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Is Choice a Problem For Android?
New submitter mjone13 writes "Dave Feldman, in a blog posts, says that the problem Android faces is giving consumers too much choice. He cites several studies which state that consumers generally are unhappier when they have too much choice. 'Catering to all individual preferences creates a bloated, bland product. Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate. Furthermore, people are notoriously bad at identifying what we want. And what we do want is influenced heavily by what we know — our expectations are constrained by our experience.' He then goes on to talk about Android fragmentation, app developer problems and bug issues. Finally he says the people who general prefer the choice Android provides are tinkers similar to gear heads who love tinkering with their car. 'I think many who extol Android’s flexibility fall into the tinkerer category, including some tech bloggers. They love all the ways they can customize their phones, not because they’re seeking some perfect setup, but because they can swap in a new launcher every week. That’s fun for them; but they’ve made the mistake of not understanding how their motivation differs from the rest of us.' Is choice really a problem for Android?"
Whether it's a problem depends on what the goals are. Providing a satisfying experience to a bunch of tinkerers is a very different thing from providing a satisfying experience to the multitude of non-tinkerers who buy smartphones.
You can have a highly customizable UI without making the default bland and impossible to navigate. Having more customization does make some things more difficult, since you can't assume all users will have the same setup, but it's still compatible with a decent default interface.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I stopped reading at "Not to mention a UI that’s impossible to navigate."
My bullshit detector went off the scale.
Some of us get their phone, install it the way _we_ want it, and then leave it like that (unless something spectacularly new comes along).
I don't change my keyboard weekly - but I did change it a couple of times, find one that suited me, and leave it that way.
Same with SMS, email client, and web browser. I haven't changed any of these in months, but they're all different to the stock version.
My Journal
"Dave Feldman is a product designer with a background in user experience, product management, and front-end development. Heâ(TM)s the co-founder and chief product officer of Emu. Heâ(TM)s held positions at Yahoo! and AOL. Check out his website Operation Project and follow him on Twitter @dfeldman."
aka mr. "I configured my configurable system to act like crap and by the way I love iPhone".
now, of course if I can make a plugin to handle file saving.. then of course I can install a dozen apps to do it. just because I install two different homescreens for example doesn't mean that I have to choose between the two each time I press home.. I could though, if I wanted.
basically the answer to his problems is to not install extra apps. I don't know what the fuck is his actual suggestion on how to remove the problem of choice. maybe he is working on his own android variant where you can't install anything... more likely he is trying to troll some buzz and score a new gig. that's what his writing looks like. only made more obvious by him submitting these pieces on different blogs to gather maximum buzz since nobody gives a shit about his blog and the product he is promoting(emu.is, some kind of sms frontend where you can attach your position easily. how novel, for 2003).
and the other problems? android phones are so BIG! well fuck buy a smaller android phone.
(oh and he doesn't really seem to understand android multitasking, only sort of).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Seriously that is all I see in this article. Flaming for the sake of clicks/views. Android fragmentation was a problem back in the version 1.5~2.1 days. Back when OEMs were experimenting and the software was maturing. Nowadays, save for a handful of tweaks, all decent Androids devices are pretty much equal. As for the UI tools, maybe not having tons of options will make that guy happy, but removing them will make a lot more people angry. What does he want? A Google branded iPhone?
Even though I subscribe to the Apple/BlackBerry/GameConsole idea of one optimal OS for one or two device types, I'm still mostly a windows and android user. Trying to make everybody happy with the "one OS for them all" strategy is just impossible plus there are many marketing and development problems associated to it for platform providers, OEMs, developers and users. However to say that the Android(and by extension windows) experiences are crap, is pure BS. Like it or not, Android gets the job done, and the experience is without a doubt what I would call very reasonable . At least that is from my experience with Galaxy and Xperia phones as well as a Transformer Tablet. If you got a $0 chinese phone with a shitty firmware that is your problem, not Android.
Sure if I could get my way, each company would have it's own OS and ecosystem, assuming that all tech companies had a interesting and unique vision for themselves. Too bad that is just unrealistic plus there are plenty of practical problems associated to this philosophy as well, but that is a discussion for another time.
Android offers choice only to tinkerers. Everybody else simply walks in a store and buys a phone that looks shiny. iPhones are having a bit of a problem in that they offer almost a single choice which was the same as that from a few years ago. You can't have a bigger screen for example. Mobiles have achieved appliance status. Who cares about fragmentation ? There is fragmentation in car models as well and fancy cars that have weird ways to switch on. After you master it, you run with it for years. You don't care if the car in the opposite traffic works differently. Fragmentation affects developers, who now have massive budgets to overcome it. There are hundreds of thousands of apps, most people use only a few and the rest they simply forget to delete after they are downloaded. So there are enough that work well out there.
The reason I switched from iOS was because personally, I *want* control over my smartphone. I want the options and customisations, and the ability to decide what keyboard to use and where my music sits. My advice to those who can't handle a few options is "get an iPhone".
Though really, I can't see why both user groups can't be catered for - have sensible defaults and basic options, and put everything else inside an "Advanced settings" button somewhere - no one is forced to tap it.
The problem that the PC faces is giving consumers too much choice....
Clearly that hasn't worked for the PC, or it would be the 100% dominant platform, rather than just the 99% dominant platform...
And for PCs the be able to run OS-X, Microsoft or Linux operating systems? Clearly wayyyy to much choice...
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
To be fair, Android is harder to navigate. There are desktop pages (similar to IOS app pages). Then there's a list of apps under the apps button. You can also copy stuff from the apps list to the desktop list.
I find this paradigm very confusing. I've seen Android users get confused on this too.
But, I desperately miss configurability in IOS. Absence of settings has my life very hard in the past... So has the conduit called iTunes. iTunes really sucks when it doesn't work properly, and is clunky when it does work.
Itunes is a nightmare that should have been burned with fire, on Android you do not have this extra layer of complexity at getting content onto your devices.
You talk about reconfigurability and settings...or the absence of them. Ignoring the irony of arguing for additional complexity at the cost of customisability, or that Apple copied the look of this with iOS 7 from Android, you argue that having a desktop(sic) that you can only add applications to is better than one you can add widgets to.
I don't think you really understand your own argument.