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Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

lobste.rs

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Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#131

Post by lnanek2 »

PuffinBlue wrote: post #101
mattmanser wrote: post #52

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…

Agreed. Some more venting... 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…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#132

Post by Mikeb85 »

mattmanser wrote: post #128
panarky wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand all the vitriol. 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 iPh…

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…

Probably some setting you chose. When I first booted up Android 5, it asked me whether or not to display notifications on the lock page (I chose no). It could be that you chose yes and your app (BubbleuPNP) keeps pushing that video to your lock screen...

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#133

Post by lukeschlather »

remon wrote: post #28

The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Excessive change is generally better than no changes at all. Things have to evolve and even if we miss the mark every now and then it should always improve over time on average when new ideas are tried and tested.

Evolution needs to be guided by need. Right now, changes happen too fast for a feedback loop to be established that validates good changes.

Furthermore, in order for that feedback loop to exist, users need to have a choice. I'm afraid that the new Google Maps is just plain worse, and Google needs to dust off the old code and start iterating on it again. It was a great experiment, but everyone building consumer software seems to be incapable of admitting when their complete rewrite was a step backwards.

When a software team does a complete redesign of a feature or app, they almost become institutionally incapable of admitting that the rewrite was the wrong choice.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#134

Post by pbhjpbhj »

incision wrote: post #98

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…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#135

Post by lukeschlather »

PMan74 wrote: post #50
remon wrote: post #28

The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Excessive change is generally better than no changes at all. Things have to evolve and even if we miss the mark every now and then it should always improve over time on average when new ideas are tried and tested.

> The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Not only is it subjective it's almost certainly incorrect. If you read anything about Google it's clear that they don't make UI decisions without looking at a ton of data, making the changes and testing those changes. What does the author of that post think? A Google designer updated a load of designs on a whim?

What sort of data? I can look at data all day, it doesn't mean that I'm interpreting it right. Furthermore, the biggest issues may not show up in the data.

I have a 22-month-old Android phone. Google Maps just keeps getting slower and slower. Now it takes 10-15 seconds to start up. I'd really like to know what percentage of the data Google is using comes from phones released in the past 10 months. (Or phones that haven't even been released yet.)

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#136

Post by paulojreis »

As someone with experience in user interface design and evalution, I'm inclined to say that these were management or "product vision" - not design - decisions. It is rather unfortunate (but common) that said motives typically override design decisions (some of them empirically validated).

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#137

Post by Shivetya »

iTunes on the Apple side has been the worst of the Mac experience for me. It always seems as if the change is to put me further and further from my music, especially custom playlists and such. Worse, it doesn't retain settings.

However like Office is to Windows, it seems Apple's test for new UI ideas, sadly they all seem to make it.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#138

Post by Bill_Dimm »

paganel wrote: post #54
jbb555 wrote: post #14

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 m…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#139

Post by Cthulhu_ »

throwawayaway wrote: post #114
mattmanser wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

you forgot to say stand on one leg.

And the repeated incantation of "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#140

Post by obsurveyor »

throwawayaway wrote: post #66
PMan74 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Not only is it subjective it's almost certainly incorrect. If you read anything about Google it's clear that they don't make UI decisions without looking at a ton of data, making the changes and testing those changes. What does the author of that post think? A Google designer updated a load of designs on a whim?

Not a whim, an existential crisis. Justifying their existence, cherry picking suitable answers from a ton of data to back that up. Confirmation bias to appear relevant.

Justifying their job too. How do you get marks on your review if the only concrete things you can point to through the year are the bookkeeping of the design world? Also, employee turnover and position changes means that those new people bring their own, "new" ideas that have to be implemented(how else do you "make your mark"?), at the expense of the user comfort/satisfaciton.
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