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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

#191

Post by Symmetry »

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…

While we're on the topic:

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#192

Post by crumpled »

zmb_ wrote: post #35
DontBeADick wrote: post #5

I stopped updating all my Google apps ~2 years ago because there were so many asinine, unintuitive UI changes with each new version. A lot of their changes didn't even conform to the standards recommended by Google (e.g. menu button locations). It's almost as if the UI team gets bored and decides to make changes just because they need to occupy themselves. And then instead of testing them with actual users, they just…

I just updated my Nexus 5 to KitKat. The update forced me to use GMail instead of the Email app, and almost 24h later GMail is still "Getting your messages". None of my email accounts work. Never mind changing the UI, they should start by not completely breaking the key functionality of their applications in their effort to force everyone to use their services.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#193

Post by adevine »

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…

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.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#194

Post by akramhussein »

Yes. Agreed. I'm fed up of this. One day Hangouts is fine then next day everything has changed...swiped from left to view contacts, now it's a click. Swipe to delete, now its a button...few months later here we go again. Rinse and repeat for every Google app it seems.

A friend once said to me "iPhone hasn't changed since day 1, it's still the same stupid square icons, they can't innovate"...I was befuddled. There is a reason things stay the same. They work and users know them like second nature. Unless you have a REALLY good reason to change the paradigm, just don't. Mac OS X and Windows until recently didn't really change that much in terms of usability. Why does Google love to change everything constantly?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#195

Post by collyw »

_blob wrote: post #160
PuffinBlue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The month view is not gone ("three dot" menu on the right side -> Month) and you can easily untick `Events` per account to hide them. The gmail app still allows you to use a list to select different accounts (tap on the account name).

Three dots. Obvious it is a menu (sarcasm).

I have just realized in the last month or so that three stacked bars is a menu (bootstrap style). I am sure those have been around for a while now.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#196

Post by at-fates-hands »

The funny thing is I just switched from my Windows Phone back to Android and Lollipop and it's been a nightmare.

All my friends told me how much better Android would be and this is a nightmare compared to how much better my Windows phone handles stuff like the calendar, multiple email boxes and other things Lollipop seems to fail at miserably now.

I'm actually considering going back after less than a month trying to wade through all the changes.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#197

Post by jackmaney »

meepmorp wrote: post #143
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

> If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board). reply Do most people swipe? I honestly have no idea, and I'm not an Android user. I'm wondering if there are any stats on that. Particularly for older or less techno-phile users, swiping keyboards might be difficult to get into using.

Wait...swiping? On a keyboard? That makes absolutely no sense. Most words contain a pair of letters that are not adjacent on a QWERTY keyboard.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#198

Post by protomyth »

Yosemite should be the case study right behind Windows 8 on how not to change a UI. Spotlight is horrible and harder to use (pop up away from mouse, UI smaller and harder to click).

I still want to have a transcript from the meeting that decided the tabs on Safari should now "scrunch" to the right of the active tab instead of all the way to the right. It makes selecting the next tab without closing the current tab a huge pain. I can see no advantage.

Let's also add that bugs get introduced / reintroduced and really irritate people. Nothing, and I mean nothing, irritates a computer user when they thought they knew how to do something and now cannot. Then, after finding the way how, it crashes with a bug. Finder for Mavericks and Yosemite is broken with Applescript (doesn't refresh view).

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#199

Post by shanemhansen »

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…

> 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?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#200

Post by cjp »

_blob wrote: post #160
PuffinBlue wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The month view is not gone ("three dot" menu on the right side -> Month) and you can easily untick `Events` per account to hide them. The gmail app still allows you to use a list to select different accounts (tap on the account name).

Nope. The three dot menu has Schedule, Day, 5 Day, Search and Refresh. There is no Month there.

By the way, limiting to 5 days is at best inflexible. Many people want to look at 7 days because, you know, that's a week.

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