The Concept of "focus"

This is the first post on my ongoing series - “Focus” on tvOS. This series will go through all the nuances of “focus” to deepen your understanding and hopefully help you fix any problems you may be facing to deal with this.

What is Focus

One of the key reasons for the need of this concept is the absence of pointer or cursor on platforms like tvOS, vision pro.

Or using pointer free input methods like keyboard, apple watch digital crown or even game controller

When you use a mouse or a trackpad, the system uses coordinates of the cursor to find the target of that interaction. Same thing with touchscreen devices - they use the coordinates of point of the screen that was tapped.

Focus provides the extra information to direct input without the need of a pointer

Focused views have special emphasis

This assists usability of the app by communicating which component will receive input. For example on tvOS — focused view receives a hover effect that lifts the focused view above the plane

WatchOS draws a green border around the controls that are in focus — This signals the user that its value can be changed by rotating the digital Crown.

And macOS and IpadOS add coloured border or background around focused view to show that user is interacting with them.

And in case of iOS, applying focus to text fields brings up a keyboard!

To summarise, focus acts as a cursor to make user understand where there input goes. And in a complex visual layouts it reminds users which part of the app they are interacting with.