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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

#241

Post by snowwrestler »

nickbaum wrote: post #211

A few thoughts: * Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies. * You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between po…

Google is currently making a number of design changes to bring products in line with their new "Material" design guidelines. These changes may or may not be in response to actual usability issues. The hypothesis is that an overall design consistency across Google products will improve overall usability over time.

However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#242

Post by gtbcb »

I feel like startups change their UI too often as well. Yes, it's good to test new designs for conversion, but sometimes I feel like every time I visit a site, I have to completely relearn how to use it. Sometimes I wonder if designers should be contracted more instead of being brought on full-time.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#243

Post by jackmaney »

coldtea wrote: post #233
jackmaney wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Who said it has to be adjacent? To type WHAT just click W, swipe to H, then to A, then to T (and that roughly).

Why would that not turn into WDFGHGFDSASERT?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#244

Post by christop »

dnr wrote: post #178
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…

The lock screen is indeed infuriating! Does anyone know if there's a way to restore the old behavior where you could enter your pattern lock immediately after pressing the power button? The extra swipe serves no purpose at all, given that I've already pressed the power button, and have a pattern lock.

Yeah, even if you disable showing notifications on the lock screen, you still have to swipe away an empty screen to get to the pattern.

Annoying.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#245

Post by hahainternet »

pjc50 wrote: post #173
iancarroll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web interface convinently logged you in and you stop using it because of that?

Logging into youtube will, by default unless you know about it and turn it off, associate every video you view with your G+ profile for your gmail account, so every person you correspond with can look up your video history.

Sorry, where do I go to see this because it sounds like you're talking absolute nonsense.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#246

Post by revelation »

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…

My personal favorite pointless change is the clock app. Now, mind you, it looks exactly the same if you disregard that they changed the widgets design, but thats system wide.

But they did manage to move the bin for deleting an alarm from the right to the left. That's all. Let's just switch it the fuck around!

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#247

Post by untog »

wtbob wrote: post #209
untog wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 …

Yeah, try putting the average smartphone user in front of a Unix terminal and see how that works out.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#249

Post by thirdsun »

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…

I couldn't disagree more. Of course there no sense in moving things around just for the sake of changing something, and implementing those design changes is always prone to making bad decisions. However I pretty much want the applications I use to move forward and if this means iterative design adjustments, then by all means, do it.

The people complaining about any kind of change are usually the ones who learn using an application by trying to exactly memorize navigation paths and word-for-word expressions in menus, which feels absolutely wrong to me. It's like learning stuff in school by memorizing the content word for word, without understanding any of them or the context in general. It may work for while, but not for long.

I know that the average person is very different from the tech-savvy crowd around here, in fact I work with non-technical people everyday, yet this helplessness once a button or a feature has been moved is still very surprising to me and I think it's a better idea to try to educate people not to hang on to memorized paths, but instead look for plausible context, really consider where you'd expect a certain feature to be located. That's exactly what the developer did for his app - well, in most cases. Avoiding change in software design is not the solution.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#250

Post by tspike »

jackmaney wrote: post #243
coldtea wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who said it has to be adjacent? To type WHAT just click W, swipe to H, then to A, then to T (and that roughly).

Why would that not turn into WDFGHGFDSASERT?

Because it's got a big list of n-grams and knows what words are more commonly used than others. It uses a predictive model to generate a list of words from your swipe, and then sorts that according to usage. It also continuously learns what words you use the most and prioritizes those. It picks the most likely word, but also displays a list of other possibilities you can tap. It's pretty slick.
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