I don't want to digress into why 3D touch is bad design. But you are sort of pointing it out right there. Everything has to be learned. There is no natural metaphor or "affordance" that guides how it is supposed to be used. It changes from device to device, from application to application.
I am pretty sure that Apple had plenty of design people (or just people with common sense) pointing out the flaws of the touch bar and 3D touch. Yet these big expensive projects are put forward. What drives that?
Right clicking on desktop brings up a contextual menu - useful. In the case of 3D touch in apps it frequently just directly performs an action, which is worse for understanding what's happening.
3D Touch is like keyboard shortcuts or Terminal on the Mac. You don't need them to use the platform productively, but power users may appreciate the efficiencies they enable.
A lot of people think that, if a feature or function is not immediately obvious to a new user, Apple did a bad job with that design.
But actually there is no way to build a powerful piece of technology and have it all be obvious. Trying to do that has resulted in a lot of really bad design over the years.
What product designers need to do is curate features--make the basic elements of interaction obvious, so regular folks can use the platform in the most common ways without too much thought. Then provide powerful tools for more sophisticated users--but by necessity they will be harder to discover.
Yeah, the person above didn't know about 3D Touch, but the point is that they have already been using the iPhone just fine without it! It is an enhancement, not a core function.
I'm sure there are other 3D Touch interactions that I don't know about, but that's fine. The iPhone is super powerful and it would be very hard (and probably pointless) to try to learn all the power features and little tricks.
This is exactly the thinking behind it and I'm so glad to see someone that gets it. It's one of the reasons why Windows is so hard for people to use, even when they use it regularly for their jobs. So much of the core functionality isn't discoverable because it's hidden behind right-clicks and ribbon menus. 3D Touch and the Touch Bar are for users that are already comfortable with the core where they can use that technology for efficiencies and additions.
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