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Material You – The next stage for Material Design

material.io

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Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#131
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you. That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.

> To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you. I've used an Android phone (including 2 Nexus 5x and a Pixel 3a, my current one) my whole life and always thought it looked okay, but not great. I've had an OnCall iPhone for a few months though, and everything just looks way more polished, sane, and even comforta…

What is an OnCall IPhone?

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have much experience with iOS products, but I recall early in smartphone history being flabbergasted by the lack of basic affordances like a notification bar, or quick settings (eg to switch wifi on/off). I'd imagine both UIs are vastly different now, so I don't think that these examples are directly relevant. But I heard so much in those days about how iOS's UI was vastly superior and was so shocked by my fi…

1) yes. but I think it's better for it and obviously plenty of others do too including apple 2) no, home screen widgets in iOS have been a feature for a while now 3) no, iOS asks me if I want to open in Apple Maps or Google Maps. I think you're conflating features and design. Whether or not there's a particular feature (turn of WIFI), is not an attribute of the design. So you can fairly say the iOS feature set was to…

The parent comment said the Android UI was better; I took that straightforwardly to mean the UI in general. He does mention "since Material", so I can see how you interpreted it as a reference to design.

That just makes the downvotes more ridiculous! There's no accounting for taste, and it's easy to imagine someone liking any design over another.

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#133

I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great. I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human de…

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hiera…

Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me to click on at this point?" I just automatically click the wrong thing every time. Like, there is even a dialog that pops up in one of the loops I often get caught in with a "cancel" button that seriously cancels my attempt to cancel something, which my brain just can't wrap itself around fast enough :(.

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#134

I upvoted solely for the use of an en dash ( – ) in the title, instead of a hyphen ( - ). Probably comes down to personal aesthetics, but I find it looks so much nicer! For users on Windows, I recommend setting up an AutoHotKey script to convert the string "==-" to "–", and "===-" to "—". Easy to type, very intuitive (typing more characters gives a longer-width dash), and gives your carefully crafted email missives a…

> For users on Windows

I recommend WinCompose: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#135
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google’s stuff isn’t bad, but it’s simply not exceptional. Disagree. I've repeatedly had to help my older relatives out with awful UX failures on Gmail or basic apps (think: the phone app) on their Android phones. As recently as a couple weeks ago. Usually it takes me a while to figure out what's going on. They have no chance whatsoever. One thing they consistently seem to get wrong is having god-awful visual hiera…

Yeah... I don't know if this works the same on Android, but on iOS I find the Google Docs app ridiculously confusing to the point where I often find myself clicking back and forth by accident through various dialogs in a loop trying to get to the "I just want to edit this document" step as it is so not what my brain expects that unless I stop entirely and stare at it and go "what was the stupid thing they expected me…

I not-infrequently see Google UI on major consumer-facing products that would have gotten me (gently) slapped down by "third-tier" designers, product managers, and UX folks—hell, even some of my fellow developers—instantly if I'd presented them. People making 1/3 or less what Googlers make (yes, in the US). There's something organizationally wrong about Google, I think, that causes them to turn out products that are, in very visible ways, sub-par even for the kinds of small-fish places I've worked. I don't know what the cause is, but whatever it is isn't producing only minor or subtle errors.

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#137

I can’t help but feel Google’s only consistency is in their trying to be clean, cool, and innovative, but not actually getting the details right, and ending up looking juvenile and Fisher-Price-like. On mobile, the font is too big and too ragged. The colors and shapes look like a Kleenex box aesthetic. The spacing isn’t all that great. I’m absolutely puzzled why a behemoth like Google can’t have exceptional, human de…

I have always preferred the cleanness of android over thr imho weird ui design of iOS. I get that people loved the hardware esthetics of iPhones over android phones but not the software esthetics. At least nog since material design started. The weirdness of ios having to put blur on everything rather than just having one clean background color. The weird need to have everything be a rounded rectangle with gradient. And Id also give android the lead in whitespace use and a slight edge in font.

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#138
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be nice to hear a practical example or two in order to understand from where your opinion springs.

I think the android back button is a good example. Having that exposed at the OS level creates a smoother navigation experience across applications.

Last time I was an Android user (and, for quite a while and for a couple different spans, an Android developer), that button was a ton of fun for when I wanted to see what random-ass crap the OS or application would decide to do when I pressed it. It was a "press only if you can't find something better to press" button given prime real-estate.

[EDIT] I think the fundamental problem with it is that, if an app screen deliberately presents a back button, there's nearly a 100% chance the current application will handle it in some way that makes sense for the current screen. With an always-on back button, the user has no way of knowing which of three handlers will receive it: 1) The OS, 2) The application, but not handling it in some way that makes sense for the current screen, or 3) The application, handling it sensibly for the current screen. You're rolling the dice.

Re: Material You – The next stage for Material Design

#139
post #118
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest this just sounds like you're used to whatever Apple is doing and nothing Google would do (except outright copy iOS) would feel "ok" for you. That's fine - we get used to stuff and rant when it changes in ways we don't expect. But the beta on my Android phone looks amazing and IMO better than iPadOS I have on a tablet.

Nah. I've never used any Apple products besides occasionally using someone's iPhone. I'm not used to the UX and to the gestures, but the interface is strikingly consistent. There's still so much clutter in Android. Fortunately, on Android you can customize most things, but Google is restricting more and more what apps can actually touch.

I've had a work iPhone 7 for years now and I'm still entirely confused by its UI due entirely to inconsistency. Where are my apps? Certainly not organized in a handy alphabetical app drawer, they're just randomly arrayed over multiple home screens in whatever order they were installed in, requiring effort to organize and then memorize where every single one is, or requiring search using the keyboard (slower particularly when you don't quite remember the name of the app).

The fact that I can never figure out in any given app how the back button is supposed to work (is it in the taskbar? or at the top of the screen? or am I supposed to swipe from the left?) or where the settings can be (sometimes in the app, sometimes in the Settings app) is deeply confusing.

Sometimes when the keyboard is up, swiping down from the top closes it, sometimes it scrolls. I find that I genuinely have no idea what's going to happen whenever I tap anywhere. The keyboard decides to just change words using autocorrect far more aggressively than my SwiftKey on Android.

Maybe one day I'll learn how to use iOS, but I know that it's definitely not "strikingly consistent".

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