What Makes Interaction Feel Right
Tap. Drag. Fling. Swipe. Every touch interaction on your phone is a gesture — a pattern the interface recognizes from your finger's movement. This guide breaks down each gesture with interactive demos you can feel directly.
Direct manipulation
The most important principle in touch interaction design is direct manipulation: the content moves with your finger, one-to-one, with zero perceptible delay. When this works, the screen feels like a physical surface. When there's even 50ms of lag, the illusion breaks — you're no longer touching the content, you're remote-controlling it.
Apple's HI team measured that users can perceive as little as 10ms of input lag. This is why every gesture in this guide starts with immediate 1:1 tracking during the touch, and only applies physics (springs, momentum, snapping) after the finger lifts.
The feedback loop
Every touch interaction follows a four-phase cycle:
- Press — the finger makes contact. The interface responds instantly with a visual change (highlight, scale, ripple) to confirm it received the touch.
- Follow — if the finger moves, the content follows 1:1. This is the direct manipulation phase. The system is still deciding what gesture this will become.
- Release — the finger lifts. The system now knows what happened (tap, fling, swipe) and commits to the appropriate response.
- Settle — physics take over. Content coasts with momentum, springs back to a snap point, bounces off boundaries. This phase communicates the result of the gesture.
When all four phases are present and well-tuned, the interaction feels continuous and alive. When any phase is missing — no press feedback, laggy tracking, abrupt stop after release — the interaction feels broken.
Try it: the feedback loop in action
Touch or click the area below and drag around. Watch the phase indicator change as your interaction moves through all four stages.
fig-000 · gesture feedback loop