Feel UX: If Apple Won't Innovate The User Experience, Android Designers Will
forbes.com
forbes.com
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you've got something basically right, the patience to refine it and the maturity to leave what is correct alone is more important.
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.
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.
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.
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've got no problem with Android but when you claim to be innovating over another platform when you aren't, that bugs me.