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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.'"
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?
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.
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.
Neither did Android. Before Apple showed off the iPhone, "Android" looked and worked very similar to wince.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Android is Linux after Google removed all the "give the user every conceivable and obscure-to-use option under the sun" put there by enthusiasts. That's why it's succeeded wildly while regular Linux projects have yet to crack 2% market share among regular users (i.e. desktop/mobile). Same thing with Apple's OS X vs. BSD Unix.
This is the biggest problem I've seen with the open source philosophy. People like to think it's altruistic, but it's really not. All it's done is shift the selfishness from profit to contribution. Developers in open source projects typically contribute what they want, not what end users want. In fact I've frequently seen OSS developers openly hostile to user requests and suggestions, as if the opinion of someone who doesn't know how to code is worthless. It's like a blacksmith who likes making horseshoes thinking he's being generous by giving free horseshoes to poor people, when the poor people don't own horses and what they really want are farming tools. Feedback from end-users is vital to shaping the software into something more productive for end-users, but that feedback loop is frequently crippled in OSS.
With paid software, the reward for your selfishness is directly linked to the opinions of end users (they buy your software). So your selfishness (desire for profit) actually achieves results similar to altruism by getting you to implement stuff which you would never want to do on your own, but which your users want. (That's not to say OSS is without merit. The zero cost of duplication means RMS is correct that society is less effective if the basic snippets of code all have to be bought. It's just that OSS works best when most of the users are also developers. Not so well when the set of developers and users have very little intersection - in these types of OSS projects the relationship often looks more like lord/serf than it does developer/user.)
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.
He very clearly means what whilst desktop Linux GUIs are thrown together by anyone who wants to contribute, the Android UI is controlled by Google.
You can take what Google put out there, but you can't change Google's Android UI.
It might make you feel all warm and cuddly to classify both these as open source. And indeed they are. But Androids success is in part due to the fact that you FOSS enthusiasts can't fuck it up, as you did with the desktop Linux GUIs.
on an iPad, using Sente and Daedalus. Works for me.
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.
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