Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

lobste.rs

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 326 posts

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#161

Post by deciplex »

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…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#163

Post by cmder »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #134
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 th…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#164

Post by mdellavo »

_lce0 wrote: post #7

I was anxiously expecting the update, but man that keyword is a deal breaker. Can it be configured as dark themed? The keyboard is a central point for UX, I've already moved away from Samsung for the same reason, and will hold the update if I'm forced to use that keyword

Yes the keyboard theme can be changed.

Settings > Language & input > Google Keyboard > Appearance & layout

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#165

Post by tim333 »

debacle wrote: post #63

We have a huge underutilization issue in tech right now. The strategy seems to be to throw programmers and designers at the wall until they make something that sticks, but a lot of bad decisions come out of that strategy and it's not immediately apparent that they're bad decisions until users complain. This has led to a lot of cyclical design cycles, reinventing the wheel, NIH, etc. It's going to be damning to the te…

>We have a huge underutilization issue in tech right now

Ironic given all the articles on the problem getting good people. I guess the trouble is the winner takes all nature of the market means Google can have 1000 spare good programmers while most small tech companies have a job hiring one or two.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#166

Post by mring33621 »

hyperpape wrote: post #62
Retric wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OS X and iOS both extensively use transitions. What's your model of a good UI that doesn't exploit transitions?

How about obvious buttons which change shading when clicked followed by instant operation?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#167

Post by frandroid »

gdulli wrote: post #85

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'…

yeah, because it doesn't have a gazillion other projects it could put these programmers to work on. Get real...

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#169

Post by mattmanser »

nilkn wrote: post #146
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".

> swipe up on your phone, not left or right The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?

The problem is that if you swipe left it will open the dialer, right photo. Only up unlocks it.

While it's useful having shortcuts to do these things, they've gone far too far and made it too hard to do what you most often want to do, which is simply unlock the phone. The old photo button worked well, for example.

They had also previously used "up" on the lock screen for voice commands/google now, so I for one have learnt never to use "up" unless I want to set a timer using voice (pretty much the only useful thing it can do).

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#170

Post by dudus »

smackfu wrote: post #38

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…

If you just tap and hold on the directions button you can jump a few steps.
Post reply on HN