If you’re a button, you have one job

One thing I was (and still am) worried about when it comes to my recent big interactive essay is that by showing all these classic desktop examples, the whole thing might appear old-fashioned, relevant only to a bygone era. Yet, the challenges it shows are universal. Here’s something I just spotted. This is how you rotate an image on an iPhone and on a Nothing Phone: It’s a pretty standard control – tap once to rotate counterclockwise, tap a second time to do it again, etc. – with a helpful transition of the photo’s orientation so that you don’t lose yours. Now, I’m going to exaggerate the problem a bit and tap 90-degree rotation quickly eight times. Eight times should result in what engineers call a “no op” – the image rotating twice in full, and ending up where it started. That indeed happens on the iPhone: But it’s a different story on the Nothing Phone/​Android: iPhone will remember and buffer the taps, so that the second, pending rotation will happen as soon as the first is done.…