That is my biggest complaint with Material Design. It’s great if you already know what all the icons mean and what you are supposed to click. Apple design, by contrast is generally very obvious and instantly understandable. Look at the Apple Music app on iOS: pretty much every icon is labeled. You don’t have to guess where “My Library” is or fumble around trying to figure it out. Google Hangouts on the other hand.. I have used that thousands of times and still have a cognitive interruption every time I try to share screen, see the sidebar chat or any other common tasks.
I frankly don’t understand the appeal of Material Design. If it came from anyone but Google, it wouldn’t be a thing except in the back alleys of Dribble.
However, this dashboard project — thanks to whomever made it. It does look very nice — just not a fan of the typical Google design language because of serious usability flaws. This dashboard does seem to mitigate some of my main complaints (ambiguity and uncertainty.)
> Apple design, by contrast is generally very obvious and instantly understandable
That’s only true if you’re already accustomed to how Apple does things.
Consider the iPhone a perfect example: 300 different ways to single-click, double-click, triple-click(!), 3D-touch (whatever that is) and use random swiping gestures from all screen directions outside the screen, and different swiping gestures within the screen.
Absolutely madness and probably makes at least 80% of the phone’s functionality completely undiscoverable and inaccessible unless you already know it is there.
How is anyone supposed to know about all that? It breaks every design book’s rules by providing zero affordances. Nothing about this is obvious or intuitive. It’s all 100% learned behavior.
> Absolutely madness and probably makes at least 80% of the phone’s functionality completely undiscoverable and inaccessible unless you already know it is there.
Well, that can't be strictly true, since no one is born knowing these things, yet people do learn about them. I don't think it's crazy to expect people to desire to read a quick guide or watch a quick video about UI paradigms/tricks/shortcuts for what is likely to be one of the most complex and most frequently used electronic devices in their lives.
I do agree that 3d touch is a bad idea, because there's no pattern to learn other than very specific per-application places it can be used. If there was some visible UI hint that an element was 3d touchable, perhaps I would be more of a fan.
As for the double-click and triple-click stuff, I can't really think of that many examples on iPhone. I believe triple-clicking a physical button can be used to enable accessibility features? I think it's pretty acceptable to have accessibility features that drastically transform the phone's user experience fairly hidden, as long as they're well documented for the people who need them.
I don’t know how common “accidental discovery” is, but it doesn’t even sound that bad to me. Learning through exploration is a pretty natural and enjoyable way to become familiar with technology.
I think it may be that "affordances" are hard on small touch screens. I mean, the "affordance" is that you can touch it, that's about it.
Really, even on desktop, we know how to use it cause we've spent years learning how to use it. The first GUI's had _much_ simpler UX's with many fewer interaction modalities, cause it was hard enough to get people to learn those. (I remember classes on how to use a mouse -- it was not obvious). They got more complicated as generalized "society" learned to use the simple ones.
If Apple had something for the web I'd almost certainly be using that instead. But in my case, I'm just trying to write JavaScript and avoid the other stuff as much as possible -- I'm more of a backend dev who's doing frontend work out of necessity. Material libraries (Angular Material, Material-UI, Vuetify, etc) have been great for me in that use case.
There's nothing really stopping anyone from implementing the human interface guidelines into a UI library. I wonder what's keeping people from building one.
I suck at front end design, but I personally would pay money for a Bootstrap-type setup based on Apple HIG. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, Apple Human Interface Guidelines seem like common sense. I am speaking from the perspective of someone who has a web application that has “normal” people as their primary user and thus have spent countless hours providing support for simple things that might seem obvious to the more technically literate. Let’s not insult users, but let’s not assume they’re all web natives either.
Jeff Raskin has a great essay on why “intuitive” usually means “familiar”, and while we think something like the mouse is intuitive, people were baffled by it when it was first employed. [1]
It’s a good read — one of my favorites on human computer interaction.
Why the hell does this get downvoted? It seems like it was a very valid opinion. Does anyone out there actually think Google Hangouts is a good design? Has anyone ever had to click something in a Google product to figure out what it actually does? Put Hangouts or even Gmail in front of a normal, non-tech user and watch them use it. It isn’t intuitive. Skeuomorphism was definitely overused, but the metaphor made products vastly more intuitive.
Gmail is by far the most popular email service in the world. I assure you that plenty of "non-tech users" have no trouble using it. But while I, too, am sad that skeuomorphic design has been abandoned, Apple has abandoned it too.
I frankly don’t understand the appeal of Material Design. If it came from anyone but Google, it wouldn’t be a thing except in the back alleys of Dribble.
However, this dashboard project — thanks to whomever made it. It does look very nice — just not a fan of the typical Google design language because of serious usability flaws. This dashboard does seem to mitigate some of my main complaints (ambiguity and uncertainty.)