Reactions on mobile device

digitalpoint

Well-known member
Affected version
2.2.13
Have you ever tried to select a reaction other than the default, “Like” on a device that doesn’t have “hover” ability (like a phone)? Try it. It’s always been so irritating I assume it’s going to be fixed at some point, but maybe I’m the only one that notices somehow?
 
It's just a very slight long click.

What's the bug?
Ya, I'm not saying it's not doable if you get the timing exactly right (like within 10ms). But it SUUUUCCCKKKKSSSS. I end up doing a Like on and off about 25 times before I finally get the intended reaction. Actually, as I got wiser with age and not trying to waste time, I go turn on my computer and do it from there so I'm not spending 30 minutes.
 
Can't say I've ever encountered that.

I guess the alternative would be to change to a click to bring up the menu and another click to select the reaction.
 
Can't say I've ever encountered that.

I guess the alternative would be to change to a click to bring up the menu and another click to select the reaction.
Ya, I just feel like it would work a LOT better/cleaner/as intended if it was similar to clicking on a user avatar...

On a computer, the hover event shows the member tooltip and the click event takes you to the member profile.

On a mobile device, the touch event shows the member tooltip, then the click event takes you to the member profile.

If it was working like the reactions, it would try to load the member tooltip at the same time as loading the member profile (useless).
 
Do you mean to say it's automatically selecting the like reaction during the long press? I haven't encountered that myself and couldn't reproduce it just now. Not to say the UX couldn't be improved upon either way, of course.
 
Do you mean to say it's automatically selecting the like reaction during the long press? I haven't encountered that myself and couldn't reproduce it just now. Not to say the UX couldn't be improved upon either way, of course.
I don't think it's technically selecting Like during the long press... however getting the timing of the long press right seems to be elusive to me somehow. Most of the time I end up with the reaction popup open and the Like link being pressed/Liked. And when Like doesn't get clicked, the text, "Like" ends up being selected like I'm trying to copy/paste it.

But even if I personally work all that out with some stuff to block text selection via CSS... how is an end user even supposed to know it's a long press (I mean even if it was all working as intended)? I'm fairly technical and I think it took me about a year to realize a long press was what I needed to (try and) do.
 
I can reproduce the text selection issue, but if I hold the like button for any amount of time longer than 200ms the tooltip appears and stays put, and the link is not pressed. What OS/browser are you using?

Point taken that gestures are not super discoverable in general. I believe XF does this so that a regular like is still available with a single tap. A lot of platforms use a double tap to select the default reaction and a long-press to pull up others, so maybe there's room to adjust the behavior here.
 
I can reproduce the text selection issue, but if I hold the like button for any amount of time longer than 200ms the tooltip appears and stays put, and the link is not pressed. What OS/browser are you using?
The text selection thing is easy enough with CSS... that wasn't the thing that was driving me batty... was the rest of it. Been using Chrome on iOS. It also seems like now that I'm trying to actually do it, I can't get it to happen again. I swear someone is trolling me and fixed it in the last hour or something because every time for the last few years it was a problem... even today right before I made this thread (I didn't update anything in the last hour on my end). lol

Was literally because I was trying to "Haha" this post and ended up having to go to my computer to do it:


That was the post that I finally decided to make this thread.

Point taken that gestures are not super discoverable in general. I believe XF does this so that a regular like is still available with a single tap. A lot of platforms use a double tap to select the default reaction and a long-press to pull up others, so maybe there's room to adjust the behavior here.
To me it would make sense to not require a gesture at all... well just a "click"... that pulls up the menu. I know it would be 2 clicks to do it on mobile, but is 2 single-clicks worse than a 1 double-click that no one knows about? I mean isn't that how clicking on avatars work? Ends up being 2 clicks to get to the member profile, but at least it's consistent and not hidden gestures. Imagine if you had to long-press to show the member tooltip instead of how it is now.
 
I know it would be 2 clicks to do it on mobile, but is 2 single-clicks worse than a 1 double-click that no one knows about?
Probaby depends on reaction usage - if reactions other than Like are only used infrequently it certainly does make sense (to me) to make that reaction avialable with just one tap.

Quickly checking stats on some of our forums seems to support this:
88 %, 98 %, 96 %, 99 %, 100% (no reactions other than like enabled) of all given reactions are Like

So in almost all cases (on our forums) the current behaviour seems fine as users can give the desired reaction without fuss - making them have to tap twice every time they want to give a reaction would actually make things more complicated for them.

That being said, I agree that long tap or double tap is not intuitive, but two taps also isn't ideal IMHO.

So we'd need a solution that does not require a log tap, a double tap or two taps :)

The user card IMHO pretty much has the same usage pattern:
In many cases it's not necessary to view the complete profile, viewing the member card is sufficient (that's the reason why it exists?) so making that available as easily as possible (eg. hover on desktop, one tap on mobile) again does make sense (to me).

 
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I get this all the time in Chrome on iPhone; trying to select a reaction other than Like is such a fiddly process I often give up in frustration; a change to tap (open) + tap (select) would be a big improvement IMHO.
 
Can anyone get a screen recording of it happening?

The text selection thing is annoying but historically there hasn’t been an easy solution to that.

But I’ve never struggled to get the reaction tooltip to trigger on tap and hold.
 
If that does indeed work without doing some other weird stuff then it never used to.

Last time I tried it (which was a couple of years ago) it would behave weirdly on iOS.

Such as the like text no longer being selectable but then the container around it would get selected and if you put user-select none on that as well then selection would occur around that and so on.
 
If that does indeed work without doing some other weird stuff then it never used to.

Last time I tried it (which was a couple of years ago) it would behave weirdly on iOS.

Such as the like text no longer being selectable but then the container around it would get selected and if you put user-select none on that as well then selection would occur around that and so on.
I didn't test it exhaustively, but a basic test just now and it works as I would expect on Desktop Chrome and Safari on iOS (Safari needs the -webkit prefix, but Chrome is fine without it).
 
Can anyone get a screen recording of it happening?
I've been trying and I swear something had to of changed. Because for the last 3 or 4 years, I couldn't NOT get it to happen (more times than I can count I either had to go to a desktop machine to give a reaction other than Like or just settle for Like because I didn't care enough to go to a desktop machine), but now I can't.

Still hate the fact that it's a long press though because normal users don't know that. It look me probably a year or so to figure out you could do it on mobile with a long press, and that was only because I stumbled upon the touchhold event in the JavaScript source. So how a normal user is expected to know this, I'm not sure...
 
It’s basically identical to Facebook on mobile so a good chunk of people will be familiar with it at least.

We could potentially add some UI hints somewhere or explore another approach.

But, no, nothing has changed, I promise!
 
While I personally agree that gestures do not make for discoverable UX on the whole, tapping an item to select it and long-pressing an item to bring up further options is a pretty pervasive pattern for touch devices. A lot of messaging platforms use a similar pattern for their reactions choices.
 
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