Gripes about UI/UX of Android phones/tablets and so called "openness" that is nonsense to consumers.

If you also have an Android phone, you are welcome to email me your gripes as well. If you don't but you want to buy one, read this blog before you do it. :-)

-- A big fan of Google, not Android

  1.  

    Reply to Richard’s reply to “5 Years Later, And Google Still Can’t Get It Right”

    Richard Borcsik sent me a response (also on Google+) to a recent guest post, 5 Years Later, And Google Still Can’t Get It Right. I contacted the original author, who was willing to respond to Richard’s opinions. So here it is. Richard’s email is quoted. In his email, Richard cited some text from the original post, I put them in bold.

    Dear Android Gripes,

    I’ve recently read a guest post on your blog from an Anonymous poster about how “Google Still Can’t Get It Right”. My jaw dropped from the amount of bullshit and uniformed claims. He gives his opinion about the UI/UX of ICS without using it, based on screenshots claiming that if it would be intuitive enough he would understand it. A big part of getting to know an OS is interacting with it; touching, scrolling, going through the menus to see what happens. Many if not all of his difficulties would go away even after 5 minutes of use.

    Let me react to each and every point he raised. IF you feel like you should give opportunity for me to defend the platform against uninformed rants than please post this to the blog. His points are in italics and comic sans bold font.

    You missed the entire point of my post. I’ll repeat what I wrote at the top since you clearly ignored it: 

    “Before you Fandroids whine about how I can’t criticize ICS without having used it, keep in mind that your OS should be intuitive enough that a new user like me can understand immediately what’s going on just by looking at it. iOS lives up to that standard, so that’s the standard I’ll be holding Android to as well.”

    Almost every single button, icon, and string of text in the iOS screenshots I presented is immediately intuitive. If iOS can accomplish this, why can’t Android? Why should I have to fumble around my OS and try to guess what each button does? Why not make everything obvious just by looking at it?

    Alarm app

    He says that the iOS version is beautifully designed. Beautiful just like many other adjectives is relative. I see fake gloss and fake textures. No thanks.

    If you honestly think ICS looks better than iOS, there’s nothing I have left to say about that. You clearly have no design sense whatsoever so it’s not even worth arguing about. 

    It looks the same as it did 4 years ago. I’m aware of the fact that good design is timeless, but I don’t think it applies to UI. The apps and OSs that look like they did 10 years ago are laughed at and pointed to.

    Android changes its look every version and has only gotten worse. The look of iOS has been great from the start, so why should it need to change?

    Now let’s look at the screen on the right (Android). First impression: a flat black square with a bunch of stark white lines. Ugh, it reminds me of a terminal screen. In the upper left you’ve got the header text “Alarms” with a clock icon. In the upper right you’ve got two icons: a check mark and some dots. One symbol is white and one is slightly grayish. Are they buttons? It’s not clear, since they look just like the title text. And if they are indeed buttons, who knows what they do. One might assume the check means “Save”, but if that’s the case, shouldn’t there be a corresponding “Cancel” or “X” button? 

    Nowhere. So I can save, but I can’t cancel? And it’s anyone’s guess what those three dots are for. They look disabled anyway, so I’ll just ignore them. 

    The three dots means more. It’s standard across the UI. As for the check mark: I have no idea since i use a modified version that doesn’t have it.

    LOL.

    Agree that they should be the same color. What do they do? This is where trial and error comes in. Everyone likes it when the feel that they figured out something on their own.

    Seriously, that’s your answer? “Trial and error”? “Everyone likes it when the feel that they figured out something”? Hey, I have an idea. Let’s all go back to using command line interfaces so people can use trial and error and then feel really smart when they figure out what “rm -rf ~/” means. Everyone would like that, right?

    In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s not 1980 anymore. We’re supposed to be done with the era of confusing UIs that people have to use “trial and error” to figure out. A good UI should be immediately intuitive to users. If you admit that Google’s interface requires trial and error, then you admit it’s not as intuitive as it can and should be.

    Next, we have a big “Add alarm” text with a “+” next to it. This looks almost exactly like the header text.  Am I supposed to tap that to make a new alarm? If so, why does it look like header text instead of a button that can be pressed? Ridiculous.

    The header ends with the blue separator. This is present througout the OS in the apps using the “Holo Dark” theme. What’s this fixation with the buttons anyway? It’s clearly a menu entry.

    What’s “clearly a menu entry”? Nothing is clear in ICS because everything looks exactly the same. Buttons, text, headers, menus; they’re all flat white on a black background. I can’t tell what’s what. There are no visual affordances to tell me what’s a button, what’s header text, what’s a menu, what’s tappable and what isn’t, etc. I’m just supposed to fumble around using “trial and error” before I can figure it out?

    Below that, we have the three alarms. OK, a little bit better. I can see the times and the days they’re activated for. But the nice touch of showing “Weekdays” and “Weekends” is not there; instead it lists out all the days. A minor thing, sure, but reveals a lack of polish. Now, are these alarms activated or not? I would assume they are, since there’s no “OFF” or other text indicating otherwise. But then there are these faint gray boxes to the left of the alarms. They look like they could be check boxes. What are they for? If an alarm is not checked, is it off? Or are the check boxes just a convenience for selecting multiple alarms and performing an action on them (e.g., like checking a bunch of emails in Gmail and deleting them)? It’s not that clear. The check boxes also look like they’re disabled controls, since they’re not bright white like the “Add alarm” button. And they’re not even horizontally centered. Laughable.

    The alarms are not activated. This is one of the thongs that you would realize if you spent 1 minute inside the app.

    Yet this is one thing that I don’t have to spend any time inside of the iOS app to realize, because of the extremely obvious “ON/OFF” switch in the screenshot. iOS succeeds where Android fails miserably.

    When you click the check box a toast message appears saying the time left until the alarm and an icon appears in the status bar indicating that there is an active alarm. The next active alarm is also shown on the lockscreen. To understand why they aren’t centered you would just need to press it. (hint: the check mark goes out of the box, this way it’s centered.)

    So they look centered when they’re in one state, and look off center when they’re in a different state? Horrendous design. The iOS switches look centered no matter what state they’re in. Once again, iOS succeeds where Android fails miserably.

    (Also, WTF is a “toast” message? Or was that just an Android autocorrect failure?)

    Finally, at the bottom of the screen you’ve got three more symbols. They don’t look like buttons, just plain icons on a flat black background. And unlike the tab bar in iOS, there are no labels, so it’s anyone’s guess what they do. Are they related to the app? The arrow looks like a “back” icon, but the other two don’t look like anything. The pentagon in the middle looks like it could be an up arrow. Does it take you up a level in the app? And what about the two boxes on the right? Sorry, I’m stumped. 

    Ladies and gentlemen we’ve arrived to the worst point in this rant. These are the software navigation keys (The galaxy nexus doesn’t have hardware keys), present in every app. From left to right: system level back, home (D’oh, it’s a house) and app switcher(box behind box = app window behind app window). Again using a phone for 5 minutes would’ve made this clear

    Seriously, that middle button is a house? Why not make it look like a house then instead of an up arrow? Great job, Google. Why not try hiring some artists instead of engineers for a change?

    WI-FI configuration screen

    Now let’s look at Android. Again, everything is flat; it’s not clear what’s a button and what isn’t. The on/off slider (I’m assuming it’s a slider?) doesn’t look like something that can be manipulated. It looks like a decorative element showing you that WiFi is on. As for the list, which network is currently active? There’s no check mark or highlighting like iOS. Instead you have to read the text to see that one of them says “Connected”. Horrible. Also, I assume tapping a network will connect to it, right? If so, how do I view details of a network without also connecting to it? 

    You should get used to the fact that android is flat and minimalistic.

    THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF MY CRITIQUE. Why have a flat and minimalistic UI that not only looks ugly but also makes everything harder to recognize and use? And don’t go telling me “Oh, Android is open so you can just root your device and install another theme, LOLOL!!111”. Google is a $200 billion company, they should have a default theme that looks better than a CS 101 class project.

    There isn’t any fake leather, fake wood, fake metal or fake linen. Yes it’s a slider! God job! What gave it away? Maybe that it looks like a slider, but is just like the rest of the UI: flat and minimal. The network that you’re connected to is always on the top. Always. No it will not connect, but bring up a window with details and a connect button.

    Each item has an unnecessary amount of detail about the security protocols used for the network. Sure, it’s a noble effort to let people know how secure a network is. But honestly, how many regular users know or care what WPA2 is? When Average Joe wants to get on the Starbucks WiFi, he’s not going to say to himself, “oh, that’s only secured with WEP, I better not use it.”  If you want to let people know that a network might not be secure, as a UI designer it’s your job to do the work for them. Don’t assume Joe knows the difference between WEP/WPA/WPA2. Instead, figure out how to translate that technical jargon into something a regular user can understand.  

    It’s not unnecessary. If you look at the signal indicator you can see that if network is secured than there is a lock icon on it.

    The unnecessary part is not the lock icon, it’s the garbage text underneath the network name. The lock icon is enough. 98% of users don’t know or care what “Secured with WPA/WPA2” means, it just clutters up the UI for no reason. That information should only be given when you ask for more details about a network, not on the main screen.

    Finally, the scan/add network/more buttons on the bottom are a joke. The spacing is horrible; they don’t look anything like buttons; two of them are text-only and another is icon-only; and there’s absolutely no reason why “Advanced” has to be a single item in a pop up menu. Ludicrous.

    Agreed. Yes I can agree if someone is right. (Though I should mention that the icon is for the overflow menu.)

    LANGUAGE SETTINGS

    Android, on the other hand, is a jumbled mess. All of the text looks similar, so you can’t easily differentiate item text from header text from explanatory text. It’s not at all obvious which items are grouped together, since everything is just separated by white lines, and the spacing is horrendous. I don’t know which items can be tapped and which can’t, and why some have icons next to them and some don’t. Some text is indented and some isn’t. What a disaster. 

    Hint: header text is in CAPS and there is a line beneath it. The items that are grouped together are the ones between the headers. Everything except the headers can be tapped. The entries with icons: the icons are there because the’re used to launch the setting for that item. Indented text: those logically belong under the one above it.

    Sorry, you can try to explain away this screen as much as you want, but there’s no avoiding the fact these settings are a jumbled mess.  Anyone who spends 2 seconds looking at the two  screenshots can see how much more logical and intuitive the iOS settings UI is compared to Android. It’s literally inarguable. 

    FINAL THOUGHTS

    I could go on with more examples, but I’ve had enough. I’m really amazed at how bad Google is at UI design, and even more amazed that people put up with it. Considering how practiced Google is at ripping off fundamental ideas from iOS (multi-touch, swiping, momentum scrolling, pinch to zoom, on-screen keyboard, etc.) you’d think they could do a better job of ripping off good UI practices also. But no; here they are 5 years after Apple first showed them the way, and they’re still failing miserably at it. Embarrassing. 

    Google is not bad at UI design.

    Actually, yes, they are.

    It’s different than the one that you’re used to.

    Different and worse.

    Ripping off idea? WTF? multi-touch and pinch-to-zoom can be seen in minority report: a 2002 movie. On-screen keyboard? Windows Mobile! Momentum scrolling and swiping? I have no idea where these came from, but surely not from apple. 

    Hilarious. Go back and watch Steve Jobs’s 2007 iPhone introduction. Witness how many of the fundamentals of modern mobile computing UI design were innovated by Apple on that day.  Compare that to the first Android handset demo and see how wrong Google got it, and how much they had to blatantly copy Apple to get where they are today: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg.

    You know what’s embarrassing? You ranting anonymously about something that you’ve never seen in real life. I’m not going to rant about iOS because I haven’t used it for extended periods. I also have a name. I’m Richard Borcsik and you can find me on google+. I will also publish this there.

    A challenge you to step forward.

    I choose to post anonymously because (unlike Google and Facebook) I value my privacy. I’d rather not have Fandroids flaming me hate mail and tweets 24 hours a day, thanks. Instead of worrying about what my name is so you can mount a personal attack on me, why not just stick to arguing the facts I’ve laid out? Because nothing you’ve said refutes the fact that the Android UI is horrendous compared to iOS.

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      android-gripes comments...buttons do though.
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