Google’s Quest to Write the Rulebook for Interactive Design
wired.com
wired.com
As I mentioned in the notes, Facebook Home was my main inspiration for this work. It's kind of a mash-up of that and Material...
Amazon apparently has some war with google over its Fire line and making Fire more attractive than Google products, so we'll never get Prime Video on the Android tablet. Little things like the in-flight video on Southwest doesn't work with android (although they give you hilariously outdated instructions to use an android device with flash installed). I have a little remote control Romo robot I use to videochat with my infant son when I'm at work, and they gave up on their android app. Every startup launches an iOS app that's solid and good looking with a "coming soon" Android app that either never gets here or is a goddamn mess.
That's on top of the other tomfoolery with the N10 like the random battery drains and random reboots, although this might just be old age. I just don't feel the Android tablet experience is there yet and considering Apple's dominance in this area, it may never be there. Developers just aren't making it a priority and often we just get a stretched out phone app, if we get anything. Its shameful how little this has changed in the past couple years.
You can now but it requires some user intervention.
Amazon's video app can't be installed via the Play store for whatever reason but, if you select a video in the main Amazon app, it asks you to sideload the video app by enabling non-store apps for a bit. Install it an everything works as expected.
> Amazon's video app can't be installed via the Play store for whatever reason
Amazon has their own Android app store that they're pushing very aggressively. When you selected the video in the Amazon app, it actually brought you to the Amazon app store to download the video app. You have to enable side-loading because the Amazon app store isn't the Play store: it's not allowed to install stuff.
[1]: https://github.com/iamralpht/tboard a spelling game for my kids, inspired by the worksheets they get at school.
The analogy to the physical world breaks down, IMHO. Virtual space is completely fungible, and we aren't ready to give that up (even assuming it were a good idea): almost everything stretches, shrinks, mutates, appears and disappears. I know part of their objective (which I applaud) is move away from this kind of paradigm (or lack of one). But in practice, you have to stop at some point and say "close enough." They say elsewhere, for example, that it's better for transitions to be fast than smooth. It's in that little interval that you can sweep the impedance mismatch (between the designer's model and the user model) under the rug.
Anyway, I'm glad that we're talking about the rational basis for one design or another, rather than treating it as an impenetrable art.
Then again, it's just a picture, but why should we listen to what they're saying? They keep getting their own products wrong.
One recent example is the android gmail app, where it's never clear when it last refreshed the data and you find yourself constantly pulling down to get it to refresh, it says it has, but then a minute or two later suddenly emails from hours ago appear. I've just switched to myMail and it's honestly a lot better.
And the new maps interface is really rubbish, you constantly feel like you're fighting it, things have stupidly slow animations for no good reason, it's not actually clear what's, what. And the navigation in FPS mode is so bad and has been for years.
Hell, and this one has always bugged me, they still after 7 years, hide the really important apps you have on google apps for business in a stupid little drop down hidden in a "more" link which isn't even clear it's a more link. Meaning the "platform" it's supposed to be is actually just a mail app with some links tacked on.
Like Apple don't say much, but then release something and nail it, while Google talk as if they're an authority but consistently release complete messes.
This is actually getting me pissed off. How can they be thought leaders? Even their own site has rubbish UX choices:
http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html
Just look at the menu, it's a complete disaster UX wise. Click menu choices just open accordion sub menus, they make the cardinal sin of forcing the user to click again and do extra work. And one of them, the "Material Design", that just opens another menu with just one, YES JUST ONE, option of "Introduction". How can you call yourself thought leaders and yet get something as basic as a menu so wrong? It's like some sort of joke I don't get. Did no-one at google try and use their own site to see how useless it is? It's not a good UX. So how can you design good UX for the rest of us if you can't get that right? And they even have .html in their paths. Argh. Hello 1990.
1.) Not about Material design, but a single app 2.) Attacks the company, not the merits of the design itself.
And I haven't even added the new home page Chrome redesign on Android now hiding the most recently viewed web in landscape mode just so it can show a massive Google logo. It's very annoying.
And their search still wastes a mass of real estate on the right hand side even when there's nothing to go there which resulted in the snippets of text being too short to be useful.
I could go on and on ;) And I haven't even started on Google Play Music which has so many things wrong with it, not showing album years, it's a nightmare if you try and go "back" and a ton of other annoyances that spotify doesn't have.
All of their products feel like they're just not very well thought out. But technically speaking they're brilliant and that makes up for it.
Personally I find Material much more thoughtful, rational and functional and that's the same take I've heard coming from just about every professional designer I've heard take the time to voice an opinion.
This is a good example: http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3776/9025739956_f90cce7276_z.j...
Come to think of it, this material manifesto sounds a bit like a company of engineers trying to force their will onto visual design.
No thanks.
I'm pretty sure that was worked out 30 years ago.
It's a drop shadow and I spent days figuring out how do to the way our design guy wanted it done in C and Assembler almost 30 years ago.
But borders basically are what we are talking about.
A lot of reductionist like to state 'This was done before', and ignore the subtle differences that make the implementation better and actually very different in application.
For example, animations were no where near as smooth in the Apple Lisa days, nor shadows able to show such subtle differences as to communicate 8+ layers. Even just these two things combine to make a very different experience in the real world.
On a positive note, the documents at http://www.google.com/design/spec/material-design/introducti..., show how much consideration is required to just do the basics well, for example buttons http://www.google.com/design/spec/components/buttons.html
It's not that the good stuff on the web is so bad, it's that the lowest common denominator is just far too low.
I wish I could get a taste of it on my Nexus 4 with Android L but I guess that's not happening.
http://www.hp.com/large/ipg/assets/bus-solutions/color-trend...
It disappears.
It does not draw attention to itself.
It enables the user experience, but is not itself the experience."
-- Kathy Sierra, Serious Pony
That's the problem. The functional purpose of the UI is to get you to the content or let you do something, then get out of the way. The business purpose of the UI, though, is to get customers to buy the thing. "Sell the sizzle, not the steak". That's the driving force behind this endless tweaking of graphic elements.
Here's another kind of UI - automobile dashboards.
http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2012/05/car-dashboards-as-wo...
This is worth careful study. Match up the dashboards with various computer UIs.
Exacerbating all of this is the fact that they won't stop redesigning their shit. Their interfaces change monthly. Now, I'm not a user who demands nothing ever change, but I can't even learn any of this stuff before it's "new and improved". Blegh.
This is on a Macbook Pro 15" running Chrome. it's also worth noting that Google's current gen algo with hit you with a penalty if you "run too many adds above the fold".
They also have carousels, maps and product photos. Google has fully become the search engines they used to despise. It's basically a paid directory. I'm a power user so I scroll down, but the first content listing will see 33% of the clicks on the page. 40% of Google users don't know the ads are even ads.
Further reading... https://econsultancy.com/blog/62249-40-of-consumers-are-unaw...
http://www.anticareer.com/google-tells-you-to-do-one-thing-b...
http://www.affhelper.com/googles-hypocrisy-exposed/
http://www.branded3.com/blogs/will-google-penalise-itself-fo...
I can see how some of the contextual interface stuff would be annoying, but some of it I actually like. For example, when googling for a sports team name, if they are playing a game at that particular time, the first thing you'll see is the game score.
http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MD234.jpg
Yet arguably the most important buttons--the persistent OS navigation at the bottom--do not have drop shadows or any other kind of affordance. So which is it? Are drop shadows essential to interactivity or not?
Anyway, this might not be the reasoning by the designer, and it might not actually work in practice, but it could be one justification... rules are there to be broken.