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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

#201

Post by Retric »

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 the vast majority of games out there. Don't get me wrong there a useful tool and can mask a slow UI, but just becase a cruch is useful to mask problems does not mean you should see more heathy people walking around with them.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#202

Post by Mikeb85 »

VieElm wrote: post #190
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 don't want joy, I want to be able to see my schedule this month and my schedule today, at a glance, so I don't lose my job.

You can change the view to give you a summary of all the events for each month... You click the top right menu button, and select 'schedule' instead of 'day' or '5 day'.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#203

Post by platz »

Remember when everyone threw a fit because facebook changed their UI? Now, no-one seems to be talking about it. Although this article raises some good points, I'm just not motivated by "it's not what I'm used to / trained myself on" arguments.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#204

Post by archagon »

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…

I wrote up a rant about Google Maps the other day[1], from the perspective of an Apple user. As a Google Maps user since the start, I've been surprised to find myself reaching for Apple Maps more and more, both on my phone and on the desktop. Despite its flaws, Apple Maps just feels like a much better product in terms of UI and performance these days — and there's still time for them to catch up in data.

[1]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2014/11/20/what's_up_with_goog...

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#205

Post by JaggedJax »

Symmetry wrote: post #191
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…

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.

The upcoming alarm notifications seem to work exactly the same way for me. If you have the alarm notification expanded there's a dismiss option.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#206

Post by collyw »

deciplex wrote: post #161
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…

I have the opposite experience. I liked the maps that came with my phone a year and a half ago.

It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.

Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#207

Post by brewdad »

umurkontaci wrote: post #39
_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

I agree, the new keyboard sucks a lot, there is no visual distinction between the letters and it is very easy to make a lot of typos, it is very painful. Went back to Swiftkey immediately.

What's odd for me is that I feel like I should be making more typos with the new keyboard, yet I'm actually making fewer. I'm not sure if that has to do with the keyboard mapping being more accurate or me focusing slightly more while typing due to the "buttons" blending together.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#208

Post by billmalarky »

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…

Exactly. Not to mention, these changes make many users feel like they are getting something new (for free even). Even if it just a style change, my girlfriend really enjoys seeing the new look of the phone. I actually purposely let her do the updates on my android phone because I'm not overly excited about the changes but I know she is (she is an apple user so can't experience new android stuff otherwise).

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#209

Post by wtbob »

untog wrote: post #47
exelius wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products. This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.

Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page. That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that. Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products. Err, no. How does the left version cram more advertising in than the right version here? http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/up…

>> Google sucks at UI. Period. They had one good UI: the original Google home page.

> That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.

That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#210

Post by gdulli »

frandroid wrote: post #167
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...

It's not that simple in the real world, there's politics involved. The people who own a successful product aren't going to give up half their team. The success of it gives them an excuse to keep them all and keep growing the team. Which is counter-productive and hurts the product and the company, but helps certain individuals in the short term.
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