What are there, 1B Android users? I'm sure Google would like that to be 7B.
I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users.
Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1].
It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming they're simply wrong or "for no reason" is somewhere between angry and lazy.
Just a glance at the new vs old keyboard or gmail shows a direction - moving / duplicating interactions toward the bottom right (logical as screens get bigger), breaking out punctuation into discrete keys (presumably logical given the way most people actually type).
The overall restyling is adding consistency between apps and particularly between mobile and the desktop.
Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.
When I help people out with their computers and I run updates (pretty much everyone I go to stay with!) they always complain if there's been a change in the UI at all - "why's that button moved?" "where's my favourites?" "how do I access my inbox now?" "why does it keep popping up that thing?" ...
I'd really like to see some respect for this from people like Firefox - "we won't move any major UI elements or update the default skin more than once every 2 years". Of course the marketing is all about the novelty at the moment - steadfastness doesn't count for much in tech circles it seems. With stable UI you can have a less rapidly changing system for users to comprehend; running updates for security fixes shouldn't mean you have to face a new menu paradigm or new default screen or new tab shape or new whatever every few weeks.
Seriously. I don't enable auto-update on supported users apps for this reason.
I couldn't disagree more. Of course there no sense in moving things around just for the sake of changing something, and implementing those design changes is always prone to making bad decisions. However I pretty much want the applications I use to move forward and if this means iterative design adjustments, then by all means, do it.
The people complaining about any kind of change are usually the ones who learn using an application by trying to exactly memorize navigation paths and word-for-word expressions in menus, which feels absolutely wrong to me. It's like learning stuff in school by memorizing the content word for word, without understanding any of them or the context in general. It may work for while, but not for long.
I know that the average person is very different from the tech-savvy crowd around here, in fact I work with non-technical people everyday, yet this helplessness once a button or a feature has been moved is still very surprising to me and I think it's a better idea to try to educate people not to hang on to memorized paths, but instead look for plausible context, really consider where you'd expect a certain feature to be located. That's exactly what the developer did for his app - well, in most cases. Avoiding change in software design is not the solution.
As a front-end engineer who works on desktop Firefox for Mozilla, I think we have actually held to your "no major redesigns more than once every 2 years" request ;)
Australis was a UI change that we don't anticipate doing more than once every two years. We recognize the costs of doing so, for users, add-on devs, and Mozilla devs.
This is why I won't recommend Android to any friends or family. Being the most technically literate person most of them know, they all come to me for help fixing problems with their computers or phones.
The UI changes in iOS7 caused a whole bunch of questions and problems with my "support network", but with Android it would be like that every year with every OS update.
Non-techy people aren't good at tech. They don't grok it. Usually they operate it by learning it by rote. "Click the button there, then click/tap this". To them working a piece of tech is like learning off spells. When you change the UI, it's like someone changed the language you're trying to work in. They have to relearn from scratch.
Same here. The technical folks will immediately update, discover the UI annoyances and find means to overcome them. But I notice that non-technical family and friends become very much annoyed when they are continuously pushed to update their software and almost everything changes within the UI.
Companies have switched from introducing new features and backend improvements (what the technical folks used to care about) to what they feel everyone can see, the UI. As a result, the software has not fundamentally changed, minus a few small new features, but it looks like a brand new product.
> Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.
Yeah, whenever I see sentence like "as a user, I don't care about animations" I just stop reading the rest. I appreciate the fact that you, the article/comment writer, have good mental model about what is going on and you want to be as fast as possible, but that comment also shows that you aren't a typical user and you don't have a clue how common people thinks.
Well thought out animation is also something that should improve usability. It directs user focus and can give hints as to what just happened.
I actually think most of the animation in Lollipop is rather well thought out from a UX perspective. It might be a teensy bit showy but I rather like it.
Exactly. Not to mention, these changes make many users feel like they are getting something new (for free even). Even if it just a style change, my girlfriend really enjoys seeing the new look of the phone. I actually purposely let her do the updates on my android phone because I'm not overly excited about the changes but I know she is (she is an apple user so can't experience new android stuff otherwise).
> Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already.
This argument conflates the problem (lacking a mental model) with a solution (animations). This Mr Programmer is confused by elements flying around in front of them. Maybe regular users get confused too?
I agree with you, but it seems the train has already left the station.
I don't use my tablet all that much, but I don't find myself questioning how something is done (that stuff didn't really change), or why things look different (I don't really care). It's just... different, nothing else.
Argh, lollipop's driving me up the wall! Vent time, woo!
The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.
And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.
And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.
The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.
The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.
I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.
The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.
And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.
The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.
I'm pretty pleased with lollipop. Some of your complaints may be down to personal choice, but not all. For example, the triangle animation changes from pointing left when the action would be 'back', to down when the action is 'down', as in hiding the keyboard.
Some other thoughts:
- Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead.
- Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for.
- The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.
Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to:
- Guest accounts
- Brightness slider in the swipe down
- Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing.
- Lock rotation in the swipe down settings
- Flashlight in the swipe down settings
Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy, it gives me joy.
It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want?
I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel. To bring this experience to the unwashed masses of Android users is a very good thing.
I had an iPhone, switched to Nexus 5. Nexus 5 already produced joy in me, it really is a great phone and as an ex-iPhoner I really think Android is prime time now and almost as good as iOS (my only issue is that some of the built in apps are a bit rubbish and Google Hangouts, the default, sucks as an SMS program).
But I'm getting no joy from Lollipop. Apart from all the interface issues I've hit, it seems fairly bug ridden.Some notification sounds suddenly turned themselves on (GMail), other sounds are really loud. Another example right now the lock screen on mine is showing a picture of a video I cast on BubbleuPNP last night. For absolutely no reason. I can't stop it.
That's totally not cool. I don't want a blurry video still as my lock screen picture. How do I clear it? Is that intentional? Or a bug?
> I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel.
iOS is colourful and whatnot, but it's confusing as hell and has some ridiculous defaults. Ever since KitKat Android has been better by a wide margin. Not to mention, Apple sucks at services, whereas Google excels at them - and that's half the functionality of a phone these days. And Google Now is pretty much the best thing ever...
But yes, the new design of Android 5 makes me happy too - everything looks so much more vibrant, colourful, sleek and streamlined, etc... It's so much more Google-ey.
Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.
This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]
Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'
This = install K9 mail.[3]
YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!
Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.
Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.
Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'
Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.
You can actually reskin the keyboard back to the old look.
Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".
>why is removing the key separators a good idea? //
I've a suggestion for this one - key separators support a paradigm of key presses, following the [traditional] keyboard metaphor. However with swipe-able keyboards it doesn't really make sense, you only need to approximate the position of the letter during your swipe - no "barriers" helps to enforce that new paradigm. If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).
I like the new keyboard. I feel like my typing mistakes have been reduced. Earlier i felt like i need to be precise on clicking the buttons now without boundary i don't need to.
I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings to get a acceptable performance.
Edit: There is one particular annoying thing in L. Sometimes when click on a tab like in Chrome, the notification window gets the touch and is semi shown.
> Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app?
The gmail redesign is really jarring if you're still on KitKat. It "fits" visually with the design language of Lolipop, but it still feels like a major step backward in terms of usability.
The conspiracy theorist in me is inclined to conclude that they do not, in fact, use their own app; it's almost like they made the Gmail app worse to encourage people to migrate to Inbox.
Thanks for the calendar recommendation. Ugh. Already switch to City Mapper from Google Maps when Google stripped that app. Sad to see the rest of the apps going the same way now.
Clock - I used to be able to dismiss my 7:30 wakeup alarm if I woke up at 7:20 by simply swiping away the notification. But now I can't find any way to suppress the next instance of a recurring alarm.
Can you? Oh, thank god! Actually, now doing that, that reminds me of another two WTFs?
The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...
And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.
I have a spare phone so I decided to throw lollipop on it. Wow, I couldn't believe how much I hated it, and I'm not one of those never-upgrade-it-because-I-don't-like-change folks.
On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.
The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"
FWIW I like what they did with maps, finally. I hated the design they came out with about a year ago or so. It was awful and I basically stopped using the app except when absolutely necessary because I always felt like a dumb idiot trying to use it. Nothing was discoverable. I never got used to it. Much better now.
Part of this, is that even if you come up with a design that is better than what you have, it ought to be a lot better, because you're also asking people to get used to a new design. If it's just incrementally better, you're going to piss people off because you're asking them to relearn how to do something again, for no apparent good reason. I don't think it's unreasonable for a person to be annoyed by that.
And of course, if it's worse, or if it's only arguably better, or if opinions are very much mixed, then you failed.
This is something Google doesn't seem to know institutionally, or rather I guess they just don't care. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Microsoft, who care about this too much.
I have the opposite experience. I liked the maps that came with my phone a year and a half ago.
It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.
Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.
Auto Brightness has been renamed and is available at Settings > Display > Adaptive Brightness. It just has to be turned on.
And I know it's personal preference but I love the way chrome tabs are integrated into the app switcher. It allows me to focus on what I'm doing and not so much what app I'm in. Now each tab is like an app in and of itself. I think that's the way multi-tasking should be done.
My personal favorite pointless change is the clock app. Now, mind you, it looks exactly the same if you disregard that they changed the widgets design, but thats system wide.
But they did manage to move the bin for deleting an alarm from the right to the left. That's all. Let's just switch it the fuck around!
You probably mean schedule, and no it doesn't as it shows only 6 or so items per page and isn't good for glancing at. I can't glance at it and see I've a meeting in the morning, I've got to read it to see when the appointments are. There's a reason the old paper calendars work so well, cause you can just glance at them.
The old calendar also had a week view where you could see most of the week and what was on. Now you're constantly having to scroll.
As for the rest, how can you debunk what actually happens? If you don't have your lollipop device on you, that probably means it's not a phone...
Yup, agenda view is great for a full day.
Settings in Chrome turns off the tab integration.
On the lock screen you can slide up from anywhere on the screen (which then takes me to the slide code screen).
The rest of the stuff - I guess some personal preference comes into it? But I'm thoroughly enjoying 5.0. Made a few tweaks to the default settings and it's great. Feels soooo much faster.
Well, the new calendar app is ridiculously bad. You can't get back the old "normal" calender view, lots of screen space is wasted in every window and the 1-month overview now is totally useless without any indicators.
Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...
The lock screen is indeed infuriating! Does anyone know if there's a way to restore the old behavior where you could enter your pattern lock immediately after pressing the power button?
The extra swipe serves no purpose at all, given that I've already pressed the power button, and have a pattern lock.
You can turn off the 'feature' of having Chrome tabs appear in the Android app switcher in the Settings. I too think that for power users especially, this is a bad idea. Maybe if they just had like the 5 most recent tabs...just maybe.
The problem is that software companies acquire the amount of labor (which is large) that they need to create something but then don't have anything to do with that extra labor when it's finished and all that's needed is maintenance and a reasonable amount of additional upgrade work.
So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that's already very good and only needs a small amount of labor to keep it ideal. This makes the product worse.
Once you see this you can't un-see it.
(Also there's the more cyncial explanation that by changing things dramatically you get people to think they need to keep spending money.)
In this case I would like them to put this people to work on my pet annoyances: screen turning on while on my pocket and natively recording my conversations.
Screen shouldn't turn on under any circumstance, unless I press the physical button. There's no way to configure this and there are many cases of this behaviour: incoming call, low battery...
There is no way to properly record every conversation. There are apps, but they don't really work. Some of them with "good critics" demand to host the audio in their servers. Are people crazy?
I've recently bought one android phone for my mother. Her experience has been sad and painful (in her words). Now it seems her next phone will need just another painful period.
It's not just geeks, UI is difficult and changing it is no good.
For better or worse, Tech. companies make software. Every member of the organization from product to design to engineering probably has some passion for innovating. If they didn't want to innovate they probably wouldn't be working on something like android.
Sadly these engines of innovation create sup-optimal products if the product is already at a local maximum for current constraints. They then just endlessly circle the local maximum in a repeating pattern (this is called fashion).
Luckily for these companies, power users and media also like change for change's sake. Helping them hype each new iteration of the product, driving sales, and giving validation (and job security) to the product/design/engineering organization.
I'd maybe agree regarding the UI/animation. But L has brought some significant improvements (ART, Project Volta, background batching API, et al). So it is a good release inspite of the UI/animation updates.
Google Maps and Windows Search are two products that have been over-worked to death. Both were better in older iterations (Windows Search pre-Vista, Google Maps before they went all minimalism-stupid).
Google Maps in particular stripped out tons of useful functionality for a long period (My Places seems to appear and disappear every second release, location search history is currently MIA, compass is gone, et al).
Windows Search just tried to make it "clever" but instead made it "unreliable." They wanted to add support for everyone file format one by one (and ignore everything else) but instead managed to only support native Microsoft formats well and nothing else at all. File Search in Windows (Vista-8.1) is horrendously poor. Give me Windows 95 search.
It's not that simple in the real world, there's politics involved. The people who own a successful product aren't going to give up half their team. The success of it gives them an excuse to keep them all and keep growing the team. Which is counter-productive and hurts the product and the company, but helps certain individuals in the short term.
Yeah and too many times when you complain about this kind of thing you get accused of "hating change" or some such thing. No, I hate THIS change because THIS change is bad!
More than one year after it happened the new GMaps interface still looks like crap, and on top of that it feels slow, on a Mac Mini with 4GB of memory. I still (don't know exactly how, could be a cookie thing, not sure) manage to have access to the old interface in one of my browsers, and the old interface works like a charm, both in terms of UI and speed.
And about GMail, nothing more to say, only that once you've managed to break the "Open in new tab" button and the "Back" button then you have no business doing UI-stuff in a browser.
Yes, I know both products are free as in I'm not paying anything for them, it's just that is really, really frustrating to compare them with how they used to behave.
As far as I remember click "?" mark on the bottom of map window - there is option to change it back to map classics. You can save this as well once changed (small pop up will come out) so it will become your default.
Yep, I still find myself switching to the old version so I can get terrain view. In the new version, once you type in an address the "terrain" link below the address box disappears. I can't imagine why that is supposed to be helpful. My typical use case is that I click a map link for a hike, enter my address to see how long the drive is, and then want to switch to terrain view to see terrain for the hike. Apparently, that is no longer possible.
Agreed, I think GMaps is probably the best example of "we have too many people working on this and we need to give them something to do". Perhaps people could have accused me of just needing to "get used to it" a year ago, but after a year of usage I find the new GMaps less useful in almost every way.
Depends on the changes. Facebook's UI revamps have usually been good ones (excluding their "hide the privacy settings" dark patterns), but a certain subset of users complain each time. I've got one friend who's been a member of each redesign's "bring back the old Facebook!" movement.
I think it depends on what your complaint is. This article has a mix of solid complaints (they keyboard has been rearranged) and bad (transitions are gross!).
Serious question, why is this a "bad" complaint? Personally I hate transitions, I think they bring nothing of value and they're wasting my time, had the impression that there must be other people who thought exactly like me.
"There are a bunch of new ‘transitions’ between elements. I don’t know what the battery cost actually is for this, but as a user I just don’t care about cute transitions between elements. I want fast interaction with my mobile device."
This is poorly phrased at best. Transitions exist to make it obvious what is happening: e.g. you minimize a window and it zooms into the taskbar/dock, as a visual reminder that it's not gone, just stored there. This kind of thing is even more important with an unfamiliar interface.
Are the particular transitions he's complaining about bad? I have no idea, since he just wrote about transitions in general, without specifying any. Not all transitions are good, but writing like they're all pointless suggests that you just don't understand UI (and I'm not a UI person, just someone who reads a tiny bit about it).
Edit: Just looked at the formatdoc. Is there a way to quote text without getting those scrollbars?
Yep, as someone who doesn't have Lollipop yet, there's almost nothing I can actually take out of this article. It's too vague and general.
For what it's worth, my girlfriend -- decidedly not a tech person -- got the Lollipop update for her Nexus 5 a few days ago. I asked her how she liked it, and she said she could barely even tell what had changed. I don't think the HN demographic is even remotely representative of how most people will feel about the Lollipop changes.
The transitions the author is probably complaining about are menu transitions: Every time you tap on a menu item you get a outward radial animation thing. It looks tacky but, more importantly, adds a half-second delay to every menu interaction.
As a long time Android user I had the same complaint about the transitions that the author did. I've already had plenty of time to figure out how things work, so I don't need those visual cues, and it just makes the whole experience feel more laggy. At the same time I can see your point for new users. Random idea: what if those transitions just sped up over time so that the longer I use the app (and the more experienced I am with it) the more the UI would prioritize speed of use over friendly reminders about how UI elements work (ie. transitions).
TIP: If you enable "Developer options" in the settings app (by "About" tapping 7 times), there are options to eliminate, speed up, or slow down the transition animations. I set mine at 0.5x the normal duration.
At best their training wheels for a UI. As such if you can't turn them off your building a poor UI. Worse, if your UI needs them then clearly your using a bad design.
* Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies.
* You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.
* Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this.
* Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it.
* You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users.
* This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data.
At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.
> You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.
Well put. Google is a data-driven company with the ability to test designs over millions of users (although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users).
I've spent quite a bit of time implementing Material Design for http://recent.io/, and then testing the design with normal, not especially tech-savvy users. My impression is that Material Design is a way to simplify and standardize app UIs (to increase app usage overall), and import visual cues from the paper world. It's very thoughtful approach, probably better than iOS, and I say this as someone whose primary mobile device is a new iPhone and who has owned an iPhone since the day it went on sale.
But what works for most people may not work for HN power users. Hence the complaints on this thread.
> although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users
This gets tossed around a lot, but is usually misinterpreted. What 5-10 users will get you is discovering the mere existence of most usability problems. What much larger sample sizes will get you is an idea of how many people are likely to experience that problem, which is very helpful when talking about trade-offs in meeting the needs of various types of users.
Google is currently making a number of design changes to bring products in line with their new "Material" design guidelines. These changes may or may not be in response to actual usability issues. The hypothesis is that an overall design consistency across Google products will improve overall usability over time.
However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.
The fact that we are discussing this generically as UI Design shows the immaturity of the concept. I can see at least two clear ideas needed to discuss this in a more detailed and rational manner.
1. We need to clearly separate the difference between UI design and UI decoration. Design should be driven by user testing that measures speed and rate of completion of tasks. If every feature of the latest UI is not measured to be a quantitative increase, then it is not a design improvement. Decoration is about being fashionable and has nothing to do with usable, efficient, elegant UI. I see no reason they cannot exist side by side, but today the prevailing policy seems to be that decorating UI in a trendy fashion trumps usability.
2. There needs to be thought about the adoption and transition of users from an old interface to a new one. Right now the philosophy seems to be "Stop whining and suck it up - our designers are smarter than you." This is not reasonable or professional. New designs should be measured not just for usability of new users, but also against users that are used to the previous interface. There are probably many techniques to improve the user experience of UI upgrades but we'll never discover them until we recognize that it is important and spend some time and effort studying this phenomenon.
Think they are too tightly coupled to use HN parlance. Would like to see stylesheets or backwards compatible skins becoming de riguer. Particularly when the program does nothing new.
You get two groups. One uses the old interface and the other uses the radically new shiny thing that might perform better. Surprise! The new interface performs better in selected metrics. Old interface hits the recycle bin and the new one become the norm. This us what seems to be the standard decision process.
I would propose the introduction of a third and maybe fourth group where returning users would also measure those selected metrics.
I find the new Google Maps UI to be frustrating. The number of taps to just find directions to something after you search for it seems to be increased, for no good reason.
I think it's mainly because there are multiple paths through the app to do the same thing, and some of them are optimized flows and others are not. So tapping the search bar is not the most efficient way to get directions anymore... you should tap the blue directions icon instead.
It's ever so slowly getting better. I remember when it first launched I couldn't even do waypoints.
Planning a cross-country trip for Thanksgiving right now. In classic I can type "Town A to Town B to Town C to Town D" and it returns a route between A, B, C and D. In the new interface it brings up a list of restaurants in Town A. How can the king of search get this wrong?
Anyone have a hint for using G-Maps (or making a homescreen shortcut) to navigate home address that won't send me to the wrong place, or make me wait, in case of slow internet?
This seems fairly basic functionality so I may be missing something. I've even been sent toward a place 30 miles east of home, repeatedly, trying to select the autocompletion of 'home'.
I wrote up a rant about Google Maps the other day[1], from the perspective of an Apple user. As a Google Maps user since the start, I've been surprised to find myself reaching for Apple Maps more and more, both on my phone and on the desktop. Despite its flaws, Apple Maps just feels like a much better product in terms of UI and performance these days — and there's still time for them to catch up in data.
Man! Move on. Start using Here maps. I don't know why people are stuck with GMpas when far more superior alternative is available. They have a new android app as well!
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I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users.
Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1].
It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming they're simply wrong or "for no reason" is somewhere between angry and lazy.
Just a glance at the new vs old keyboard or gmail shows a direction - moving / duplicating interactions toward the bottom right (logical as screens get bigger), breaking out punctuation into discrete keys (presumably logical given the way most people actually type).
The overall restyling is adding consistency between apps and particularly between mobile and the desktop.
Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.
1: http://www.google.com/design/
I'd really like to see some respect for this from people like Firefox - "we won't move any major UI elements or update the default skin more than once every 2 years". Of course the marketing is all about the novelty at the moment - steadfastness doesn't count for much in tech circles it seems. With stable UI you can have a less rapidly changing system for users to comprehend; running updates for security fixes shouldn't mean you have to face a new menu paradigm or new default screen or new tab shape or new whatever every few weeks.
Seriously. I don't enable auto-update on supported users apps for this reason.
The people complaining about any kind of change are usually the ones who learn using an application by trying to exactly memorize navigation paths and word-for-word expressions in menus, which feels absolutely wrong to me. It's like learning stuff in school by memorizing the content word for word, without understanding any of them or the context in general. It may work for while, but not for long.
I know that the average person is very different from the tech-savvy crowd around here, in fact I work with non-technical people everyday, yet this helplessness once a button or a feature has been moved is still very surprising to me and I think it's a better idea to try to educate people not to hang on to memorized paths, but instead look for plausible context, really consider where you'd expect a certain feature to be located. That's exactly what the developer did for his app - well, in most cases. Avoiding change in software design is not the solution.
Australis was a UI change that we don't anticipate doing more than once every two years. We recognize the costs of doing so, for users, add-on devs, and Mozilla devs.
The UI changes in iOS7 caused a whole bunch of questions and problems with my "support network", but with Android it would be like that every year with every OS update.
Companies have switched from introducing new features and backend improvements (what the technical folks used to care about) to what they feel everyone can see, the UI. As a result, the software has not fundamentally changed, minus a few small new features, but it looks like a brand new product.
Yeah, whenever I see sentence like "as a user, I don't care about animations" I just stop reading the rest. I appreciate the fact that you, the article/comment writer, have good mental model about what is going on and you want to be as fast as possible, but that comment also shows that you aren't a typical user and you don't have a clue how common people thinks.
I actually think most of the animation in Lollipop is rather well thought out from a UX perspective. It might be a teensy bit showy but I rather like it.
This argument conflates the problem (lacking a mental model) with a solution (animations). This Mr Programmer is confused by elements flying around in front of them. Maybe regular users get confused too?
Try it out for yourself and see if you find it confusing. In many places it's designed to enhance ease of use and does a fairly good job of it.
I don't use my tablet all that much, but I don't find myself questioning how something is done (that stuff didn't really change), or why things look different (I don't really care). It's just... different, nothing else.
The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.
And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.
And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.
The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.
The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.
I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.
The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.
And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.
The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.
Some other thoughts: - Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead. - Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for. - The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.
Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to: - Guest accounts - Brightness slider in the swipe down - Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing. - Lock rotation in the swipe down settings - Flashlight in the swipe down settings
Just another data point.
I have a 4.4 device and a 4.0.something device and this happens in both (except is not a triangle)
Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy, it gives me joy.
It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want?
I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel. To bring this experience to the unwashed masses of Android users is a very good thing.
But I'm getting no joy from Lollipop. Apart from all the interface issues I've hit, it seems fairly bug ridden.Some notification sounds suddenly turned themselves on (GMail), other sounds are really loud. Another example right now the lock screen on mine is showing a picture of a video I cast on BubbleuPNP last night. For absolutely no reason. I can't stop it.
That's totally not cool. I don't want a blurry video still as my lock screen picture. How do I clear it? Is that intentional? Or a bug?
iOS is colourful and whatnot, but it's confusing as hell and has some ridiculous defaults. Ever since KitKat Android has been better by a wide margin. Not to mention, Apple sucks at services, whereas Google excels at them - and that's half the functionality of a phone these days. And Google Now is pretty much the best thing ever...
But yes, the new design of Android 5 makes me happy too - everything looks so much more vibrant, colourful, sleek and streamlined, etc... It's so much more Google-ey.
Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.
This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]
Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'
This = install K9 mail.[3]
YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!
Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.
Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.
Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'
Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.withouthat...
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.calen...
[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl...
Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".
I've a suggestion for this one - key separators support a paradigm of key presses, following the [traditional] keyboard metaphor. However with swipe-able keyboards it doesn't really make sense, you only need to approximate the position of the letter during your swipe - no "barriers" helps to enforce that new paradigm. If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).
I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings to get a acceptable performance.
Edit: There is one particular annoying thing in L. Sometimes when click on a tab like in Chrome, the notification window gets the touch and is semi shown.
The gmail redesign is really jarring if you're still on KitKat. It "fits" visually with the design language of Lolipop, but it still feels like a major step backward in terms of usability.
The conspiracy theorist in me is inclined to conclude that they do not, in fact, use their own app; it's almost like they made the Gmail app worse to encourage people to migrate to Inbox.
Clock - I used to be able to dismiss my 7:30 wakeup alarm if I woke up at 7:20 by simply swiping away the notification. But now I can't find any way to suppress the next instance of a recurring alarm.
The gmail app still allows you to use a list to select different accounts (tap on the account name).
To be fair you can turn this off, that's the first thing I did when Chrome notified me of this "awesome" change.
The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...
And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.
On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.
The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"
Part of this, is that even if you come up with a design that is better than what you have, it ought to be a lot better, because you're also asking people to get used to a new design. If it's just incrementally better, you're going to piss people off because you're asking them to relearn how to do something again, for no apparent good reason. I don't think it's unreasonable for a person to be annoyed by that.
And of course, if it's worse, or if it's only arguably better, or if opinions are very much mixed, then you failed.
This is something Google doesn't seem to know institutionally, or rather I guess they just don't care. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Microsoft, who care about this too much.
It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.
Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.
And I know it's personal preference but I love the way chrome tabs are integrated into the app switcher. It allows me to focus on what I'm doing and not so much what app I'm in. Now each tab is like an app in and of itself. I think that's the way multi-tasking should be done.
But they did manage to move the bin for deleting an alarm from the right to the left. That's all. Let's just switch it the fuck around!
I find the new calendar baffling. Luckily, the old AOSP calendar is still available on F-Droid.[0]
[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=aosp+calenda...
It's still there under Settings. It's now called "Adaptive brightness"
Try the 'agenda' view which does exactly that.
I was also going to debunk most of your other complaints because I know they're false but I don't have my Lollipop device with my at the moment.
The old calendar also had a week view where you could see most of the week and what was on. Now you're constantly having to scroll.
As for the rest, how can you debunk what actually happens? If you don't have your lollipop device on you, that probably means it's not a phone...
Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...
The extra swipe serves no purpose at all, given that I've already pressed the power button, and have a pattern lock.
Annoying.
Deleted Comment
TIP: Pull down with two fingers to go straight to the quick settings shade.
So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that's already very good and only needs a small amount of labor to keep it ideal. This makes the product worse.
Once you see this you can't un-see it.
(Also there's the more cyncial explanation that by changing things dramatically you get people to think they need to keep spending money.)
In this case I would like them to put this people to work on my pet annoyances: screen turning on while on my pocket and natively recording my conversations.
Screen shouldn't turn on under any circumstance, unless I press the physical button. There's no way to configure this and there are many cases of this behaviour: incoming call, low battery...
There is no way to properly record every conversation. There are apps, but they don't really work. Some of them with "good critics" demand to host the audio in their servers. Are people crazy?
I've recently bought one android phone for my mother. Her experience has been sad and painful (in her words). Now it seems her next phone will need just another painful period.
It's not just geeks, UI is difficult and changing it is no good.
Sadly these engines of innovation create sup-optimal products if the product is already at a local maximum for current constraints. They then just endlessly circle the local maximum in a repeating pattern (this is called fashion).
Luckily for these companies, power users and media also like change for change's sake. Helping them hype each new iteration of the product, driving sales, and giving validation (and job security) to the product/design/engineering organization.
Google Maps and Windows Search are two products that have been over-worked to death. Both were better in older iterations (Windows Search pre-Vista, Google Maps before they went all minimalism-stupid).
Google Maps in particular stripped out tons of useful functionality for a long period (My Places seems to appear and disappear every second release, location search history is currently MIA, compass is gone, et al).
Windows Search just tried to make it "clever" but instead made it "unreliable." They wanted to add support for everyone file format one by one (and ignore everything else) but instead managed to only support native Microsoft formats well and nothing else at all. File Search in Windows (Vista-8.1) is horrendously poor. Give me Windows 95 search.
And about GMail, nothing more to say, only that once you've managed to break the "Open in new tab" button and the "Back" button then you have no business doing UI-stuff in a browser.
Yes, I know both products are free as in I'm not paying anything for them, it's just that is really, really frustrating to compare them with how they used to behave.
The new Maps has come a long way since launch but I agree that it's still very far from good.
Serious question, why is this a "bad" complaint? Personally I hate transitions, I think they bring nothing of value and they're wasting my time, had the impression that there must be other people who thought exactly like me.
Are the particular transitions he's complaining about bad? I have no idea, since he just wrote about transitions in general, without specifying any. Not all transitions are good, but writing like they're all pointless suggests that you just don't understand UI (and I'm not a UI person, just someone who reads a tiny bit about it).
Edit: Just looked at the formatdoc. Is there a way to quote text without getting those scrollbars?
For what it's worth, my girlfriend -- decidedly not a tech person -- got the Lollipop update for her Nexus 5 a few days ago. I asked her how she liked it, and she said she could barely even tell what had changed. I don't think the HN demographic is even remotely representative of how most people will feel about the Lollipop changes.
No, it really doesn't. It's just an animation running in the RenderThread while the new Activity is loading on the UI (main) thread.
* Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies.
* You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.
* Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this.
* Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it.
* You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users.
* This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data.
At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.
Well put. Google is a data-driven company with the ability to test designs over millions of users (although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users).
I've spent quite a bit of time implementing Material Design for http://recent.io/, and then testing the design with normal, not especially tech-savvy users. My impression is that Material Design is a way to simplify and standardize app UIs (to increase app usage overall), and import visual cues from the paper world. It's very thoughtful approach, probably better than iOS, and I say this as someone whose primary mobile device is a new iPhone and who has owned an iPhone since the day it went on sale.
But what works for most people may not work for HN power users. Hence the complaints on this thread.
This gets tossed around a lot, but is usually misinterpreted. What 5-10 users will get you is discovering the mere existence of most usability problems. What much larger sample sizes will get you is an idea of how many people are likely to experience that problem, which is very helpful when talking about trade-offs in meeting the needs of various types of users.
However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.
1. We need to clearly separate the difference between UI design and UI decoration. Design should be driven by user testing that measures speed and rate of completion of tasks. If every feature of the latest UI is not measured to be a quantitative increase, then it is not a design improvement. Decoration is about being fashionable and has nothing to do with usable, efficient, elegant UI. I see no reason they cannot exist side by side, but today the prevailing policy seems to be that decorating UI in a trendy fashion trumps usability.
2. There needs to be thought about the adoption and transition of users from an old interface to a new one. Right now the philosophy seems to be "Stop whining and suck it up - our designers are smarter than you." This is not reasonable or professional. New designs should be measured not just for usability of new users, but also against users that are used to the previous interface. There are probably many techniques to improve the user experience of UI upgrades but we'll never discover them until we recognize that it is important and spend some time and effort studying this phenomenon.
I would propose the introduction of a third and maybe fourth group where returning users would also measure those selected metrics.
I think it's mainly because there are multiple paths through the app to do the same thing, and some of them are optimized flows and others are not. So tapping the search bar is not the most efficient way to get directions anymore... you should tap the blue directions icon instead.
Planning a cross-country trip for Thanksgiving right now. In classic I can type "Town A to Town B to Town C to Town D" and it returns a route between A, B, C and D. In the new interface it brings up a list of restaurants in Town A. How can the king of search get this wrong?
This seems fairly basic functionality so I may be missing something. I've even been sent toward a place 30 miles east of home, repeatedly, trying to select the autocompletion of 'home'.
[1]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2014/11/20/what's_up_with_goog...