iTunes: Swiping Gestures Gone Bad

Observed as recently as iTunes 11.2.2.

The iTunes Store has a really annoying usability bug around swipe gestures. Go to the home tab of the Movies part of the store and you'll see a number of content "wells"... many of these are side-scrolling areas where you can view the movie posters. For each of those, you are able to use two-finger swipes (on a trackpad, single-finger swipes on a Magic Mouse) to scroll these left and right to view more content.

But, the very same gesture is used to navigate backward and forward through the store (similar to how it works in Safari for browser history). What makes this so bad is that the gesture does different things based on where your mouse cursor is.

Here's a screen shot to illustrate the problem a little bit:

There are three regions highlighted above:

1. This one will cause you to navigate backward to Music, since the scrolling region can't scroll to the right any further.
2. This area does not scroll, so swiping here will also make you navigate back to Music.
3. This area can scroll some more (you can see there's more content to the left), so a swipe here will scroll that region and will not navigate back to Music.

This is madenning. It means I have to pay attention to where the mouse cursor is resting any time I use these gestures. And if it is resting on a scrollable region, I need to also observe where the scroll bar position is, so I know whether the gesture will result in scrolling that area versus moving me to a different page (and even more tricky, since OS X doesn't show the scroll bar in a resting state).

Apple's Multi-Touch Gestures article documents all of them and even calls out the exception for the "Swipe to navigate" gesture:

Note: If there is horizontal content to scroll, this gesture will first scrolls (sic) to the end of content and then it will move to the next page.

So what's the solution? I would recommend following the pattern used on iPad: drop the forward/backward history navigation for the iTunes app and switch to tabs for different areas of the store or just simple forward/backward buttons if necessary. Stop doing two things with the same gesture.

I made a short video to further illustrate the problem:

(This video should be viewed full-screen so you can see what's going on a little better.)

Apple: please fix that.