Google Design
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Their design patterns fail in user testing too. Moving actions to an unlabeled icon in the top right like they recommend to Android developers now instead of a large clear button just causes users to never find the action.
The recent Android Wear release is similar. All notifications are stripped of anything but text and an image and there's no way to put a button in where users may want one like the notification API already supports with RemoteViews. Google is forcing a certain look on the developers at the cost of the users.
I think their whole design initiative is just trying to make things look pretty and screwing over their users, personally.
On mobile, it's the very first option in the drawer, and if you turn it on it stays on until you turn if off again.
Ex: I look up my favorite pizza place and it's 15 minutes away. Now I want to see traffic. How? It's impossible to view both.
If you're not seeing traffic all the time, it either means:
- there's no congestion at all in the route that you picked
- you have a different version of maps than the latest one in the play store
- you didn't select driving directions, but either bus, walking, biking or something else.
- traffic for your location/city is simply not supported.
On mobile? I think it's even worse. Look up your nearest favorite chain and it zooms in on what it believes is the one you're looking for. What if it's not? There's a tiny 3 lines in the search bar that I apparently have to click to list all locations.
And anytime I snap to location? It zooms in. Really I'd love to just write the few lines of code it takes to toggle between current zoom level and default zoom level when snapping to location.
And they've stripped features. New UI is fine but at least keep old features nestled around somewhere. I used to be able to look up directions and then nestled in settings view "gas stations along the way". It's near impossible to do that now.
I admire aspects of the technical execution, but the user flow is just so perfectly wrong it's astounding.
Those people shouldn't be giving design advice, they should be seeking it.
You've been unhappy, while I've been extremely happy. In day to day usage, I find the new Maps is a net positive whereas the previous one was both overcrowded and cramped. The new design scales as with whatever device I'm on, it behaves the same while offering the best use of available real estate.
> trying to make things look pretty and screwing over their users
They have consistently iterated towards a more cohesive, better thought out design language. Their "Material design" is the culmination of this process, embodying the principles of good design while covering a large spectrum of input and output devices. This is an incredible challenge and I feel they're well on their way to achieve this goal.
Yet, if I halve the width of the browser while maintaining the height, I get more a lot more content. That's not really good responsive design.
I click introduction. Again, huge meaningless illustration and not even a shred of text in sight. What illustrations there are, don't even correlate to the accompanying text.
Now, once you start driving into Layout, Style, sections, things get more meaningful. But in order to get to those content, you need to use the hamburger icon to toggle the left nav, because left nav is collapsed by default.
This is a kind of design that invites 90% drop off rate.
Apple has violated their own design guidelines on many occasions. Google has just never had anything like this (or at least to this degree of detail) in place, so they have much more distance to cover in order to catch up.
Anyway, I do think google solved this in to ways: type contact and from:contact is suggested
If you rest the curser over a contact name, a box with an option to see all conversation appear.
> A material metaphor is the unifying theory of a rationalized space and a system of motion.
http://codepen.io/bennettfeely/pen/twbyA http://www.google.com/design/spec/animation/delightful-detai...
From Google's Material Design guide:
"...visual cues that are grounded in our experience of reality. The use of familiar tactile attributes speaks to primal parts of our brains and helps us quickly understand affordances."
I'm half joking, of course there's elements of skeuomorphism that work this way, like designing a note taking app that looks like a lined pocket notebook. But the recent trend is to approach this very minimalistically, only taking the "primal parts" and leaving out the leather textures.
A contrived example of this is a skeuomorphic car dashboard display would have photo-realistic guages with lighting reflections from the cover glass, detailed bezel, etc. My read of a Material design implementation is that it should have a flat design with lighting and depth effects for contrast and shape recognition.
I'm gonna pass, and slag this "material design" every time it comes up. Clownshoes design philosophy, though I suppose I'm not surprised. Look how many steps it takes to "logout/login from a different account" now.
As several have remarked, the principles in the OP tend to yield low-information interfaces. Colors, sizes, and spatial relations are not used as variable axes because they are subservient to visual appeal and "responsiveness".
I suspect that the Tufte-style displays (besides being difficult to craft in the first place) are difficult to suit to doing a lot, and the "material" style visuals are difficult to use for conveying a lot.
This has inspired me to work on an "almost-almost-flat" design that is high on information and affordances, while teaching itself.
Reminds me of this post - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7555012
Google, historically, has benefited from immunity to design nazis, but it now looks like they've completely taken over.
1920x1080 is a common form factor, yet for some reason they are allergic to the idea (as are a lot of other people) that their web-apps should not break when split to half the screen size.
It feels like at design style rather than a design framework.
Very similar to how in Windows7 the task bar follows your cursor with a glowing highlight - which I found very distracting and useless (not unlike the OSX dock magnify-on-mouseover). At least in Windows and OSX I can turn that off - since these are guidelines for new apps, I don't think Android users are going to be given those options.
E.g. When the style guide talks about mass and force in animation, I was expecting something much more than some recommendations on tweening. In many cases, it feels like a shallow reference to the physical / material, not quite the meaningful "metaphor" that it aspires to be.
Polymer, on the other hand, is pretty awesome.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtR_zA9elrM
That was definitely way over the top, but there is a lot of potential in naturalism (depth, lighting, shadows, paper) as well as natural motion in a phone UI. I'm glad Google is going in this direction.
Presumably they are talking about cameras.
'At Google we say, "Focus on the user data and all else will follow"'
"At Google we say, 'Focus on the user data and all else will follow.'"
> Color is inspired by bold color statements juxtaposed with muted environments, taking cues from contemporary architecture, road signs, pavement marking tape, and sports courts. Emphasize bold shadows and highlights. Introduce unexpected and vibrant colors.
Is that announcing they're launching a text generator for design guidelines?