While I didn’t have as much fun with car lights, I experienced another nice motor memory moment last week when using CarPlay.

During my drive, I wanted to ask the new Siri something – but as only an occasional driver, and my phone out of sight, I was puzzled as to how to actually invoke it.

I did see the new Siri app icon appear in the sidebar on the car’s screen, but tapping on that only showed me a list of prior conversations. Sure, I could probably initiate a new chat by tapping the button in the top right corner, but that corner felt really far away from where I was sitting, and didn’t feel inviting to someone who – just as a reminder – was driving a car at that time:

So before giving up, I did one thing that somehow felt very natural – I pressed and held the “home” button in the bottom left corner:

And… it totally worked.

I feel that with any good motor memory story, your fingers do something seemingly on their own, and then it’s up to you to figure out why they did so.

I believe in this case they did so because Apple built a good set of overlapping gestures and expectations:

• In many other places – iPhone, Apple TV – you long press a physical button to invoke Siri.
• Also, on Apple’s touch devices and on Apple TV, “long press” on a touch target has been a consistent entry point to an “advanced function” in a same way right click is on desktop.
• Lastly, on earlier iPhones asking for Siri was literally a long press of the physical home button:

So, kudos to the many designers on sustaining a stable gesture system that lasted decades, and embedded itself in my fingers so well that it felt completely natural to invoke in a situation I really wasn’t allowed to split my attention or play with the interface.

An extra delightful moment in that last video – note how the physical home button and the virtual Siri button match in size.