifications.
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That’s it. I wish you could modify more, but you cannot at this point in time. This new feature is a very new one and it is possible Apple will add more options down the line. In the meantime, you should play around with these customization settings and see what works best for your individual needs.