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Comment by shawnwall | Hacker News Reader

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 when things change, but keep in mind that change can be positive and/or negative.

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> 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?

IIRC, there's actually a distinction between clickable stuff and text in material design.

I'm not saying every choice they made is perfect. One of my qualms is the lack of backgrounds for button selection in areas with 'ok' and 'cancel' - which is one of the most important areas to give the user clear direction.

I've had Lollipop for over a week and I generally don't find lack of affordance in the UI. It's very clear what is clickable and what isn't. (there are a couple of very minor exceptions I can think of)

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.

Logging into youtube will, by default unless you know about it and turn it off, associate every video you view with your G+ profile for your gmail account, so every person you correspond with can look up your video history.

I had no idea it had gotten that bad! Seems my overreaction was justified.

Sorry, where do I go to see this because it sounds like you're talking absolute nonsense.

It appears to have changed in the last few months, and it didn't show full history, so I'll take it back slightly, but you can still see other Youtube users favourites/subscribed: https://www.youtube.com/user/whoever

Some people have a link from their G+ to their youtube, but it seems not to be there for everyone any more.

The other really frustrating thing is when you log out of Gmail, you are not actually logged out. You will be presented by a pseudo-looking login screen, which is really just an authentication screen to get back to Gmail.

What really happens is they keep you kind of logged in to collect as much data on your searches, videos, etc. The way to actually log out is:

- Click logout in Gmail

- Click "Sign in with a different account" (!)

- Click "Remove"

- Click the X next to your name.

- Click Done

It feels like they are trying to trick you into staying logged in by making the logout process extremely obscure and difficult, and I really hate it when I'm being blatantly tricked like that. With existence of evercookies (http://samy.pl/evercookie/) I am somewhat skeptical that even that obscure logout process actually logged me out.

This is pretty much the strongest reason why I don't use the GMail UI anymore (there are others, but this alone would have made me stop).

One could use chrome's incognito mode to get around such irritations if one were so inclined.

When I have to use Privacy Mode, I do. But the sheer fact I have to is mildly infuriating.

In some apps, yes, but in many others they are just as atrocious as they've always been—just adhering to material design a bit more. For example, Chrome on iOS has a pretty wonderful UX but Maps is a shitshow; it takes me several frustrated clicks to do what I want. You can never tell what a UI element does simply by looking at the screen.

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