What is the term for the design pattern/micro-interaction where you speed up an action by holding a button?

Question

I think most of us are familiar with the interaction of holding onto a button and watching a particular value increment or cycle through at a constant speed.

However, I think it is common practice for many devices and applications these days to also incorporate a secondary interaction when you hold onto a button, which is to speed up when you hold onto it for a set amount of time.

For example, the volume button or control when pressed once will increment the value by one. When you press and hold for over a set amount of time (e.g. 1 second) then the value will increase much faster in a shorter period of time.

What is the term used to describe this design pattern or interaction? Are there other variations of this interaction that exists (i.e. other than just speeding up)?

Answer 1

A bit of Android background. If I am understanding correctly: yes, this is a known interaction/gesture, that goes under the names of "long press", "long tap" or "long click". I haven't personally come across the usage that you're describing ("speeding up things"), however that seems like a good use case.

Ideally, according to Material Design principles, long clicks should reveal some sort of contextual menu or additional modes (such as selection mode for example, where you could edit or remove the item you selected) or actions.

From my personal experience the usage I described tends to be more and more obsolete, as designers tend to use three vertical dots to show additional actions. That's because long press actions are not always easily discoverable.

That being said, I think the speeding up action is still a good use case, as it saves user the time to increment the value. Just make sure your users know about it!