Am I the only one who gets a headache trying to decipher tile layouts like this? My eyes bounce back and forth and I still have no idea how the information is structured or what's important.
I appreciate that Google is sharing all of this though.
I appreciate that Google is sharing all of this though.
I can 'feel' these new concepts as they roll them out, and then just get frustrated by them. It feels like they come up with certain standards/rules, and then have to adapt their UIs to it. So buttons are put in confusing places, with weird icons.
Take the phone dialer for instance. I press the phone icon. How do I get to a dial pad? Why didn't it just give me a damn dialpad to begin with? The dialpad button is a little blue square with dots in some kind of matrix that sort of looks like a dialpad. Every time - every time - I make a call, I have to go through this ritual again of figuring out where the dialpad is. Even though I know where it is, it doesn't look or feel right. And that's just the beginning. The whole dialing process, finding contacts, etc. has been totally broken. Just so the UI is pretty and meshes well with itself. And this is a phone!
Then I figured out the double tap on the home key and "Hi Galaxy" and my life changed forever. I use it waaaayyy more than I've seen anyone I know using Siri. The only annoying thing now is when I disable gps and then try to use maps from voice while driving things get wonky because I'm driving, trying to enable GPS, and trying to deal with maps popups telling me gps isn't on and whatnot. I just forget to re-enable it before I drive somewhere so it happens quite a bit.
I also actually sat down and read the manual for the phone and looked up tips and tricks online. Really studied it as opposed to just expecting to "get it out of the box". I know the whole "It just works" mantra is great, but if you're willing to spend a little time reading and researching you can have a great mobile experience instead of just blindly ignoring things that don't appear to immediately work/make sense.
In a nutshell, they really are little computers now, and putting in the time to learn it well will open up doors for you.
What is the most frustrating thing about it is the "hang-up" button is a gigantic red button and right below it are the really minute buttons to fire up the dialpad, mute, conference, contacts, etc. Yep, what are the chances you will accidentally hang up while trying to find the dialpad or quickly mute your conversation.
that in a nutshell, is how I feel about Microsoft Office.
It it a button? Or a dialog box? Maybe it's an ad. Flip a coin!
The new Azure portal looks very similar and it's borderline unusable. Unless I'm just resistant to change and will eventually warm up to it but it seems to violate a lot of fundamental design principles.
Also closing 5 panels before opening a new one feels like a huge waste of time.
The impact isn't so bad, though because once you get past this style into an app you're looking at a mostly white screen with color for the buttons and the buttons are well placed in standard places most of the time so you can know they are buttons.
For example, if I haven't been to the site before, I might have to explore the interface a bit before I get to the part of the interface I want. Clicking on those tiles makes things shift and bounce around, the content portion of the screen constantly moves left to right.
Way too much difficulty for doing something so simple.
Designs should be visually appeasing, but not at the expense of ease of use or ease of understanding.
For example: why is that credit card ad hanging off the center tile like that? Why isn't it shaped like the other tiles?
Also material design is not a safe guard for implementing crap user interfaces. In this case, if you decide to have moving tiles that disorientate the user and think 'well its material design', no that's actually just poor design.
(Firefox & Chromium. )
As someone who use mainly workstations with a at-least-three-buttons mouse, I feel web browsing is getting increasingly annoying.
The second panel of information is a video covering "color theory" and goes off almost straight away talking about using "the 500s" and moving to "the 700s". I've no clue what this means. What is a 700?
Strangely a google search yields no results as to what this means, but the video takes it as fact I should know what it's on about.
There's a whole color industry, and a trade organization for it, the Color Association of the United States. They're not as influential as they used to be, but they still orchestrate, among other things, the cycle of consumer electronics from white to black to off-white to grey and back to white again. (You thought that just happened by accident?) The Material Design people are trying to promote that concept for web sites, so last year's web sites will look dated as the recommended colors change.
[1] http://www.pantone.com/pages/pantone/color_xref.aspx [2] http://www.colorassociation.com
I'm not a fan of Material design though, I just think it's tacky.
Polymer is just a library to help you make Web Components. They don't have to be Material Design.
Now, if it didn't work in Firefox or IE11, then that would be significantly more questionable.
Edit: I'm assuming we're talking about classic Opera, not the Chromium build that is currently called Opera but is actually Chromium.
Whatever happened to coding according to web standards? This isn't a small boutique shop that cannot afford testing, this is a huge multinational company.
Hardly. Mozilla/Gecko may have been obscure at the time, but it was under active development. Opera is very definitely dead.
> Whatever happened to coding according to web standards?
So by "web standards" do you mean "older web standards supported by an outdated browser"?
Firefox had about 3% share at the end of 2004, even less before that.
>Opera is very definitely dead
Huh what? Opera is still under active development.
http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/
>So by "web standards" do you mean "older web standards supported by an outdated browser"?
No, I mean current web standards.
And this website reliably crashes Google's own Chrome[1] on iOS on an iPhone 4s. It's fucking stupid that we've gone so far backwards with web design.
I am not sure if its a side effect of designers getting carried away but I find most of the web animations useless.