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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

#61

Post by Siecje »

I have to first trigger the unlock on Lolly Pop and then if I swipe wrong I'm taken to Phone which I barely use. Also the Phone's button to open the keypad looks like the App List button, so I usually hit that by accident.

The white background doesn't look as good as the transparent one, in the app list. The space between pages makes the screen look smaller.

There are permanent notifications for The Battery save mode and when you Restrict Background Data.

It takes me two swipes to pull down to access the settings.

Notifications on the lock screen are nice but not enough text is shown.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#62

Post by hyperpape »

Retric wrote: post #53
hyperpape wrote: post #45

"There are a bunch of new ‘transitions’ between elements. I don’t know what the battery cost actually is for this, but as a user I just don’t care about cute transitions between elements. I want fast interaction with my mobile device." This is poorly phrased at best. Transitions exist to make it obvious what is happening: e.g. you minimize a window and it zooms into the taskbar/dock, as a visual reminder that it's no…

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?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#63

Post by debacle »

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 tech sector if any of the big players (Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, off the top of my head) need to tighten their belts, because they're going to be able to shed a ton of employees without losing a shred of profit or productivity.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#64

Post by iancarroll »

throwawayaway wrote: post #46
shawnwall wrote: post #30

Google is making a huge amount of progress in UI and UX; the company has historically been rather mediocre in terms of it's UI and UX, while Apple was always the star. Over the past year or so the roles have reversed, and Google continues making strides towards unifying their applications in a single user experience and ui paradigm that allows for simpler app use, particularly for new users. It's easy to get upset wh…

The new gmail interface combined with the fact it logs me in to youtube to watch a video, made me install a cli mail client. Haven't looked back.

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

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#65

Post by asgard1024 »

shawnwall wrote: post #30

Google is making a huge amount of progress in UI and UX; the company has historically been rather mediocre in terms of it's UI and UX, while Apple was always the star. Over the past year or so the roles have reversed, and Google continues making strides towards unifying their applications in a single user experience and ui paradigm that allows for simpler app use, particularly for new users. It's easy to get upset wh…

> allows for simpler app use, particularly for new users

Are you kidding me? So called "flat design", with nondescript icons indistinguishable from the surrounding text, is the worst thing ever for new users. How am I supposed to know that I can click (er, I mean, touch) something?

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#66

Post by throwawayaway »

PMan74 wrote: post #50
remon wrote: post #28

The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Excessive change is generally better than no changes at all. Things have to evolve and even if we miss the mark every now and then it should always improve over time on average when new ideas are tried and tested.

> The problem with arguments like these is that there being "no good reason" is highly subjective. Not only is it subjective it's almost certainly incorrect. If you read anything about Google it's clear that they don't make UI decisions without looking at a ton of data, making the changes and testing those changes. What does the author of that post think? A Google designer updated a load of designs on a whim?

Not a whim, an existential crisis. Justifying their existence, cherry picking suitable answers from a ton of data to back that up. Confirmation bias to appear relevant.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#67

Post by untog »

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…

For Google Maps you can click on the help button on the bottom right and choose "Return to Classic Google Maps".

The new Maps has come a long way since launch but I agree that it's still very far from good.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#68

Post by throwawayaway »

iancarroll wrote: post #64
throwawayaway wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new gmail interface combined with the fact it logs me in to youtube to watch a video, made me install a cli mail client. Haven't looked back.

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

Yes, you read correctly. One man's convenience is overstepping the mark pushing G+ for another.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#69

Post by funkyy »

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…

As far as I remember click "?" mark on the bottom of map window - there is option to change it back to map classics. You can save this as well once changed (small pop up will come out) so it will become your default.

Re: Stop Changing UIs for No Good Reason

#70

Post by k-mcgrady »

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…

>> "And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day."

Try the 'agenda' view which does exactly that.

I was also going to debunk most of your other complaints because I know they're false but I don't have my Lollipop device with my at the moment.

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