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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of design and usability. I upgraded to a Android 5.0 recently (lightly modded by One Plus), and the design is really stunning. The icons have been redesigned to appear as though they they are made of actual flat material adding almost a hybrid 3d flat design that looks great. The colors are vibrant without being overwhelming. Messenger and Contacts applies a new color to your contacts which helps you keep in mind with whom you are speaking. All the Google apps exhibit similar colors and styles to add for consistency.

I'm not a designer and maybe its just personal preference, but I'm a long time Android user and this is the first time the stock Android has been pleasant to look at. I use other's iPhones and, despite the great display, the UI now appears rather dull in comparison.

https://design.google.com/

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    > The production of beautiful objects is only one
    > small component of modern design…

As the authors say, and as Steve Jobs and Jony Ive have reiterated in almost every Apple product launch, how something looks is only a small part of the design Apple focuses on. Historically, the priority is how things _work_.

This is probably the most misunderstood aspect of Apple products. A screenshot of software XYZ may look just as thoughtful as an Apple product, but rarely in practice is that true.

What has OP misunderstood? That he or she _should_ prefer iOS over Android because of a demagogoic quote? It's unclear what your point is here.

That said, the other day I was using Google Maps for iOS and could not figure out how to switch directions from public transit to car. It seriously took me a few minutes of playing to realize how to do it. I feel like people implementing Material do it in a kind of perfunctory way and that can be lossy usability wise. On the other hand the Google Maps have a history of myopically introducing big UX changes that make the product worse, so why would I expect anything more from the team when implementing Material on iOS?

OP starts with:

    > I think Android has surpassed iOS in terms of
    > design and usability.

But then only describes how materials _looks_. Both Windows and Android have been plagued with attempting to make things look a particular way without consideration for how they _work_. Ironically, Apple is often criticized for exactly this, when in my experience they really do sweat the _work_ details.

I'm not saying OP should prefer anything over another thing, just that only talking about how devices look is missing the broader goals of design and usability.

Well, Android with Material started focusing a LOT on how things work, how animations have to seem natural, gives guidelines on language and explains how to structure your app.

> the priority is how things _work_

I really wish that they would apply this to iTunes and with their power/USB cables.

They've done a good job with OSX - F3, F4 and the multi-window support all work really well. Multi-windowing is an especially big improvement over windows.

But there are easily 10 x as many iTunes users as OSX users so they should really do something about it.

I've never understood why iTunes is the way that it is, except that was already available on Windows, so it seemed like a good vector for devices. It really is a jumbled bag now though, and seems to go through significant UI changes every release for no good reason (hearts? stars? iTunes has them both!)

OS X used to have a separate syncing application, iSync, for PDAs that was simple and generally worked. I was dusappointed when the moved everything into iTunes (really, calendar and photo setting in my music player?)

What is the concern with USB and power? I really like lightning and MagSafe.

The lack of stress relief which means that the cables break very quickly. It's a well known design defect in Apple products.

I'm very careful with my technology but I'm already on me 2nd MBP power supply and my wife is on her 3rd USB cable for her iPad. This all in 18 months.

Uh, there is strain relief. On every cable. You're probably doing what everyone does, which is to wind that cable on the power supply as tightly as you can around the charger, which is going to eventually break the cable. Instead, make a small loop where the cable begins, then wrap gently. It will last essentially forever.

And no. This isn't a "well known design defect". In fact, Apple's cables are inevitably designed and manufactured better than competitors'. Have you even seen the awful mess that passes for PC power supplies lately? At all? Well, I have, since I administer about 200 Macs and around 75 PCs. I can tell you that there is no comparison in design or quality.

I have a MBP from 2008 with the original t-shaped magsafe power cord, and its still in perfect working order. Maybe you're harder on you're harder on your power cables than you're giving yourself credit for.

> Historically, the priority is how things _work_.

Right, everyone agrees with this. And as users of their products, we can see that this is no longer the priority today. The question is, how and why did it change?

You can see it even in little things like Apple removing the ability to display how much battery time is remaining instead of percentage in OS X. This makes the product work less well, but makes it more consistent with iOS and "simpler".

I'd guess they removed it because it was so inaccurate due to people changing their use habit. If I'm just browsing the web my laptop might last for 7 hours, but as soon as I fire up some youtube it drops dramatically.

The positioning of the FAB or "Floating Action Button" on top of the content, makes sense when you think about it but in practice I find it frustrating:

- Because the way I hold the phone, most of the time my thumb is covering it and I don't see it.

- Because it is supposed to be the "main" action, it makes all other actions move around. Example: on Google Photos, the FAB is search. on Gmail the FAB is "create" and search is at the top.

- It is still the last place I look on the screen to perform an action. I look at the top first, then I look in the hamburger menu and only then I realize it was beneath my thumb. Fuck

I'm not convinced. I don't think google is convinced either because they keep shuffling it around from update to update, from app to app like they don't know what to do with it.

I don't think everyone would agree with your reasoning. In fact, your reason for disliking the FAB (it's position) is all the more reason for it to be there because it's easy to tap.

Most the material ergonomy is laughable, lots of nice ideas and work but I'm about 32x more productive with a BadaOS interface.

Yeah i miss the Holo stuff. At least there buttons etc seemed to automatically find a finger friendly size.

Again and again i have seen apps go Material, only to have buttons etc become so small i have to tap 2-3+ times to hit them. And i do not have anything close to large fingers.

Frankly i am left with the impression that with Material Google abandoned their adaptive UI frameworks and went with "pixel counting". Thus Material interfaces only seem to work properly on 10" and 5" screens.

Material often places action item in very bad places, floating over content, far from where you were touching... like a mouse compared to a keyboard home row, aka non-ergonomic.

It was amazing as a design idea, having all the pieces analog, independent yet coupled when needed, it felt like the proper way to build things, but I'm starting to think that this is a classic wrong variable focus, this doesn't matter for the kind of interaction it's used for.

I also think that Google has found a sweet spot.

The implementation is far from perfect, but the use of z-position + color creates a really good UX IMO.

They took pretty much the only thing they got right design wise (a sense of depth applied to buttons & popups) with the first versions of the OS and used it very well.

There are still some things that need improvement though :

- Consistency. The platform is slowly becoming more consistent but there is still a way to go. We now have a design library. It is a great step in the right direction but it needs to evolve a lot. Particularly, Google apps should always use the same implementation of a widget (whether it comes from the public design lib or a private one). With the nav drawer, at first there was no common implementation in the support/design lib, so each team implemented one with small differences, for 6 months it was very maddening.

- Navigation patterns. Google encourages the use of tabs for 0-depth apps with a few options. Good, that's indeed a strong pattern. For more complex apps though, the only solution pushed by the system is the Navigation Drawer. I have got to admit that Google uses it well with all the important features accessible from the first screen and only the secondary use cases hidden in the drawer. Third party apps generally get that entirely wrong. That's not always a good pattern though and I would really like to have an alternative for complex apps pushed by the platform. (yes in most cases the response is to simplify the app, but that's not always possible.

-System navigation. the back versus up paradigm is almost always badly implemented so it might be time to just abandon it. The home + drawer idea is confusing for lambda users.

It's definitely just subjective tastes. Personally I find the colour schema of Material Design to be too saturated and garish. Case in point. YouTube on iOS:

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/10/05/youtube-for-ios-ge...

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