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Google Design

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Re: Google Design

#91

Hmm. Material design is clicking twice on the play button to launch a Youtube video.

Which browser? Works fine for me in Chrome.

EDIT: Ahh, you're talking about the transition from the homepage to the video page. I spent most of my time watching on the individual video pages, so I didn't really notice this interaction TBH.

Re: Google Design

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well at least it loaded for me in Opera, unlike the Google I/O site which reminded me of the dark days of the single browser web.

The Google I/O site works fine in Opera. Not sure what you're seeing. Considering that Opera now uses Blink, that's not really surprising.

It comes up with a blank teal(?) color page for me. I disabled all extensions to make sure they're not causing the issue.

Re: Google Design

#93

Am I the only one who gets a headache trying to decipher tile layouts like this? My eyes bounce back and forth and I still have no idea how the information is structured or what's important. I appreciate that Google is sharing all of this though.

I've had Androids since way back, and while the UI has continuously gotten prettier, it has gotten harder and harder to use. I can 'feel' these new concepts as they roll them out, and then just get frustrated by them. It feels like they come up with certain standards/rules, and then have to adapt their UIs to it. So buttons are put in confusing places, with weird icons. Take the phone dialer for instance. I press the…

Haha. I remember that. The hardest feature for me to figure out after getting my phone was how to actually call somebody. Also after installing skype I started getting popups when I would call about "Do you want to use your phone or skype to call?". Why do I have to click so much to make a call I kept asking myself?

Then I figured out the double tap on the home key and "Hi Galaxy" and my life changed forever. I use it waaaayyy more than I've seen anyone I know using Siri. The only annoying thing now is when I disable gps and then try to use maps from voice while driving things get wonky because I'm driving, trying to enable GPS, and trying to deal with maps popups telling me gps isn't on and whatnot. I just forget to re-enable it before I drive somewhere so it happens quite a bit.

I also actually sat down and read the manual for the phone and looked up tips and tricks online. Really studied it as opposed to just expecting to "get it out of the box". I know the whole "It just works" mantra is great, but if you're willing to spend a little time reading and researching you can have a great mobile experience instead of just blindly ignoring things that don't appear to immediately work/make sense.

In a nutshell, they really are little computers now, and putting in the time to learn it well will open up doors for you.

Re: Google Design

#94
The design gives no indication of what's clickable. Reminds me of those Flash games where you frantically click on things trying to find out what does something. Except now, everything is a flat-shaded rectangle.

The input side seems confused. In their guidelines, they talk about buttons having a drop shadow, and less shadow when depressed.[1] Fine. But not all buttons have a shadow, and not all objects with a shadow are clickable. On interaction, they write "What will happen if I touch this screen? And then this icon?"[2] That's a game-like interface. It might be tolerable if there was an standard, easy way to undo whatever you just did. There's no sign of that in the guidelines.

There are 84 standard input icons.[3] But no icon dictionary. Help text is so last-cen. You're supposed to know.

When they finally get to "Buttons"[4], they have a reasonable set of controls. However, one of them is plain text, with no indication that it is clickable. That contradicts their principles of material design. If they're going to have all this pseudo-3D, it ought to be used for all things which behave differently from their surroundings. But no. Google does suggest the use of a distinctive floating action button for "promoted actions" (i.e. "Buy").

The output effects are pretty, but that's all this is. Pretty. It's all output-side. There's no innovation on the input side. It's what you get when you put graphic designers in charge of a user interface.

[1] https://www.google.com/design/spec/what-is-material/elevatio... [2] https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/responsive-inte... [3] https://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/icons.html# [4] https://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html

Re: Google Design

#95
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's gonna get worse before it gets better.... http://beta.united.com/ It it a button? Or a dialog box? Maybe it's an ad. Flip a coin!

That site is very clean, readable, understandable and (it seems) perfectly usable.

The contrast of the blue text(62a9e3) in the dropdown menu against the pure white background fails all WCAG guidelines. So it is not perfectly usable.

Re: Google Design

#96
Google's only design philosophy is to arrange content in a way that maximizes the profit. If on top of that you can make it look good, cool. If not... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Re: Google Design

#97
post #3

Web page is nice-looking, but isn't snappy (at least not on my laptop).

Scolling is smooth in IE on a Surface Pro 3, but not in Firefox. That's pretty typical. What's unusual is that it's visibly janky in Firefox on this desktop with an i7 and a Quadro FX 580. Sure, it's not a brand new workstation, but it should be able to scroll a webpage...

Seems fine for me on Firefox 38.0.1 on Arch Linux, with an i5 2520M

Re: Google Design

#98
post #26

Am I the only one who gets a headache trying to decipher tile layouts like this? My eyes bounce back and forth and I still have no idea how the information is structured or what's important. I appreciate that Google is sharing all of this though.

Back button doesn't work right on that site. It gets you back to the top of previous page, it doesn't take you down where you were on the page. I love modern web UX. (Firefox & Chromium. )

Middle clicks on links are also pretty broken. Sometimes they do open the link in a new tab, something they open the link in the same tab, sometimes they do nothing.

As someone who use mainly workstations with a at-least-three-buttons mouse, I feel web browsing is getting increasingly annoying.

Re: Google Design

#99
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's gonna get worse before it gets better.... http://beta.united.com/ It it a button? Or a dialog box? Maybe it's an ad. Flip a coin!

I actually like that homepage. It seems like a nice alternative to tabs, especially if they put useful information in the collapsed tiles (essentially becoming Windows Live Tiles or whatever they're called).

It might look kind of cool at first, but it puts additional barriers in between the user and actually doing something useful like entering data in a form, booking a flight, etc.

For example, if I haven't been to the site before, I might have to explore the interface a bit before I get to the part of the interface I want. Clicking on those tiles makes things shift and bounce around, the content portion of the screen constantly moves left to right.

Way too much difficulty for doing something so simple.

Designs should be visually appeasing, but not at the expense of ease of use or ease of understanding.

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