A) Apple is innovating the user experience. The author even specifically says that Apple is far ahead in the game, but doesn't seem to acknowledge that this is precisely because of past innovation.
B) It's not even necessarily Apple who have to innovate. There are tons of developers writing libraries for iOS that make UX and user experiences better. Tons of developers meaning more developers than exist for Android.
C) To claim that Android designers are innovating is just such a weak claim. Most Android apps I see are either ports of legit iPhone apps or really awful designs, note that I specifically mention the design.
It may have been true at one time that most Android apps were just ugly ports of iphone apps but in my experience that is no longer the case. Devs are taking the platform seriously and it its really coming into its own. Iphone apps on the other hand are starting to look like just mashups of each other all with the same generic looking animations and U X elements. New apps on my Xoom tend to be exciting and original. My iPad? More of the same.
Good point, although the glacial pace of Apple's refinement and their total lack of user customization options cripples their platform aesthetically and functionally.
This is a bigger problem on the Apple desktop, which still forces the late-'80s/early-'90s inverse color scheme on you all day. Squinting at black text on a glaring white screen results from the failed attempt to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. This fails because paper doesn't emit light. It's a bad idea left over from the "desktop publishing" era.
On any other GUI (certainly Windows for 20 years), you can simply set up a color scheme that makes sense. Competent applications then take on that scheme automatically.
Note that this is not a call for the return of the asinine "skinning" fad of 10 years ago. We are seeing that in mobile apps, which eschew well designed standard controls in favor of undiscoverable gimmicks.
>New apps on my Xoom tend to be exciting and original. My iPad? More of the same.
Can you name a few so that I can try them on my tablet? Also would be helpful if you can point me to a place where the good and new tablet apps are showcased(not just the Play store's Tablet picks) since most apps seem to be phone apps that look terrible on a tablet.
Tablified Market. They do the hard work of going through the Android Market to find the apps that actually work well on Android tablets. More on them here:
>Iphone apps on the other hand are starting to look like just mashups of each other all with the same generic looking animations and U X elements. New apps on my Xoom tend to be exciting and original. My iPad? More of the same.
Design consistancy, standard UI widgets and behavior are all good things. What excites me on my iPhone/iPad is apps that do new cool things, not apps that try to create new UI behaviors and looks.
Honestly, as an experienced Android user I try to shy away from the apps that are recent iPhone ports.
They can look pretty, but they usually make basic mistakes like not supporting the Share intent correctly, not taking advantage of Google/other account integration and not integrating with external applications (e.g. browsers). Those developers can think they're bringing "good design" to Android, but, by not paying attention to what's different, they're often producing apps that are borderline unusable.
As a life-long Mac user and Android UI dev there seems to be a distinct pattern forming:
1. Revolutionary services start on iOS.
2. Innovations on common mobile services start on Android and get "finished" later by Apple.
There's plenty evidence to support this - almost all new stuff announced by Apple in the last two WWDC were things already done on Android. But they were all unfinished ideas. Apple recognized the usefulness and completed them.
For all of the innovation that Android claims to have going for it, is this Feel UX really the best that you can do? Honestly this is barely changed from the default android UI. You repackaged the widgets so they're on their own page which you could already do. You added a shortcut screen which can hold both widgets and apps and contacts which is the same as any regular Android screen and you put the apps on one page like the launcher. Changing the way the lock screen looks with swiping is cool but that's not all that special. That's a jailbreak tweak away from being an iPhone.
I've got no problem with Android but when you claim to be innovating over another platform when you aren't, that bugs me.
I don't think 'Android' is claiming anything. There was a story on here a few days ago about the online religious battles between the various tech factions, mobile in particular. It was kind of pathetic. When you start anthropomorphizing an electronic gizmo, maybe its time to go outside and get some fresh air. Just a thought.
Excuse me for not clarifying: Android users, Android developers, people writing articles that anthropomorphize android. Certainly the little green robot isn't claiming anything.
Yeah, it's all a question of if you have the time, resources, and most importantly a good sample.
Testing 41 shades only sounds bad because we typically have far too many design variables relative to the population of users. In those cases, we need someone with a priori knowledge of good design to limit the space we explore. When you can make billions of observations, you can start exploring experimentally much more of the design space.
Fair enough, and thats an interesting point, though I have my doubts about the relevance of the point.
First as an overall product and market strategy for a phone that's about as good an idea as making a mass market product designed for developers.
Second I think equating a handful of UI skinning enthusiasts as the whole of product and experience designers is perhaps going a bit far, no? Sure I'll admit I couldn't live without the Go launcher on my Android, but I'd still switch back to iPhone in heartbeat because the overall experience is still much smoother. Subjectively speaking anyways.
1) It isn't really mass market except in cases where someone has built some half decent UX on top of it. But yes the CLI tools are an amazing UX for developers, no developers are not a mass market
2) Again a handful of skinners (many of whom are really just sticking half naked women on the screen) are probably not representative of the whole of design or even the best of it.
This is pointless nonsense. What's demonstrated is a special effects video of a reworked Android home screen with a bunch of whizzy mystery-gesture interactions - the exact same kind of interactions that takes the longest for iOS users catch on to. (make a folder, edit homepage, notification center, camera-from-lock screen, caps lock)
And it's shipping for a subset of a boutique phone line sometime this summer in Japan only. Next!
Okay, only semi on-topic, but I'm curious. Am I the only one who finds this interface interesting, but unbearably ugly? Mostly, the boxes around icons and the form factor of the phone itself. I usually appreciate them all - iOS, Android 4, QNX and the Lumia 800 - but this is hate at first sight. I can't even explain why.
Anyone else? I feel weird, like someone who is about to give Inception a rating of 2 on IMDb.
It's grey, it's flat, and I honestly think they're iOS users trying to do an Android OS UI. There's a lot of mistakes in there and not much flexibility (which is in very high demand on the platform).
But at least it's not the 4x4 grid we've seen for 5 years.
They took almost all of the iOS UX and pasted some new ugly graphics on top.
I did not see a single thing that iOS does not do. Drag to reorder, got it, splashscreen info/camera, got it, notifications, got it, even the swipe down from the top for notification center.
So TL;DR a leap forward for Android is two steps behind iOS?
Maybe I did not make it clear enough, but my point was that the title "If Apple Won't Innovate The User Experience, Android Designers Will" does not make sense since iOS already has the features the they are "innovating" When I hear innovation I expect a completely new way of doing something not makeup slathered on with a trowel.
I was looking more at the funtional differences instead of the skin which seems to be quite dramatically different from anything currently out there. Although at the moment I don't see how I would know what pinching and swiping would do at any given moment.
> Making good on the trend described in mobile app designer Josh Clark’s An Event Apart talk, “Buttons Are a Hack,” there are almost no buttons to be seen at all. Everything slides, pinches and magically appears in context.
For the love of God, please don't let this start to be a thing.
I watched the video, and the phone seems like hell to use. Wait, do I swipe down or left to call? Up or diagonal to get to my address book? Oh no, I have to pinch. Oh crap, that just took a photo.
Buttons provide unambiguous affordance. I'll just leave this here, since it seems like every week new designers forget about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
Well said. Gestures are all good, until they become arbitrary and everywhere. My 1yo can navigate through the apps on my iPhone because the system's unexciting but intuitive use of buttons for the most important things: app icons are buttons, most things interesting to her are tappable, and mostly importantly, when something goes "wrong" - app showing ads, reaching an unrecognized page of SpringBoard - she could always push the only big physical button to get back and restart. Now that simplicity is another kind of coolness that we should really shoot for.
(There are definitely arbitrary use of gestures in iOS, but they are mostly for non-essential tasks or to provide shortcuts. You could swipe an item in a table to reveal the delete button, but you almost always can find an "Edit" button to achieve the same goal.)
That title is hilarious. Compare user experiences before iOS and after. But, these guys made a skin so they're the innovators. OK.
And, as ever, what would this article be without the inevitable trotting out of the old "fanboy" chestnut. If there were a "tech blogger bingo" card this one would surely be a winner.
I hate that this response shows up on every article on HN. It offers no insight whatsoever, as far as I'm concerned. Just because profit is the "only" thing a company cares about [1] doesn't mean it's the only thing worth discussing.
1: As if it's even true that companies only care about profit--you think Steve Jobs was motivated more by money-making itself or by money-making as a vehicle to advance his vision of technology?
It all seems very snazzy. Personally I would love to have this UX, but I can't say the same for my parents. The gesture overload would make this UX unusable for them. Guess who is gonna get called then!!
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 82.0 ms ] threadA) Apple is innovating the user experience. The author even specifically says that Apple is far ahead in the game, but doesn't seem to acknowledge that this is precisely because of past innovation. B) It's not even necessarily Apple who have to innovate. There are tons of developers writing libraries for iOS that make UX and user experiences better. Tons of developers meaning more developers than exist for Android. C) To claim that Android designers are innovating is just such a weak claim. Most Android apps I see are either ports of legit iPhone apps or really awful designs, note that I specifically mention the design.
Yes, if you do that you are "just mashups of each other", if you don't you are "inconsistent".
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
>New apps on my Xoom tend to be exciting and original. My iPad? More of the same.
That's just in the superficial sense --looking different etc. Not in any new cool interaction models.
The way Cocoa Touch works though, means that when Apple will redesign the UI elements (the "look" part), all the "generic" apps will get the new look.
In ad-hoc UI Android, not so much.
This is a bigger problem on the Apple desktop, which still forces the late-'80s/early-'90s inverse color scheme on you all day. Squinting at black text on a glaring white screen results from the failed attempt to make the screen an analog for a piece of paper. This fails because paper doesn't emit light. It's a bad idea left over from the "desktop publishing" era.
On any other GUI (certainly Windows for 20 years), you can simply set up a color scheme that makes sense. Competent applications then take on that scheme automatically.
Note that this is not a call for the return of the asinine "skinning" fad of 10 years ago. We are seeing that in mobile apps, which eschew well designed standard controls in favor of undiscoverable gimmicks.
Can you name a few so that I can try them on my tablet? Also would be helpful if you can point me to a place where the good and new tablet apps are showcased(not just the Play store's Tablet picks) since most apps seem to be phone apps that look terrible on a tablet.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2402037,00.asp
A must-have resource for any Android tablet owner.
Design consistancy, standard UI widgets and behavior are all good things. What excites me on my iPhone/iPad is apps that do new cool things, not apps that try to create new UI behaviors and looks.
They can look pretty, but they usually make basic mistakes like not supporting the Share intent correctly, not taking advantage of Google/other account integration and not integrating with external applications (e.g. browsers). Those developers can think they're bringing "good design" to Android, but, by not paying attention to what's different, they're often producing apps that are borderline unusable.
1. Revolutionary services start on iOS.
2. Innovations on common mobile services start on Android and get "finished" later by Apple.
There's plenty evidence to support this - almost all new stuff announced by Apple in the last two WWDC were things already done on Android. But they were all unfinished ideas. Apple recognized the usefulness and completed them.
I've got no problem with Android but when you claim to be innovating over another platform when you aren't, that bugs me.
If you've got something basically right, the patience to refine it and the maturity to leave what is correct alone is more important.
Testing 41 shades only sounds bad because we typically have far too many design variables relative to the population of users. In those cases, we need someone with a priori knowledge of good design to limit the space we explore. When you can make billions of observations, you can start exploring experimentally much more of the design space.
http://mycolorscreen.com/popular/
But hey, flame on.
First as an overall product and market strategy for a phone that's about as good an idea as making a mass market product designed for developers.
Second I think equating a handful of UI skinning enthusiasts as the whole of product and experience designers is perhaps going a bit far, no? Sure I'll admit I couldn't live without the Go launcher on my Android, but I'd still switch back to iPhone in heartbeat because the overall experience is still much smoother. Subjectively speaking anyways.
2) Where the best designers go, so follow consumers. Apple proved that, no?
2) Again a handful of skinners (many of whom are really just sticking half naked women on the screen) are probably not representative of the whole of design or even the best of it.
And it's shipping for a subset of a boutique phone line sometime this summer in Japan only. Next!
Anyone else? I feel weird, like someone who is about to give Inception a rating of 2 on IMDb.
But at least it's not the 4x4 grid we've seen for 5 years.
So TL;DR a leap forward for Android is two steps behind iOS?
You lose quite a bit of credibility by suggesting this is something any Android build stole from iOS.
For the love of God, please don't let this start to be a thing.
I watched the video, and the phone seems like hell to use. Wait, do I swipe down or left to call? Up or diagonal to get to my address book? Oh no, I have to pinch. Oh crap, that just took a photo.
Buttons provide unambiguous affordance. I'll just leave this here, since it seems like every week new designers forget about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
(There are definitely arbitrary use of gestures in iOS, but they are mostly for non-essential tasks or to provide shortcuts. You could swipe an item in a table to reveal the delete button, but you almost always can find an "Edit" button to achieve the same goal.)
And, as ever, what would this article be without the inevitable trotting out of the old "fanboy" chestnut. If there were a "tech blogger bingo" card this one would surely be a winner.
For all those ventures, which often compare themselves to market leaders, it is nothing more than a buzzword.
1: As if it's even true that companies only care about profit--you think Steve Jobs was motivated more by money-making itself or by money-making as a vehicle to advance his vision of technology?
one more ui for android :)
edit: let google choose a standard , and with any hope it will be a standard for all android.