71–80 of 86 posts
I sort of like the design. Too bad google's business model is still offensive though. At least with iOS I know the deal is: I give Apple money, they give me a widget. With Google the deal is they give me services, I give them ... gobs of information.
I like it! I am not a designer, just a user of Android and this looks good. I just never liked or bought the complete flatness idea. Maybe I am too brainwashed by skeumorphic buttons shadows and whatnot. But we just don't live in the 2D world, the world is 3D and shadows, textures, depths help us interact with the real world (it is there without anyone explicitly adding it in, as in objects in the world are inherentl…
http://blog.tobiasandtobias.com/post/37179466962/in-defense-...
Excerpt: Even ‘digital natives’ live in the physical world. We start learning how it works before we ever touch a computer, and even the most dedicated nerd spends more time interacting with physical objects than with digital interfaces. It doesn’t take additional learning to know that an object casting a shadow on another is in front of that other, for example. Failing to leverage that existing knowledge is tantamount to shutting down whole swathes of users’ brains.
Now Google is acknowledging this deficiency of Flat design. See: http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/... They have a page titled "Dimensionality affords interaction." Google is bringing back some dimensionality because a pure flat UI is harder to figure out.
I think that material is great design, but terrible strategy and in the end may land up resulting in the Android design space being worse, not better. For years google (and many members of the design community) made a very successful argument that android apps should look and act like android apps, and iOS apps should look and act like iOS apps and web apps should act like web apps. Trying to achieve design consisten…
I read "platforms" in that sentence as the different Google platforms: Android on phones, Android on tablets, TV, Chrome, etc.
"The design team at Google felt the need to come up with a more coherent look and feel that could be applied across all of its products, from Android to Chrome OS to the web."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't drink the koolaid, man. You were right the first time. Calling it a "design language" is their way of obfuscating what they do, making it sound like it's something that only they can do. Therefore you, a mere programmer, should listen to them and do what they tell you, because you aren't qualified to "design" things. Hey, you didn't even know what a design language is! I think we are witnessing the collision be…
Your comment is a great example of not understand what design is. Design is not something that is applied at the end, or something that is in conflict with function. Your contempt is the product of ignorance. You'd benefit greatly from some formal design education.
Strawman alert! He never said that.
>Design is not something that is in conflict with function.
It should not be. If it is then it's useless. But nevertheless we do see examples of such absurdity as a common place occurrence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the idea is that there are ready-made toolkits for Material that will give you the same design across iOS, Android, and web, and so if it's easy to develop in, why not use them? As a startup founder, I have to say it makes a lot of sense. My core competency is finding & serving my own market, I don't have time to wrestle with designing for 3 platforms. I'm guessing that the strategic advantage is to cut off A…
Unless Google ports their UI framework to iOS, I don't see how iOS developers will use Material.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate the hidden swipe features. If there is no UI space for it, I'm not literally going to click and swipe around to "discover" shit. using an app, I dont want to have to discover, I want to easily be able to find what I'm looking for. Swiping between map results at the bottom of the new maps was completely unintuitive for me. I was still pinch zooming and clicking on individual results on the map. To "teach" me, t…
I had no idea you could swipe between map results! Wow. Talk about undiscoverable; if they had overlayed instructions for me (which they probably did), I probably just dismissed them without reading because I was trying to find my results.
I think that material is great design, but terrible strategy and in the end may land up resulting in the Android design space being worse, not better. For years google (and many members of the design community) made a very successful argument that android apps should look and act like android apps, and iOS apps should look and act like iOS apps and web apps should act like web apps. Trying to achieve design consisten…
>>Trying to achieve design consistency across platforms was going to annoy your users. Instead you should strive for _branding_ consistency across platforms and use native interaction patterns. Yep. Case in point: the Windows 8 "Metro" fiasco.
So, over the past few weeks I've been asking a few friends and family what they think of things like iOS 7, Windows 8, flat styling on web sites, and the like.
Quite a few responses to my completely unscientific study have been downright negative, such as "boring", "childish", or "dumbed down". "I can't find anything any more" was probably the most common form of complaint about behaviour rather than style, particularly regarding Windows 8 and the UI formerly known as Metro. Some people have been more moderate, for example giving two-way comments like "this might work well on a touch screen but it's awkward on my laptop" or "it's very simple".
Most telling to me is that absolutely no-one has actually come down in favour of either iOS 7 or Windows 8 overall so far, while I know at least one person who is trying to return a brand new iPad after a week because they "hated it" and several who have at some point in the recent past bought a device and either chosen Windows 7 over Windows 8 or actively downgraded after purchasing. People are literally avoiding or even returning or rapidly reselling new devices just to avoid these kinds of UIs.
I'm sad, though unsurprised, to see Google following Microsoft and Apple down this evolutionary dead end. As others have commented in this discussion, it seems like reducing everything to the least common denominator. To me, it also seems like promoting tools that make it cheap and quick to build software and web sites with maximum reach -- essentially, a direct commercial advantage -- rather than promoting tools that help you build software and web sites that are any good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your comment is a great example of not understand what design is. Design is not something that is applied at the end, or something that is in conflict with function. Your contempt is the product of ignorance. You'd benefit greatly from some formal design education.
>Design is not something that is applied at the end Strawman alert! He never said that. >Design is not something that is in conflict with function. It should not be. If it is then it's useless. But nevertheless we do see examples of such absurdity as a common place occurrence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same problem has plagued Android tablet apps. Google has tried to pursue the notion that you don't really need separate apps for phone and tablet; one single app can be made of fragments that rearrange in suitable ways to work on either phone or tablet. The problem is that this is only true if you accept a mediocre common denominator between the two platforms. If you are striving for pure excellence - the very be…
That's just not true. People forget that before smartphones we use to make applications that worked on lots of resolutions. It's not a new thing. In fact what Google is doing is fantastic. They provide the tools to make your app have different layouts on different form factors. Much easier than detecting when the resolution changed on a CRT screen and then trying to scale everything accordingly.
But only as long as what you're laying out looks and works the same on every platform and gives good results in all cases.
We used to have this issue in desktop software development. MS and Apple had quite different UI standards for their respective platforms, and if you just naively ported an application from one OS to the other without considering the details then it just wouldn't feel right in a hundred little ways that added up.
The current trend for trying to homogenize native mobile apps, web apps, desktop apps, and anything else we can call an app, seems like a retrograde step. It makes development cheaper, but different platforms are useful for different things and they are used in practice in different ways. There is way too much hammering square pegs into round holes right now.
Ironically, Google's own sites are often excellent examples. Analytics, for one, is literally unusable on various tablets (notably iOS ones using mobile Safari), because they've tried to be too clever with standardising their look and feel instead of using native system controls. What they've actually done is cause a bunch of content not to even appear in the viewable area and broken the normal idioms for basic interactions like zooming and scrolling that would otherwise have fixed that.