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Comment by erikpukinskis | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, in terms of staff UI design cred Android is in better place than iOS right now.

With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design.

Jony Ive is probably the most brilliant consumer electronics hardware designer in the world, but I have yet to see any indication that he has any idea how to lead a platform UI design project. I had issues with Scott Forstall's style, but he was at least leading the charge somewhere.

In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse. At best Apple is in a holding pattern right now, I haven't seen any indication that they're pushing the state of the art outside of the hardware. The animations keep getting flashier and smoother, but that's not really UI design.

I thought Ive's strong understanding of design methodology would be enough, but I think maybe software design requires a different way of thinking. I don't know.

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Matias Duarte doesn't work on Android anymore.

https://twitter.com/MatiasDuarte/status/781132858802909185

I think it is a matter of personal taste. I personally don't like the material design. I enjoy the thin typography and design of iOS, and finding myself enjoying the experience of "Messages" in iOS at the moment. The "tapback" feature letting me heart/thumbs up some message is elegantly done IMO. And the knowledge that the receiver is also getting it the way I intended is great.

Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. It can be evaluated on a purely objective basis. You're talking about style, which is about expression more than outcomes, and is received in a very personal way.

When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there. The purpose of the design work is to make it usable.

"Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. "

But, what if I like/dislike the designers goals? In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design?

Not trying to prove any point. Just trying to understand your perspective.

> In other words, if the designer painstakingly crafts a detail I don't care about, does it mean it is a good design?

If that detail helps them achieve their desired business outcomes, then yes. You might not like the product, but the design work is good. If you are trying to weed your garden, a Tesla is not useful to you. That doesn't mean it's a bad design, it just wasn't designed for that particular need.

All design comes from a specific set of values, and can only be evaluated within the context of those values. The notion of universal design is a fiction. It's the remnant of the colonialist mindset, where there is a presumption of universal values.

Sounds like you're describing Art more than Design.

I would agree that I don't prefer Material design. It feels, to me, too much of a lowest-common-denominator.

While I wouldn't use it, if I feel frustrated or find usage unpalatable, that to me is an indicator of inferior design.

>Sounds like you're describing Art more than Design.

And even at that, parent goes for a controversial, "if it fits the goals of the artist it is fine" view of art, which is hardly some universally accepted standard for art.

Rule #89: if someone on HN argues that something that seems subjective is actually objective... they're wrong.

Rule #89 appears subjective to me

What if this is not the definition of design? A quick search of various dictionaries didn't yield what you have described.

Dictionaries usually lag consensus among practitioners about what a field is really about. What is software engineering? We update our answer year after year, but Oxford English only does every decade at best.

>Design is not a matter of personal taste. It either achieves the goals of the designer or it doesn't. It can be evaluated on a purely objective basis.

No it cannot. First, because nobody cares about the goals of the designer -- it's all about the goals and satisfaction of the users.

(E.g. if the designer is in love with themselves and find everything they do great, then any crap design they've made that they're fine with, can be said to "satisfy their goals" and by this logic is "objectively good").

If you meant "satisfies the designer's stated goals when it comes to actual use" (e.g. make the UI intuitive, convenient, powerful, etc") then notice how all those words are still subjective, and the various hard objective design laws (Fitts law, etc) are not enough to cover the entirety of a design.

And of course all those are about the UX. A design can have great UX but still look like crap in the aesthetics department -- and this is also quite subjective.

>When someone reacts so negatively to material design that they won't use it, that is a failure. There's no matter of opinion there.

That's (someone's rejection) is the definition of subjective though.

So much for "design success is objective". If you meant "refusal to use can be objectively measured" sure, but that doesn't say much about the design.

Said person could be a bizarro outlier that prefers some way worse design for example.

Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design.

This is a pretty subjective statement. It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative. Material extends MS's Flat design. I'm also not sure how much of that is Duarte, its a pretty open secret that Google makes use of some pretty high end digital agencies who aren't allowed to let folks know what they're working on.

WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs.

The Sidekick may have been his most interesting product but it was completely broadsided by the release of the iPhone and was n't anywhere near competitive to the Blackberry so I'm not sure how innovative it was.

If anything Duarte's had pretty good record for working on products with innovative features but never necessarily ground breaking on UI/UX

> WebOS was pretty tacky though an interesting OS design - actually implemented better by LG on their SmartTVs.

I've got to stop you there. WebOS was far ahead of its time, and especially considered in the context of a small startup going against established players, was brilliant.

It offered in some ways better and more intuitive usability than iOS, along with a great app development ecosystem and philosophy.

Palm's WebOS devices were a pleasure to use, in a time when that was a very rare thing for a mobile device.

Agreed. WebOS was the only other OS other than iOS that offered the singular upgrade experience.

It was clunky under the hood and never received enough love. It would have been interesting to see where WebOS (phone) would be today had Palm survived.

Was Palm a small startup? I think it was more like the last effort of a company on it's way out.

Preware was one of the most amazing pieces of software I've ever seen on mobile (I remember going out at lunch multiple times to hang around a fast public wifi spot to try and download an LDXE-based chroot that was too large for my home connection).

Stuff like Xposed is interesting, but I haven't seen any software for mobile that managed to match the kind of community driven tweaking that Preware fostered.

Ever heard of Cydia?

Yes, but Cydia requires jailbreaking which limits how similar I'd say it is to Preware, as the average iOS user probably isn't jailbreaking

> WebOS was far ahead of its time

I see this any time WebOS is mentioned but this makes WebOS sound a lot more innovative than it was. WebOS is widely lauded for two things: (1) the card application interface and (2) the accompanying physics/gestures, especially swipe from edge. Now these are great and appropriately lauded but that is a short list that really pales compared to a similar list of things the iPhone OS had introduced at that time. Other than that WebOS is basically a nicely polished clone of the iPhone OS. Even the cards metaphor itself, the hallmark of WebOS, was used two years earlier in the original iPhone in Mobile Safari and Cover Flow.

My wife had a Palm Pre with WebOS when I had an iPhone 3G. The Pre was pure crap, but the OS was very interesting and intuitive. I rarely had to help her with it. She's had iPhones since then, which can frustrate her due to how it handles settings, and she hates changes -- this week it's the removal of swipe to unlock :)

> a short list that really pales compared to a similar list of things the iPhone OS had introduced at that time

Like what?

Exercise left to readers making good faith arguments.

Pass. I will say that I saw features in webOS that took a long time to roll out to Android and iOS.

> Material extends MS's Flat design.

Don't see much credit for that original work being passed around, but I haven't dug up the facts.

I liked the WindowsPhone 8 instance, pity that's being flushed away. Hope it will be stolen and resold to the public.

> It seems that a lot of Duarte's designs are somewhat derivative

All UX/UI design on major platforms is "derivative". None is ground breaking.

I find it funny how you back up your claim by showing an equally derivative work (LG Smart TV)

Material design is like bootstrap for mobile. Good to give devs something they can't mess up too badly, but is pretty soulless.

>but is pretty soulless

What does that mean?

It's kinda like reference hardware. It's the baseline, with nothing special or unique. It takes a talented designer to take the toolkit and design language, and extend those to inject their own style and character into the finished product so that it both solves the specific needs of the product being designed by clarifying the interface to the user - and hopefully delights the user in some way to make the experience of using the app not just tolerable but delightful.

So, in a sense material design is too restrictive to let designers think outside of the box.

I get that opinion. But allow me to play the devil's advocate:

Mobile interfaces are small and restrictive. Touch screens and gestures have zero discoverability. Interfaces must scale to a multitude of different screen sizes and resolutions. Flare hurts usability in these situations. When designers break convention it is far more likely to result in confusion or frustration by end users. Well defined standards can enable me to use your app without even looking at the screen and drastically improve accessibility for things like screen readers.

I think the tendency toward flare stems from design education that emphasizes print media and tries to make a direct translation into Web/UX Design. Print media, and advertisements are meant to grab your attention, establish unique brand design language and brand identity. But If I'm already on your website or using your app you already have my attention. You've already sold me. Now simply help me accomplish the task I am here for in the least painful way possilbe. Branching out beyond common guidelines and creating new interface conventions may scratch your creative itch but it is rarely more efficient or easy to use that established conventions.

Material is a just a design language.

Apps that follow it will all have a similar look and feel on a platform... however, you can still make both good and bad UIs within that (or any other) framework. It doesn't alleviate the need to work with a UI designer.

There are certainly a fair number of developers who will just download a Material-styled template. But please don't assume that you can't do much more.

Take a look at some of the showcase designs on the Material Design Lite site for examples: https://getmdl.io/showcase/index.html

I don't agree with this. It is the same as iOS: design an app with the barebones, you will have a soulless app. The OS doesn't matter. What it matters it's what devs do with the visual kit. There is few innovation in app design in Android and this will be like this until the Android market turns out more profitable.

What do you expect; it's "Material"? Souls are immaterial.

I don't think UI is the issue.

Coming from someone who WANTS to love android for philosophical reasons and bought the google nexus, google nexus 5x. I always went back to iphone. The biggest issue is the device is not very good in comparison to the current gen iphone. It feels 1-2 gen behind in performance.

How so, exactly? I have a 5x myself and have never felt this to be the case.

Eh?

I still use a first generation Nexus 5. SNES/N64/PSP emulators run like a dream. Apps open/transition instantly.

What performance metric are you even using?

In a nutshell: Android itself isn't actually any slower, but it _seems_ slower due to garbage collection pauses.

When Android stutters, you can put money on it being down to the garbage collector running at an inopportune moment. This is the downside of most Android apps being built in Java, whereas most iOS apps are written in Objective C, which uses reference counting and so you have more deterministic release of allocated memory. The upside of this is little or no stuttering, but the downside is that you can still end up with pauses, but they can be in places which are hidden from the user. The other downside of GC is that developers can lean on it a bit more than is justifiable to create needless duplicates of objects on the assumption that they'll be garbage collected eventually... which can lead to GC stutter. A lot of Android's 'slowness' issues would go away if devs were a bit more careful with how they allocate their objects.

Another thing that makes Android seem slower than iOS is that Android gives apps a pretty lengthy grace period when they hang for some reason and will alert the user if it thinks the app has hung. iOS, OTOH, is less tolerant of this kind of thing and will just kill the offending app and rely on the app to restore its state when restarted. This hides a lot of issues with apps on iOS that are more obvious on Android. Which choice is better is a matter of debate: the iOS route gives the better user experience 90% of the time, but when you want that 10%, you really want that 10%.

Emulators (and quite a lot of games too) tend to be written in C and C++, which means they do manual memory management or use the conservative Boehm GC, so you end up with little or no GC stutter. OTOH, if the developer isn't careful, you're more likely to end up with memory leaks.

You must have a lot of nightmares then. My old iphone 4 lasted happily for 4 years and after I gave it to my sister in law. I couldn't force myself to use the awful nexus 5 for even two years. And I really went close to throw that piece of crap against the wall. Apparently the "new" nexus 5x is even slower than that for some reason that is beyond human comprehension. You really have very low performance standard, like my friend that enjoys his Nexus 5x even if it feels like a slo-mo fest compared to my iphone. Good for you, but please don't even try to convince anyone of the super performance of your favourite phone.

Lots of anecdotes, and then:

> Good for you, but please don't even try to convince anyone of the super performance of your favourite phone

...maybe take your own advice?

iOS is in a tough position, the road of incremental changes is coming to an end. The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution. You can kinda see Apple dipping it toes into the widget arena with the notifications area, yet they're probably hesitant to remake the whole home screen and risk alienating their current users. Tech savvy people won't mind a new home screen concept but for the "dad's and mom's out" there it might be a tough sell.

Apple's leadership in UI design the last couple of years has been a little lackluster. While they seem to be able to iterate, with a few missteps, I'm less sure about their capability to get a whole revamp done right.

The talent is surely there but the question is whether the leadership and willing to take the right risks is. It's going to be interesting going forward, I'm guessing they will have to introduce something widget/tile -ish in the next phone

Age is not a sign that's something is broken. Apples main lead is they need much less hardware to get good preformance which means smaller and longer lasting battery's and better profit margins. Giving that up for a useless status screen is a terrace idea that would cost them 10's if not 100's of billions of dollars.

Nothing wrong with the age of an UI per se, but I think the notion of App's as silos which need to be individually opened get its information is rather old fashioned, and not ideal from an UX POV. Being able to quickly glance information from weather, email, social media does do quite a lot to lessen unnecessary UI excise.

I don't think it has anything to do with hardware, they can be engineered in such a way they don't needlessly drain the battery, nor do I think most people would feel it was useless. Then again, people sometimes don't miss something before they have it :)

iOS does have a widget screen.

> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Right. Anything can be accessed so quickly a home screen should be more contextual than static app icons.

Well, they're half way there with the "force"-push shortcut actions on icons. It's a good idea even if discovery is a little bad. That was easier to add however since it really doesn't interfere with existing users. Changing how the home screen looks for everyone might be perceived as risky.

> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Well, perhaps they can license Live Tiles from Microsoft. There are definitely things to like there, and Microsoft's certainly not using them on phones anymore - at least not as far as real-world usage can show.

> The icon-based home screen is showing it's age and will need a revolution rather than an evolution.

Why? It is easy, intuitive, and used by millions of people.

Change for changes sake?

Glanceable information on the home screen is useful so users don't have to open every app, it also changes the home screen from being just "an launcher" to potentially provide useful information that you might need rather then being "just a launcher". It's just "one step less" in some scenarios.

Notifications are great for things that need your attention but the home screen becomes a little more of a seredipious view of app information that can increase the usefulness and engagement with an app

I think right now using the notifications screen for this 'at a glance' info and using the home screen for launching full apps, accomplishes the goal you are seeking.

I would love to see the iPad interface evolve a bit and not look so much like my phone. I don't feel like they are using all that space as elegantly as they could be.

It's getting there, but it's not ideal yet. At a glance means I don't have to do anything but glance. To see the widgets now, you have to wake up the phone and then swipe right.

On recent iPhones, waking up the phone just means picking it up. The swipe right is still an issue, though; it'd be nice if they could get rid of that. (Maybe default to the widgets view if there are no notifications?)

You are spot on. IIRC correctly there are built in hacks to make at least the clock and calendar icons show correct information, but for example the weather icon never tells you it rains. IMHO the Microsoft Live Tiles on Windows phone do make iOS look dated. Luckily for Apple, no one is buying those phones.

It seems very telling to me that the Standard Windows Desktop is generally considered a wasteland of discarded program and file icons, basically where you throw your digital trash...yet iOS decided that this was the design they wanted for the main start page of their OS.

No wonder there is such a divide among users. I don't think age has anything to do with it though.

The huge difference here is that on iOS you don't have random files lying around your home screen. The springboard is for apps, with a dock for the most common ones to persist between screens.

On Windows (and macOS) the desktop is fundamentally different, used differently, and is often obscured by your windowed content.

No, instead you had unremovable "useful" apps like "Apple Watch" instead.

Luckly they managed to at least let users hide that in iOS10, but it's still a cesspool of rarely used apps.

If by cesspool you mean a single folder on a hidden home page containing unused default apps, then yes, I suppose you're correct.

If by "single folder on a hidden home page containing unused default apps" you mean "App draw", then you've described Androids (arguably superior) default UX.

Put another way.. You're manually 'fixing' the iOS UX to operate like the Android "default"?

This kind of thinking is the one of them forces that drive initially good-enough designs into complete bullshit by spiral "aging" and "revolution" of even simple things. Thanks for all software that I dumped because of that.

The problems I have with the iPhone are 1) lack of a back button, so I have to learn every single screen of every single application and 2) the app store.

I had to help a friend to find a qrcode app on Sunday. Look for qrcode in the store, 842 found. Wow... None of them has a review or stars. How do you trust them? We kept scrolling for a while, nothing. Compare that with the Google store. It doesn't tell me how many qrcode apps are there but it gives me a rating for every single one. Then it's the usual hunt for the app with no ads and least permissions, but that's the same on the iPhone.

A back button would make no sense to me. There are situations in apps when you can't "go back" -- wait, do you mean some physical back button?! Otherwise, there's the "Return to..." feature, the fact that the back button in most iOS apps is always the top left button of the navigation bar, and there's always the left edge swipe. If you can't figure out how to go back in an app, then it's the app's fault, not the phone's. "I have to learn every single screen of every single app" -- come on, bro, that's a bit much.

As for the store, well, the App Store actually has standards and minimums for apps and reviews. I would think a google search for "best qrcode app ios" would yield better results than your strange method, but, hey, to each his own.

Samsung phones have physical back buttons. Other Androids have them on screen, which I find very annoying. In my limited experience not every iOS app has a way to go back to the previous screen. Maybe it doesn't make sense there but Android apps and web pages are built around that concept of history. I couldn't find a way to go back from an app detail page to the search results page in the App Store. My friend, which uses iOS since a long time, couldn't too. I guess she's not very expert at navigating iOS apps. Maybe that left edge swype would do, I'm learning it now, she seemed not to know it.

She was as clueless as me about the lack of stars. We looked for qrcode in the App store. This is what I would have done on my Android. She didn't suggest an alternative. A very basic iOS user?

> Wow... None of them has a review or stars. How do you trust them?

The top result for me has over 800 reviews and ratings. The vast majority of them have at least some reviews.

| With the Sidekick, PalmOS, and then Material Design, Matías Duarte has been consistently at the forefront of mobile UI design.

Agreed, but with a slight nitpick - Duarte was hired to lead development on Palm's webOS designs. PalmOS was the aging predecessor.

> In my opinion, force click, Siri, 3D wallpapers, etc, have not been major coups in terms of UI finesse.

I wouldn't say force click is a coup... it's like Android's menu button in the way it hides functionality and non-standard UX. Heaven knows what's going to happen if I trigger it random app. Google was wise enough to drop the Menu button in Android

It's hard to buy that argument. It doesn't appear Material ever attempted to be better than iOS, just different. And now Google Design is quietly backtracking (dialogs are transitioning to iOS action sheets, hamburger button is being phased out for bottom tab navigation). And now the phone even looks even more like an iPhone. Let's be honest, there are only two rules for design at Google: "Not Apple" and "good enough".

Honestly I notice more Android on my iPad than I notice iOS on my phone. iOS finally got custom keyboards so I can use a proper mobile keyboard like Swype, the notification panel isn't as useless as it was and is a lot richer like on Android. Its really only a matter of time until iOS introduces widgets on the home screen. I've convinced more than a couple people to switch to Android for their phone simply because you can have your calendar and todo list right where you can always see it.

Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web.

> Were hamburger buttons an Android thing? I noticed them everywhere, including on the web.

More of a Twitter Bootstrap thing, I think.

I had also thought that it was more of an Android thing. But apparently it's been the rat in the walls of computer UI since the 1980s on the Xerox Star and DOS, now blown up by Twitter and Facebook. https://blog.placeit.net/history-of-the-hamburger-icon/

IMHO, Google should use Material Design for their Android applications, but it doesn't belong in iOS applications.

I second this.Gmail is something that I use regularly on iOS and the interface is so ancient compared to gmail on Android. This is true for a lot of applications except maybe google photos.

Outlook (for iOS) does a better job of managing Gmail in iOS than the official app.

It also backups your email to MS servers for free.

I'm already regretting giving Google so much of my personal data, no way in Hell am I going to give a copy of it to MS. But I agree about the interface since I use Outlook for work emails.

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