Hacker News Reader

Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

> Please, HTC, no more ad-libbing your own user interfaces They suck and are hard to remove. We all call it nonSense for a reason.

No, people on XDA developers (phone nerds) use the tern 'NonSense'. HTC sticks to common UI principles, ie:

* Identifiable icons (eg, using a globe, rather than a blue and white sphere, for a web browser)

* Known color schemes, eg, black, green, and white, versus Googles white, blue, orange and green.

* A home screen which can host animations. Google's can't, which is why the widget selection is poor and those that exist don't do as much.

* Always visible phone function, something Google themselves did in 2.2

* Widgets that don't waste space, compared to the default 2 x 4 widgets for Twitter and Facebook with the massive stip between.

I could go on. HTC have UI designers. Android clearly don't - it's not a matter of personal preference, it's a matter of basic design principles.

Edit: Fixed 'Apple' rather than 'Android'.

View on HN

Actually, HTC's icon for the web browser confused me. It said "Internet", not "Browser", so I thought it was some dumb app that Sprint put on to show me how amazing a phone with "Internets" was. Nope, it's actually the web browser. Why not just call it that?

Do people like HTC's random animations? Do I really need to see lightning flash when I unlock my phone because there was a thunderstorm at the airport an hour ago? I much prefer Google's more tasteful weather widget -- a simple icon representing the weather and the temperature. Then I don't have to use more than half my screen for an extra clock and a huge picture of a cloud. Looks great in advertising materials, looks terrible in real life. (Of course, you can just remove the widget, so that's not a big deal.)

But it does show you the overall idea behind sense -- stupid gimmicks to make phones more exciting to people that can barely afford the monthly contract fee for a smartphone. Good for them, not good for me. So I kill it.

My biggest beef with Sense is that they put so many gimmicks on the keyboard that there isn't any room for the letter keys. I want to type on the keyboard, not be impressed that they have half-working text-to-speech. On the stock android keyboard, I can get a fucking comma without having to go to the alternate keyboard. On the sense keyboard, nope.

If HTC wants to see how to improve, they should look at the Droid X keyboard. That thing is great. (And it's what I use now :)

Anyway, "basic design principles" my ass. "Basic bling principles" maybe.

Unfortunately, most people don't know what a browser is. Google's shown that in their own research for Chrome.

> But it does show you the overall idea behind sense -- stupid gimmicks to make phones more exciting to people that can barely afford the monthly contract fee for a smartphone.

Sense for me gives me instant access to my friends activities (via FriendStream, which won't work on normal Google home as animation isn't allowed in widgets - see the vanilla Facebook and Twitter one-at-a-time widgets), my investments (same thing), and a visually driven music player that takes advantage of the fact I can find a picture a lot faster than I can a word.

I can do all of these without leaving my home screen. On regular Android, I can't.

After removing sense, the only thing I missed where the widgets. It detects vertical scrolling in widgets, which works well with twitter.

Also agreed on space efficiency - their weather widgets are much better done (fortunately tons of alternatives exist in the market).

There are plenty of things that annoyed me though. 1) The UI is slower and any of its minor gains is not worth this trade-off. 2) I dislike the iPhone style time select (android's key input is quicker to use, though it too has flaws (not selecting the existing text automatically)). 3) The clock that is a direct rip off of the iPhone. Its features are quite lacking (a stopwatch without laps, etc.)

> HTC have UI designers. Apple clearly don't

Wait, what?

Oops - wrote 'Apple' when I should have written Android. Corrected.

Pretty sure he meant Google, which wouldn't be true either...

Well per the post, there's more evidence of Google either not adopting or ignoring well known UI design principles throughout Android, in terms of making common functions widely available, consistency in UI, not using a color scheme with two colors directly sitting across from each other on the wheel.

They famously eschew design ideas from design "dictators", favoring data-driven design (e.g. choosing a blue that yields more ad clicks); I wonder if they do this in the Android development cycle or once it is in users' hands.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com