When Apple sets a precedent, as an app developer, it’s usually in your best interests to follow their lead. The key word is “usually”, here.

In the Photos app, Apple uses the “Action” icon on two of the buttons in the app. While it can be argued that the two buttons have somewhat similar functions, they’re actually very different.

Here’s how Apple describes the usage for the standard Action button in the bible of iPhone app design, the iOS Human Interface Guidelines (HIG):

Action
Open an action sheet that allows users to take an application-specific action

While we’re referencing the HIG, I might as well point out this little, but very relevant tidbit:

To avoid confusing people, never use the standard buttons and icons to mean something else. Be sure you understand the documented meaning of a standard button or icon; don’t rely on your interpretation of its appearance.

For the one that’s in the bottom-left corner when a individual photo is displayed, it’s definitely the proper usage for the button as it opens an action sheet which makes several actions available to be taken on the photo.

But for the one that’s in the top-right corner when viewing an album in your photo library, it can definitely be argued that Apple’s misusing the button. In this instance, the button is used to put the app in a mode where you can select multiple photos by tapping on each. You’re then able to perform various actions on the set of photos via the four buttons at the bottom of the screen.

To put it more concisely, the button enables multiple-select mode.

Before version 2.1 of our Camera+ app, we followed Apple’s lead and used the Action icon in the Lightbox section of the app. It seemed like the right thing to do for consistency’s sake. Bear in mind that although most of the UIs in our apps are custom as far as graphics go, we’re very adamant about consistency in behavior, as every developer should be.

Over the months that Camera+ has been out in the wild, we’ve observed many, many people using the app in the real world. One thing that initially surprised us was to learn that most people had no idea that multiple photos could be selected in the Lightbox. Even though we mimicked the way Apple set things up in their Photos app, it soon became obvious to us that this function was less than obvious to our users, unfortunately.

As the months have gone on, we became more and more frustrated by the fact that one of the most convenient features of the app was one of the most underused, mainly because it was essentially unknown. Our users were inefficiently sharing, deleting, etc one photo at a time when they could save lots of time by selecting multiple photos and then performing whatever action was desired on the group.

So we decided to do something about it… We chose to break from Apple’s precedent and change our multiple-select button icon to something that was much more representative of what it actually does.

Right after we made the change, Scott showed the app to one of his friends and the person immediately noticed the change and said, “Oh, so that’s how you share a bunch of pics!” We knew we did the right thing then. In the big scheme of things, this is a fairly minor detail, but it’s the little details like this that add-up and make for a better user experience in the end.

Multiple sharing isn’t the kind of thing that most people would do every time they’d like to share something in their photo collection. Most of the time people just want to share one particular photo and that’s fine. But for the times when it’s desirable to share a bunch all together, it’s a good thing to have the mechanism to do so be as intuitive as possible.

For those of you who’d like to see Camera+’s multiple-selection in action, Lisa recently made a helpful video on it:

http://taptaptap.com/blog/multiple-photo-sharing-with-camera/

We’re making the multiple-selection icon available to you in case you’d like to use it in any of your apps where appropriate. There’s a .png that can be directly used in a standard control and a Photoshop .psd so that you can tweak it to suit your needs.

MultiSelect.zip