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SXSW: How Emotions Determine Android's Design
Nerval's Lobster writes "At a SXSW panel titled, 'Android's Principles for Designing the Future,' Helena Roeber (who headed up Android's UX research from 2007 through 2012) and Rachel Garb (who leads interaction design for Android apps at Google) discussed the complex philosophy behind Android's design. Roeber went back to the very beginning, recounting Google's Android Baseline Study, in which the team made in-home visits to study how people use technology. 'We saw the profound effect that technological design has on people's lives,' she said. 'Technology had become so pervasive that people had started to schedule and enforce deliberate offline moments to spend time with their family and friends.' From that study, the team learned that users were often overwhelmed by their options and 'limitless flexibility,' leading them to consider how to design a mobile operating system that wouldn't beat those users over the head (at least in the proverbial sense) on a minute-by-minute basis. Instead, they focused on an interface capable of serving features to users only when needed. That meant creating an interface that only interrupts users when needed; that does the 'heavy lifting' of the user's tasks and scheduling; that emphasizes 'real objects' over buttons and menus; and that offers lots of chances for customization. All those elements— and many more — eventually ended up in Android's trio of design principles: 'Enchant Me, Simplify My Life, and Make Me Amazing.'"
I want this, but I swear I've heard this before and it is rare I've seen anyone pull it off. It is almost always "here is a huge collection of options you are free to do what you want!" or the Apple-like way of "Please select from these sane, but limited options." Both have their advantages, but I just want the best of both worlds.
What is the point of calling something a 'principle' if it is so vacuous as to both affirm and reject practically any design decision you might choose to make?
One of the big criticisms of MS is that it did not start with how humans were going to interact with it's equipment. I know in the past several years it has, but that may be one issue with MS mobile technology. A mobile device is very intimate, much more than the personal computer, and therefore the interaction between user and device is much more critical. Than Android did start with the user is not surprising.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Tablets have their uses -- for example, my 2 years old nephew can use them just fine. For myself, though, I fail to see any single purpose I'd ever want to use one. I don't watch TV or its likes, any activity that's not read-only requires some reasonable input dev. For most tasks, a keyboard is mandatory, and for the rest, a touchscreen is hardly ever adequate. Either you need something more accurate (like a stylus), or an interface that's dumbed down into uselessness.
So say what you want about "getting overwhelmed by limitless flexibility" -- oversimplifying things means you end up with a shiny toy that's not fit for anything serious. Unless you call getting the user to purchase the toy after a brief play "serious" -- as it's indeed to the advantage of the toy's maker. There's no way around the learning curve: either it's easy and weak, or hard and powerful.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
... is the opposite of this design philosophy.
I really don't want to be a Linux basher, but the truth is that Linux embodies all of the principles of how you do NOT want to be friendly to the user. That's why it's never succeeded.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
The image shown as an example has most of the screen real estate tied up with a useless background of car images. Then there's a tiny map. The screen contains no useful information about bypassing the delay. The actual info is less useful than what 511.org or calling 511 provides.
As for dialog boxes, Apple had a spec for those in the original Macintosh user interface guidelines. Trouble dialogs should be two sentences. The first sentence describes the problem. The second suggests corrective action. And you should never have to tell the machine something it already knows.
What they actually say about their design sounds like the design spec for Metro, except without the emphasis on square flat-shaded icons. Scrollable grids of icons presented in more or less random order do not scale well.
Linux doesn't even interact with the user in the way that you describe.
There are several layers between Linux and the user of a system that
runs a Linux kernel.
I think you DO want to be a linux basher.
They went to homes and saw how "emotionally" attached people were to their iPhones that they made the engineers duplicate iOS.
Either that or they went to homes and brought back nothing the engineers could use, and forced them to find their ideas elsewhere, like by looking at iOS.
Obviously they are not identical, but why open source is always "inspired by" their closed source predecessors and is somehow able to deny it or justify denying it is intriguing.
This is how it appears to the public:
Linux = Windows rip-off.
Open Office = Office rip-off.
Android = iOS rip-off.
Their main differences is in the freedom of the developers which also happens to be inversely proportional to how much they get paid.
"I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong. I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this."
- Steve Jobs
Of course, he also is famously quoted as saying:
"Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- Steve Jobs
Clearly Jobs knows a stolen idea when he sees one. Takes one to know one?
"Creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."
- Albert Einstein
How they avoid admitting they were inspired by iOS boggles my mind. BECAUSE IT IS SO DAMN OBVIOUS.
It's amusing how with all their detailed explanations, you realize that the iPhone is exactly that. Not overwhelming with complex "multi tasking" stuff. Focusing on full screen apps. Simple UX, with simple visuals. Badges. And yet, a powerful graphics engine that enables "enchanting" animations. The iPhone is enchanting, useful, and helpful.
All this shows is that even if you try to go through the whole journey of researching this, you eventually get to the same conclusions about how to build it. Because the users are the same (human beings), have similar requirements overall, and face pretty much the same challenges.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
Would you care to mention a single idea Apple has not "stolen" from someone else?
And your claim that Linux is a rip-off of Windows (and not Unices of old) is beyond words.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Oh come on, Linux = Unix rip-off, not bloody Windows!
Sometimes I go pseudo-offline - still work on PCsetc but stay away from e-mail and social networking - or at least try too, but one annoying thing I've found with Android is even if I turn the volume right down the dumb thing still chimes when I have an e-mail. The device is so 'connected' the best solution is to turn the tablet off entirely.
They neglected to mention that they also read through Apple's iOS Human Interface Guidelines in detail.
They are confusing themselves with the people who designed N9.
I can even do 'real' work on it when I have to with very little trouble.
Even when "real" work involves displaying things side-by-side? Android's window management policy is all maximized all the time. Switching between two maximized windows isn't very efficient, yet it's the assumption that Android has always made.
The Android UI is a proprietary designed UI not a product of the FOSS movement.
The Android UI is part of AOSP. It is distributed under the Apache Software License 2.0, a free software license. What exactly did you mean by "FOSS movement"?
Did they cover why they've moved away from properly supporting SD cards, so that now you have to jump through hoops to get Google Play Music to store offline mp3s, and have multiple multi-GB games installed?
As things stand, my music collection alone is bigger than the space on my Galaxy Note 2 - I knew this on buying it, which is why I made sure it had an SD card slot.
Except, of course, the SD card isn't used in the same way it used to be with earlier versions of Android, and apps seem to ignore the free space my card provides - effectively making it completely fucking useless.
Microsoft Bob, oy
Table-ized A.I.
You didn't seem to understand his post. Did you not get as far as:
"Picasso had a saying - 'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
- Steve Jobs
His point is that EVERYTHING is part based on other things that came before. And he's pointing out that the degree of Android being based on iOS was high, but that in this presentation that pretends to lay out the principles and techniques that Android UI was designed by, they left out bit where they studied iOS. No names, no pack drill.
The only emotion Android evokes within me is frustration.
on an iPad, using Sente and Daedalus. Works for me.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
I switched phones from iOS to Android about a month and a half ago, because I wanted a phablet, widgets, and expandable memory and an escape from the jailbreak vs. upgrade-to-lates decisions and waits.
But I'll be damned if Android doesn't piss me off often. Most frustrating thing: inconsistent UI. What does the back button do in this app? And what does the onscreen "back function" near the top do do? Is it even there? That's one example, but the general theme is that Android apps are far less consistent than iOS apps, many requiring that you learn their own peculiarities.
Just as frustrating are the instability—so many apps crash regularly—and the UI speed and smoothness, which even with the jelly bean update really doesn't compare to iOS.
I wish one of these two systems would get it right.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Anytime I hear of a study being performed on "actual users," I know the product is behind the times. If there is no leader who is willing to put their cojones on the line and say what the interface should be, then there is no actual leadership, just engineering through committee. The android product is a perfect example of this: fine for most, imperfect for all.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Not to mention, the Windows had significant Linux ripoff, as did the Apple OS X.
Oh, and MS Word 98 was a wordperfect ripoff, right down to. The file corruption bugs -- loopback errors, no end of file errors, complete system shutdown errors -- that they couldn't find for five years, and thererfore simply denied that they existed, and said, no, don't send us a copy to pick apart.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's