I'd wager the complaints of the sort of people who frequent lobste.rs or HN are not representative of the majority of current users and almost certainly not of the next 6B potential users.

Overall, it's everything Google said they would do with material [1].

It's fine to dislike these things, I don't necessarily like them myself, but claiming they're simply wrong or "for no reason" is somewhere between angry and lazy.

Just a glance at the new vs old keyboard or gmail shows a direction - moving / duplicating interactions toward the bottom right (logical as screens get bigger), breaking out punctuation into discrete keys (presumably logical given the way most people actually type).

The overall restyling is adding consistency between apps and particularly between mobile and the desktop.

Animations are really valuable anytime someone doesn't come to the table with a complete mental model of how something fits together already. Basically, they're not for you Mr. Programmer.

1: http://www.google.com/design/

I'd really like to see some respect for this from people like Firefox - "we won't move any major UI elements or update the default skin more than once every 2 years". Of course the marketing is all about the novelty at the moment - steadfastness doesn't count for much in tech circles it seems. With stable UI you can have a less rapidly changing system for users to comprehend; running updates for security fixes shouldn't mean you have to face a new menu paradigm or new default screen or new tab shape or new whatever every few weeks.

Seriously. I don't enable auto-update on supported users apps for this reason.

The people complaining about any kind of change are usually the ones who learn using an application by trying to exactly memorize navigation paths and word-for-word expressions in menus, which feels absolutely wrong to me. It's like learning stuff in school by memorizing the content word for word, without understanding any of them or the context in general. It may work for while, but not for long.

I know that the average person is very different from the tech-savvy crowd around here, in fact I work with non-technical people everyday, yet this helplessness once a button or a feature has been moved is still very surprising to me and I think it's a better idea to try to educate people not to hang on to memorized paths, but instead look for plausible context, really consider where you'd expect a certain feature to be located. That's exactly what the developer did for his app - well, in most cases. Avoiding change in software design is not the solution.

I'm almost sure that if you're a serious programmer you use a command line. You know, where you type in one line, the output is written in the following lines, emulating the electrically-controlled typewriter which prints the letter one after the another on the roll of the paper from the sixties. Think about that. "Carriage return" once actually caused the physical carriage to return and the line feed actually activated the paper feeder to roll the paper one line up.

A lot of changes in the UI are often driven more by the changes in the politics inside of the company (who is going to be seen for his visible contribution to the "change") than any real need. Think about that.

For many people, computers are just a thing they use, whether for work or for keeping in touch with friends or whatever. They aren't something that they dedicate very much of their brain to. Computer interfaces have lots of text, lots of images -- some of which are clickable, some of which aren't -- and the rules aren't very consistent from device to device. On top of all that, there are some genuine dark UI patterns, like software from CNet that tries to trick users into downloading useless crap.

What you're basically expecting is for people to dedicate more of their attention to computers. And guess what? Mechanics wish people would dedicate more attention to their cars. Contractors wish people would dedicate more attention to their homes. Landscapers wish people would dedicate more attention to their yards. And in each of their professional forums, you'd hear some of them arguing with equal veracity that people need to be more educated about all of these things.

Australis was a UI change that we don't anticipate doing more than once every two years. We recognize the costs of doing so, for users, add-on devs, and Mozilla devs.

Since the Firebird days I've been using FF (on and off, I had a dalliance with Opera, Chrome, some other variants) and even I had to first search what the newtab page was even called (I forget now, it doesn't tell me anywhere in the UI) then having read a few posts I noticed that some people had different size site links and tried scroll-zoom and so returned to my default of 3 x 5 sites shown.

It's tiny things like this - you open your browser and newtab has been altered (to make way for adverts in this case) and smack there you are. It's not "your" browser it's the company that offered the upgrade, it's theirs now .. until you can claw it back again. Then the next upgrade comes, some security fix and you apply it with trepidation.

Is it really 2 years since the addon bar was removed, the big orange menu button was removed and the new "burger" menu link was added, the new config for the menu link, the streamlined tabs, the removal of the menubar, tabs moved above the address bar. Time flies?¹

[Looking it seems the major Australis changes (removal of addon bar for example) came in 2013, this thread is full of rants against changing the UI and moving towards Chrome https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2013/05/27/major-compatibili...]

¹ - I genuinely don't remember. I also used to use fixes/addons to have a compact menu with chrome removed (using KDE settings) so I'm not clear on default UI.

The UI changes in iOS7 caused a whole bunch of questions and problems with my "support network", but with Android it would be like that every year with every OS update.

So, it's not about Apple designing great products; i recommend android because it's a better choice for freedom (which usually always ends up having to make more effort).

Companies have switched from introducing new features and backend improvements (what the technical folks used to care about) to what they feel everyone can see, the UI. As a result, the software has not fundamentally changed, minus a few small new features, but it looks like a brand new product.

Yeah, whenever I see sentence like "as a user, I don't care about animations" I just stop reading the rest. I appreciate the fact that you, the article/comment writer, have good mental model about what is going on and you want to be as fast as possible, but that comment also shows that you aren't a typical user and you don't have a clue how common people thinks.

I actually think most of the animation in Lollipop is rather well thought out from a UX perspective. It might be a teensy bit showy but I rather like it.

This argument conflates the problem (lacking a mental model) with a solution (animations). This Mr Programmer is confused by elements flying around in front of them. Maybe regular users get confused too?

Try it out for yourself and see if you find it confusing. In many places it's designed to enhance ease of use and does a fairly good job of it.

I don't use my tablet all that much, but I don't find myself questioning how something is done (that stuff didn't really change), or why things look different (I don't really care). It's just... different, nothing else.

The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs and mixing them all in with your other apps, in an attempt to force you to use the bloody useless app switcher button instead of making it do something vaguely useful.

And the lock screen, what the hell were they thinking? The amount of times I've opened the phone app instead of unlocking the phone is becoming obscene. I often have my phone landscape while using it as a mini-tablet and in that orientation it's easy to do. Perhaps I'm paranoid but I think the screen now locks faster than it used to and I haven't been able to find the setting to slow it down yet, which exacerbates the problem, when you're lounging and intermittently transferring your attention between tv and internet browsing.

And the new calendar app only allows you to see 6 hours at a time, so you can't get an overview of your day.

The settings app requires some sort of double swipe down that's just plain awkward. Auto-brightness has been got rid of so often you're constantly fighting the brightness of your phone at night.

The new notification have to be double tapped, which again is awkward, especially as they register the first tap and then "helpfully" tell you to make a 2nd one. But the first tap is behind a button press of the lock screen so it's actually a triple press.

I'm also slightly perplexed as to the home button icon change, to a circle of all things. It actually offends me a bit, it's so tiny and yet completely devoid of meaning. It's different for Apple's circle button as that was a real button, Google's tiny circle just kinda floats there. And the "back" triangle changes orientation for no discernible reason other than the designer obviously wanted to animate something.

The new phone app is strange, the buttons are too small, the volume of the button presses doesn't turn down as you turn down the speaker volume.

And this is in a day and a half of use. It honestly feels like anyone testing it would have hit most of these issues. I suspect Google's designers then turned round to the testers and said "As designed. Material, you know. It's just a new way", rather than admit they'd screwed up.

The worst part is, it's not added anything. I've not come across a single thing yet that I've gone, oh, cool! Not one.

Some other thoughts: - Getting to settings is no different from before when I had to swipe down and then tap a button to see the settings button. Now it's two swipes instead. - Try schedule view in calendar for the overview you're looking for. - The double tap on notifications to open them I like because it means I won't accidentally open one.

Things I've said 'oh, cool!' to: - Guest accounts - Brightness slider in the swipe down - Priority/None interruption settings for the ringer. I used to use Shush! but this works nicely and with more configuration options, albeit less granular timing. - Lock rotation in the swipe down settings - Flashlight in the swipe down settings

Just another data point.

I have a 4.4 device and a 4.0.something device and this happens in both (except is not a triangle)

Lollipop arrived on my Nexus 5 last week, and I couldn't be happier. Battery life is significantly longer, and the new UI ... ugh, this sounds almost cloying ... the new UI makes me happy, it gives me joy.

It's beautiful, it's intuitive, it's functional, it's natural. What more could you want?

I've never owned an iPhone, but this joyful experience must be a tiny bit like what iPhone owners feel. To bring this experience to the unwashed masses of Android users is a very good thing.

But I'm getting no joy from Lollipop. Apart from all the interface issues I've hit, it seems fairly bug ridden.Some notification sounds suddenly turned themselves on (GMail), other sounds are really loud. Another example right now the lock screen on mine is showing a picture of a video I cast on BubbleuPNP last night. For absolutely no reason. I can't stop it.

That's totally not cool. I don't want a blurry video still as my lock screen picture. How do I clear it? Is that intentional? Or a bug?

iOS is colourful and whatnot, but it's confusing as hell and has some ridiculous defaults. Ever since KitKat Android has been better by a wide margin. Not to mention, Apple sucks at services, whereas Google excels at them - and that's half the functionality of a phone these days. And Google Now is pretty much the best thing ever...

But yes, the new design of Android 5 makes me happy too - everything looks so much more vibrant, colourful, sleek and streamlined, etc... It's so much more Google-ey.

Calendar is now rubbish, month view is gone, schedule view is too limited and there's way to much whitespace and 'fat' place cards. Got multiple Google accounts? You can't remove the 'events' calendar. And 'Events' is ostensibly the first calendar in your actual online Google Calendar which you might have named 'Home' but in the app is steadfastly refuses to be called anything but 'events'.

This = install aCalendar[1] and Simple Calendar Widget [2]

Gmail app is now rubbish. HORRIBLE account switching. Do they even use their own app? I don't want a profile pic so I don't know which account is which of the 5 I need to use, so I just pick pot luck or swipe through them all? Then there is that annoying hover button. 'WRITE SOMETHING' it screams out at you, 'Surely that's why you're here isn't it? You couldn't possibly just want to scroll through your inbox without accidentally tapping me!!!'

This = install K9 mail.[3]

YouTube - Enter menu drawer, close it, press 'back' > still takes me back to the home screen. Take a leaf out of Feedly's book and open the frickin' menu drawer!

Chrome - Thankfully you can stop the annoying tab merge pretty easily.

Notifications - now to get to settings I have to do three actions, two pull downs and hit a teeny tiny little button, or you know, waste a space on the home screen.

Phone dialer - I actually like it. It's way faster to get to you contacts and has a much better layout than before. Still got that annoying floating button - 'DIAL SOME NUMBERS ASSHOLE!!!'

Default keyboard - why is removing the key separators a good idea? Is there some data to back that up? To me it looks like a cluttered mess. Thankfully switching back to the old style is just a setting away, but it would be great if there was a more sane default.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.withouthat...

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anod.calen...

[3] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9&hl...

Click the unlock button, swipe up on your phone, not left or right, pull down on your phone twice, click the settings button, ignore the randomly flashing menu items as you scroll down, find "language and input", click "Google Keyboard" (not "Current Keyboard"), click "Appearance and Layouts", click "Theme", click "Holo White".

The way you wrote this makes it seem like swiping up instead of left or right is really horrible and confusing. Why? Previous versions of Android had a totally different lock screen design, so I honestly do not know why you feel so confident that the correct swiping direction should be left or right. Because Apple did it that way?

While it's useful having shortcuts to do these things, they've gone far too far and made it too hard to do what you most often want to do, which is simply unlock the phone. The old photo button worked well, for example.

They had also previously used "up" on the lock screen for voice commands/google now, so I for one have learnt never to use "up" unless I want to set a timer using voice (pretty much the only useful thing it can do).

Also, for what it's worth, I find swiping up to be easier to do one-handed on large phones.

As I said, swiping up actually feels easier to me on a large screen than swiping left or right. And putting notifications on the lock screen is a critical feature in my opinion, something Android has desperately needed out of the box for a while now. I use a custom lock screen just for that feature because it's so useful.

It's the swiping that I'm specifically disliking. Every time I swipe to the right it opens up the phone app. Probably there are many users who have formed a really strong habit of swiping a certain way to unlock their Android phone. I would bet on that direction being left-to-right.

Do you know if it's possible to change the way the lock screen handles swiping in some settings page somewhere?

I've a suggestion for this one - key separators support a paradigm of key presses, following the [traditional] keyboard metaphor. However with swipe-able keyboards it doesn't really make sense, you only need to approximate the position of the letter during your swipe - no "barriers" helps to enforce that new paradigm. If most people swipe, then it makes sense to move away from representing the keyboard as a layout of switches (a key-board).

Do most people swipe? I honestly have no idea, and I'm not an Android user. I'm wondering if there are any stats on that. Particularly for older or less techno-phile users, swiping keyboards might be difficult to get into using.

On numeric keypads, each button corresponds to ~3 letters. Basic text entry involves pushing each button multiple times to select the index of the letter you want[4], then waiting to confirm the selection before moving to the next character.

T9 sped up this process by allowing you to press each button once. It would determine which word you meant by comparing all possible combinations of letters that could be created from the buttons you pressed against a dictionary of known words.

Swype provides a similar extension to QWERTY touchscreen keyboards. With Swype, you drag your finger across a QWERTY grid, creating a path. This path starts on the first letter of the intended word and crosses all letters in the word, in order. It also crosses lots of letters that aren't in the word, or are out of position. The 'secret sauce' lies in how to compare the ordered set of keys defined by the path to a predefined dictionary and produce a meaningful prediction of the intended word.

I haven't implemented such an algorithm myself. However, you can imagine how it might be done. For example, acute angles in the path probably occur when you reach a letter you want, then angle off to collect the next letter. This provides a signpost that can be combined with the initial letter to reduce the possible words down to the set that starts with the initial letter and includes the key with the acute angle.

[1] First introduced by Swype: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swype

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T9_(predictive_text)

[3] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/24/swype-vs-iphone-typ...

[4] e.g. the "3" key corresponds to "DEF", so press "3" twice to enter "E"

And by bizarre you mean fantastic... It's even better in a language like French, where swiping means not having to type in the accents, whereas normally you'd have to do a long press of the letter and then select the accent you want...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9b8NlMd79w

I like everything about the new UI except for that Gmail profile switching. But you can easily switch from menu so no problem. Now OS X Yosemite those changes are annoying me and also slowing down my macbook pro. I had to disable few settings to get a acceptable performance.

Edit: There is one particular annoying thing in L. Sometimes when click on a tab like in Chrome, the notification window gets the touch and is semi shown.

I wouldn't mind if the desktop/web interface were a bit more like the tablet sized gmail though... also if gmail proper could also see my other email accounts this way since there's no proper mail client in chromeos.

The gmail redesign is really jarring if you're still on KitKat. It "fits" visually with the design language of Lolipop, but it still feels like a major step backward in terms of usability.

The conspiracy theorist in me is inclined to conclude that they do not, in fact, use their own app; it's almost like they made the Gmail app worse to encourage people to migrate to Inbox.

Clock - I used to be able to dismiss my 7:30 wakeup alarm if I woke up at 7:20 by simply swiping away the notification. But now I can't find any way to suppress the next instance of a recurring alarm.

(at least you can on kitkat, I swipe down over 3 alarms at once and dismiss them all)

By the way, limiting to 5 days is at best inflexible. Many people want to look at 7 days because, you know, that's a week.

I have just realized in the last month or so that three stacked bars is a menu (bootstrap style). I am sure those have been around for a while now.

To be fair you can turn this off, that's the first thing I did when Chrome notified me of this "awesome" change.

The new menu system is bizarre. You get loads of random animations of grey appearing for no apparent reason. Put your finger on something to scroll, "grey flash!!!!". Err? What did I do? Oh, nothing...

And, this could be just not getting used to it yet, but I am completely flabbergasted at just how crap the new scroll limit indicator looks. It changes shape depending where your finger is pulling from, why? I keep thinking something's gone wrong because this uneven blob suddenly appears on the top of your screen.

Personally, I think people just don't like change. A lot of the things — camera shutter sound, out of bounds scrolling — they're not actual complaints. They sound more like "this is different and I'm not used to it". OTOH, some are definitely valid.

I wonder if there's any easy way to roll out design changes for the masses which doesn't cause uproar. I swear this happens every single time.

On 4.4.4, I've been hating the new calendar. Christ I hate the colors in agenda mode. They make it almost impossible for me to "see" the text without extreme concentration.

The first time I became familiar with the constant-change-is-bad meme is with Quicken. They would force you to upgrade every 3 years (or so, I may have the number wrong), and for a while I upgraded every year. Nothing changed from year to year except everything was in a different place and they added more bugs. I finally moved to Moneydance a couple of years ago and have been in financial software heaven ever since. One of their selling points was "we don't change shit around for no reason!"

Part of this, is that even if you come up with a design that is better than what you have, it ought to be a lot better, because you're also asking people to get used to a new design. If it's just incrementally better, you're going to piss people off because you're asking them to relearn how to do something again, for no apparent good reason. I don't think it's unreasonable for a person to be annoyed by that.

And of course, if it's worse, or if it's only arguably better, or if opinions are very much mixed, then you failed.

This is something Google doesn't seem to know institutionally, or rather I guess they just don't care. On the opposite end of the spectrum is Microsoft, who care about this too much.

It keeps getting upgraded. I lost the zoom buttons (pinch to zoom is very dangerous when driving, so basically a major feature loss for me). And recently the whole thing goes so slowly on my older phone that I have usually found the destination before the phone has managed to load the screen.

Recently I founds that I can uninstall all the updates, and I am back to the basic version that came with the phone. Far nicer. Less screen space, and search history is not as integrated, but at least it is usable in real time. If only I could go froward by two or three updates, then there is probably a version that did everything I want.

And I know it's personal preference but I love the way chrome tabs are integrated into the app switcher. It allows me to focus on what I'm doing and not so much what app I'm in. Now each tab is like an app in and of itself. I think that's the way multi-tasking should be done.

But they did manage to move the bin for deleting an alarm from the right to the left. That's all. Let's just switch it the fuck around!

I find the new calendar baffling. Luckily, the old AOSP calendar is still available on F-Droid.[0]

[0] https://f-droid.org/repository/browse/?fdfilter=aosp+calenda...

It's still there under Settings. It's now called "Adaptive brightness"

Try the 'agenda' view which does exactly that.

I was also going to debunk most of your other complaints because I know they're false but I don't have my Lollipop device with my at the moment.

The old calendar also had a week view where you could see most of the week and what was on. Now you're constantly having to scroll.

As for the rest, how can you debunk what actually happens? If you don't have your lollipop device on you, that probably means it's not a phone...

Compared to that, the new Gmail and Maps apps are almost good...

The extra swipe serves no purpose at all, given that I've already pressed the power button, and have a pattern lock.

Annoying.

   The thing I'm hating is that they've managed to completely screw up Chrome by getting rid of tabs

The new behavior is surprising to people who have used any phone browser before, and it will continue to be surprising to people who use their desktop browsers as a point of reference.

TIP: Pull down with two fingers to go straight to the quick settings shade.

So if the company is profitable enough that it doesn't need to lay anyone off, it has the excess labor keep iterating on a product that's already very good and only needs a small amount of labor to keep it ideal. This makes the product worse.

Once you see this you can't un-see it.

(Also there's the more cyncial explanation that by changing things dramatically you get people to think they need to keep spending money.)

In this case I would like them to put this people to work on my pet annoyances: screen turning on while on my pocket and natively recording my conversations.

Screen shouldn't turn on under any circumstance, unless I press the physical button. There's no way to configure this and there are many cases of this behaviour: incoming call, low battery...

There is no way to properly record every conversation. There are apps, but they don't really work. Some of them with "good critics" demand to host the audio in their servers. Are people crazy?

I've recently bought one android phone for my mother. Her experience has been sad and painful (in her words). Now it seems her next phone will need just another painful period.

It's not just geeks, UI is difficult and changing it is no good.

Sadly these engines of innovation create sup-optimal products if the product is already at a local maximum for current constraints. They then just endlessly circle the local maximum in a repeating pattern (this is called fashion).

Luckily for these companies, power users and media also like change for change's sake. Helping them hype each new iteration of the product, driving sales, and giving validation (and job security) to the product/design/engineering organization.

Google Maps and Windows Search are two products that have been over-worked to death. Both were better in older iterations (Windows Search pre-Vista, Google Maps before they went all minimalism-stupid).

Google Maps in particular stripped out tons of useful functionality for a long period (My Places seems to appear and disappear every second release, location search history is currently MIA, compass is gone, et al).

Windows Search just tried to make it "clever" but instead made it "unreliable." They wanted to add support for everyone file format one by one (and ignore everything else) but instead managed to only support native Microsoft formats well and nothing else at all. File Search in Windows (Vista-8.1) is horrendously poor. Give me Windows 95 search.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IFilter

- Windows had an indexer long before Vista (many many years)[0].

- Windows Search supports (and supported) UTF-8 and UTF-16 strings, as well as unicode if you had the correct language pack installed.

- Windows supported file content searches in Windows 95 (up through Vista).

- Microsoft could have allowed plugins to enrich search results WITHOUT gutting raw text searching (see Windows XP for a compromise, before they removed the work-around in Vista).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indexing_Service

And about GMail, nothing more to say, only that once you've managed to break the "Open in new tab" button and the "Back" button then you have no business doing UI-stuff in a browser.

Yes, I know both products are free as in I'm not paying anything for them, it's just that is really, really frustrating to compare them with how they used to behave.

The new Maps has come a long way since launch but I agree that it's still very far from good.

Serious question, why is this a "bad" complaint? Personally I hate transitions, I think they bring nothing of value and they're wasting my time, had the impression that there must be other people who thought exactly like me.

You might be surprised at the hints they give you subconsciously about where UI elements are going and what they're doing. Google's Material Design actually does a good job showcasing this - I had no idea the lock screen had a 'double swipe' motion to bring down quick toggles, but the transition of my first swipe made it clear that the extra motion was available to me.

Proven how? With first-time users? Phones are things where I want to pull it out of my pocket, do the thing I want to do, and have it take the absolute minimal amount of time. I don't think this is a techie thing. Even non-techies are willing to take a little more time to learn an interface if it means they can spend a few seconds less to send a message. That said, if I have a device that can send a message quickly, I don't want to pull it out of my pocket and find out I have to re-learn how to do it. I don't care if the interface is better - I want a 5-year interface, not a 5-month interface.

When you make statements like "helpful for users" you can't stop at a simple focus group. You have to think about how added complexity hurts the reliability and speed of the device.

It seems standard that phones older than 1 year are getting slower and slower. I've had the same Android phone for about 22 months, and it's been getting unusably slow (mostly, Google Apps (Gmail, Maps, Hangouts) take between 10-15 seconds to open on a white screen.) I'm willing to believe the hardware has degraded over the time I've had the phone. But primarily, I think software has been pushed out that was designed for flagship phones released in the past 8 months without looking at the performance impact.

This is not the kind of innovation we need.

  "There are a bunch of new ‘transitions’ between elements. I don’t know what the battery cost actually is for this, but as a user I just don’t care about cute transitions between elements. I want fast interaction with my mobile device."

Are the particular transitions he's complaining about bad? I have no idea, since he just wrote about transitions in general, without specifying any. Not all transitions are good, but writing like they're all pointless suggests that you just don't understand UI (and I'm not a UI person, just someone who reads a tiny bit about it).

Edit: Just looked at the formatdoc. Is there a way to quote text without getting those scrollbars?

For what it's worth, my girlfriend -- decidedly not a tech person -- got the Lollipop update for her Nexus 5 a few days ago. I asked her how she liked it, and she said she could barely even tell what had changed. I don't think the HN demographic is even remotely representative of how most people will feel about the Lollipop changes.

No, it really doesn't. It's just an animation running in the RenderThread while the new Activity is loading on the UI (main) thread.

It's a common element of game Menu systems ex: rolling up an in game paper when closing a menu. But, games rarely add a delay before basic gameplay like walking. Granted, there are built in delays used for balance ex: reloading a gun or to give time for a video to play etc. But, they don't really fit the UI defining for transitions. Which is pure UI window dressing aiding usability.

ED: Ok, their also commonly used on game loading screens but again adding more loading screens does not improve a games gameplay.

* Google has a large and very competent design team. They are not changing things "for the sake of changing them." More often than not, changes are made in response to issues discovered during usability studies.

* You are not the user. I am not the user. The designer is not the user. In fact, for a project as large as Android or Gmail, there is no "the user". You're always making trade-offs between power vs. common, new vs. existing users.

* Existing users are inherently conservative. By definition they mostly like things as they are or they wouldn't be users. You have to weigh their needs vs. those of future users. A big part of that is understanding how many people are upset about the change (all vs. vocal minority), how quickly they get used to it (if ever), and how you can mitigate this.

* Ideally, you want to make "Pareto efficient" changes, that make everyone better off. The only thing easier than doing what you've always done is when the new UX is so easy and intuitive you instantly understand it.

* You do not want to version your UI, just like you don't want to make everything a setting. This is a recipe for maintenance headaches, and endless wasted cycles supporting an ever-shrinking minority of users.

* This being said, it's very helpful to release a redesign as a beta, and let users switch back and forth for a while while you iron out the kinks. This in itself gives you good data.

At the end of the day, design is all about trade-offs. It's very easy to criticize a change because you don't like it, but it's a lot more interesting to think through why a change might have been made. If we're going to be critical, let us be constructive.

Well put. Google is a data-driven company with the ability to test designs over millions of users (although Jakob Nielsen's work has shown that you reach the point of quickly diminishing returns after testing with 5-10 users).

I've spent quite a bit of time implementing Material Design for http://recent.io/, and then testing the design with normal, not especially tech-savvy users. My impression is that Material Design is a way to simplify and standardize app UIs (to increase app usage overall), and import visual cues from the paper world. It's very thoughtful approach, probably better than iOS, and I say this as someone whose primary mobile device is a new iPhone and who has owned an iPhone since the day it went on sale.

But what works for most people may not work for HN power users. Hence the complaints on this thread.

This gets tossed around a lot, but is usually misinterpreted. What 5-10 users will get you is discovering the mere existence of most usability problems. What much larger sample sizes will get you is an idea of how many people are likely to experience that problem, which is very helpful when talking about trade-offs in meeting the needs of various types of users.

However, this is still just a hypothesis. It might turn out to harm usability on some platforms while helping on others...or harm usability across the board. Adherence to a standard is not necessarily the same thing as a usability improvement.

1. We need to clearly separate the difference between UI design and UI decoration. Design should be driven by user testing that measures speed and rate of completion of tasks. If every feature of the latest UI is not measured to be a quantitative increase, then it is not a design improvement. Decoration is about being fashionable and has nothing to do with usable, efficient, elegant UI. I see no reason they cannot exist side by side, but today the prevailing policy seems to be that decorating UI in a trendy fashion trumps usability.

2. There needs to be thought about the adoption and transition of users from an old interface to a new one. Right now the philosophy seems to be "Stop whining and suck it up - our designers are smarter than you." This is not reasonable or professional. New designs should be measured not just for usability of new users, but also against users that are used to the previous interface. There are probably many techniques to improve the user experience of UI upgrades but we'll never discover them until we recognize that it is important and spend some time and effort studying this phenomenon.

I would propose the introduction of a third and maybe fourth group where returning users would also measure those selected metrics.

I think it's mainly because there are multiple paths through the app to do the same thing, and some of them are optimized flows and others are not. So tapping the search bar is not the most efficient way to get directions anymore... you should tap the blue directions icon instead.

Planning a cross-country trip for Thanksgiving right now. In classic I can type "Town A to Town B to Town C to Town D" and it returns a route between A, B, C and D. In the new interface it brings up a list of restaurants in Town A. How can the king of search get this wrong?

This seems fairly basic functionality so I may be missing something. I've even been sent toward a place 30 miles east of home, repeatedly, trying to select the autocompletion of 'home'.

[1]: http://beta-blog.archagon.net/2014/11/20/what's_up_with_goog...

I'm afraid to buy a new Nexus because of how bad the application interfaces will probably be.

It's easy to get upset when things change, but keep in mind that change can be positive and/or negative.

Are you kidding me? So called "flat design", with nondescript icons indistinguishable from the surrounding text, is the worst thing ever for new users. How am I supposed to know that I can click (er, I mean, touch) something?

What really happens is they keep you kind of logged in to collect as much data on your searches, videos, etc. The way to actually log out is:

- Click logout in Gmail

- Click "Sign in with a different account" (!)

- Click "Remove"

- Click the X next to your name.

- Click Done

It feels like they are trying to trick you into staying logged in by making the logout process extremely obscure and difficult, and I really hate it when I'm being blatantly tricked like that. With existence of evercookies (http://samy.pl/evercookie/) I am somewhat skeptical that even that obscure logout process actually logged me out.

This is pretty much the strongest reason why I don't use the GMail UI anymore (there are others, but this alone would have made me stop).

Some people have a link from their G+ to their youtube, but it seems not to be there for everyone any more.

I once had a customer who told vendors, "I don't want maintenance, and I don't want the software I just bought to change, ever." At the time, most of us thought he was crazy. Now I'm not so sure.

I'm still sitting shivah for Classic Google Maps, Palm Graffiti, and Windows XP. Sigh.

This applies to physical products too. These companies change their labels so much.. It just makes it more difficult to find and leaves me, as a consumer, confused when shopping unsure that I'm buying the correct product. Yes, things needs to be updated and kept "pretty" but can we keep a base? Or can we agree, at least, to pick something and stick to it?!

This has led to a lot of cyclical design cycles, reinventing the wheel, NIH, etc.

It's going to be damning to the tech sector if any of the big players (Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, off the top of my head) need to tighten their belts, because they're going to be able to shed a ton of employees without losing a shred of profit or productivity.

And it apparently leads to shallow changes. While I am ok with the new design in OS X, there are a lot real problems that I would rather like to see addressed, such as: providing a better filesystem than HFS+, fixing the annoying 'sandbox apps set quarantine attribute' bug [1], making Mail work with GMail, make iWork on par with the old versions again, etc.

[1] https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/issues/162

Ironic given all the articles on the problem getting good people. I guess the trouble is the winner takes all nature of the market means Google can have 1000 spare good programmers while most small tech companies have a job hiring one or two.

[1] - I'm not bragging or anything; I was declined an offer after my onsite visit, but that was also three years ago.

Furthermore, in order for that feedback loop to exist, users need to have a choice. I'm afraid that the new Google Maps is just plain worse, and Google needs to dust off the old code and start iterating on it again. It was a great experiment, but everyone building consumer software seems to be incapable of admitting when their complete rewrite was a step backwards.

When a software team does a complete redesign of a feature or app, they almost become institutionally incapable of admitting that the rewrite was the wrong choice.

Not only is it subjective it's almost certainly incorrect. If you read anything about Google it's clear that they don't make UI decisions without looking at a ton of data, making the changes and testing those changes. What does the author of that post think? A Google designer updated a load of designs on a whim?

I have a 22-month-old Android phone. Google Maps just keeps getting slower and slower. Now it takes 10-15 seconds to start up. I'd really like to know what percentage of the data Google is using comes from phones released in the past 10 months. (Or phones that haven't even been released yet.)

Can't agree with that. If the change isn't needed then change can't be better. The burden of responsibility for justifying the change is on the person wanting the change. To identify why the change is needed and how it's an improvement.

It's a weakness of the production team if there's a "must evolve no matter what" mentality on repeat-cycle. You could aim for "stability", for "baseline" for "solid foundations" instead of "excessive change". Then your efforts are about extending, expanding and tweaking rather than changing.

There's nothing subjective about evaluating reasons for changing an interface. There's either good reasons for the change, or there isn't. Too many people try to manipulate discussion in this business with "it's subjective". It dilutes the discussion because "subjective" doesn't commit either way, it just kind of shrugs and says "oh well, too hard to conclude anything".

When a consequence of change is that you piss off a bunch of users, then you can't say that change is inherently better each iteration. A wrong turn might be made and literally breaks the product or dents the reputation for many iterations. It happens. Nothing is immune from the great unwashed interface testers, and we don't like useless layout changes for things already committed to muscle memory.

I'm curious... when you say 'change' is there a contextual limit to what counts as a change? That is to say, am I taking you too literally if I consider an A/B test a change? Or is there a pervasiveness of rollout that you think is necessary to consider something as a change?

In either case, I wouldn't want to underestimate the value of studying reactions to a change--especially the negative reactions. There's a lot to be learned from mistakes.

A-B testing won't reveal how many people reluctantly embrace the change, rolled their eyes and cursed your service as they completed the task. A-B testing is not all-knowing. It's suitable for colder functional changes, not things such as key separators on a virtual keyboard.

None of this would be a problem if users are simply given choice and meticulous control over the changes and how or whether they're applied. Choice, control, options and user preferences - those should be the key features. I wish for innovation in changes, such as inviting and allowing users to preview for themselves a particular change.

Fortunately we do have lots of options in our settings for a lot of things, but it doesn't go far enough. Their new "material girl in a material world" design philosophy is a distraction... and personally I think is weaker than commentators are declaring.

Who wants reliable, familiar interfaces and predictable functionality? Um.... try everyone!

{glances at this HN thread} Yes, clearly :)

I get that these changes are pain points for lots of people, and no one wants to be frustrated using the devices with which they have everyday, critical interactions.

> Who wants reliable, familiar interfaces and predictable functionality? Um.... try everyone!

Sure we want that... and we also want newer, better things. That's a tug of war between comfort and progress. If all we did were laser-focus on reliable, familiar interfaces and predictable functionality we never would have gotten the GUI or the mouse, right?

> A-B testing won't reveal how many people reluctantly embrace the change, rolled their eyes and cursed your service as they completed the task. A-B testing is not all-knowing. It's suitable for colder functional changes, not things such as key separators on a virtual keyboard.

I completely agree. My point was to home in on what you would characterize as change. Your response was very helpful to that end.

> None of this would be a problem if users are simply given choice and meticulous control over the changes and how or whether they're applied. Choice, control, options and user preferences - those should be the key features.

Yeah, it would be comforting if the gmail app let users toggle between "classic" and "material"... and it would also be contrary to that which is (seemingly) the driving force behind Material Design: defragmentation of UX in the Android space.

Choice is a double-edged sword. Several studies suggest that choice overload reduces happiness, increases stress, and leads to poorer decision-making.[1] On the other hand, one study found that choice overload caused all of those reactions but also positively affected their perceived quality of the brand.[2]

We HNers are a niche of tinkerers who enjoy poring through settings. As I understand it, our love of actively customizing and tweaking is not shared by the larger demographics.

Change bears risk, yes; but personally I would rather groan at questionable changes than ploddingly use an app that sacrifices the hope of exceptional change for the fear of bad change.

To each his own, I suppose.

-----

[1] For anyone interested in "choice overload":

* http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/bad-good-ch... which refers to a dead link that I think was moved to http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.127.3.27...

* http://www.fastcompany.com/3031364/the-future-of-work/why-ha...

* http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/03/01/select-all

* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/your-money/the-trap-of-too...

* http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/research-too-many-choic...

* https://hbr.org/2006/06/more-isnt-always-better written by the author of a book that some of the other articles cite

[2] http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/when-customers-equate-c...

In the end, apps should be more familiar, and easier to use.

The change itself is always frustrating, people who are used to an uix (by learning it), hate change, even if the new uix is simpler.

It will be like everywhere else. Someone wanted to change stuff to make their mark and found a way to get survey results that confirmed their decision.

That's all well and good, but they seem to do this every two years or so.

I think the guy has valid points, and your post is just an appeal to authority.

Sadly it's not only google, it's also Microsoft (Windows 8), Gnome (3), Ubuntu (Unity), etc. This UI minimalism consisting in removing features with no good reason is killing me.

Also, not that it matters, but the old app is 2 MB and works flawlessly, the new one is more than 20 and chugs a bit when scrolling on a quad core processor.

This is yet another case of where if you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. So they're not designing it for you.

Whatever OS you pick, there are elements that are simply wrong.

I have a particular loathing of iTunes for its many persistent idiocies, but I could just as easily pick examples from Windows or Linux world.

Designing eye-candy is much easier than designing good application work-flow - and it's the latter that defines the UX.

It's baffling that this is either not understood or ignored by so many product managers.

Or maybe not - if you research app design books you'll find a huge amount written about coding conventions and ideas like MVC, and quite a lot about HI standards and graphic design, but (relatively) almost nothing about workflow design.

That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.

Everything since then has not been about making their products more usable, it's been about finding ways to cram more advertising into their products.

Err, no. How does the left version cram more advertising in than the right version here?

http://indonetworksecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/An...

> That was a textbox. You can't build an OS around that.

That sounds like Unix to me. Seems to work just fine …

I do not think that necessarily follows. Even if you are not the customer, they likely (think they) are designing it for you. Because they need you to keep giving them your data, they need you to find the UI easy to use and easy to hand over data.

The new Google Maps UI is fucking custom tailored to showing you advertisements. It's much less useful now for things like driving directions or finding businesses that don't pay for sponsorship (i.e. if I search for "Rite Aid" from my house, it shows me a Rite Aid 3 miles away instead of the one literally 50 feet from my front door.)

Per Google's 10-K [1], they had revenues of $50 billion on ad sales in 2013, and $5 billion in revenue on everything else. If there is a conflict between advertiser interests and end-user interests, the advertiser will win because Google gets >90% of their revenue from advertising.

If you don't pay for advertising, then you're not Google's real customer. They will do whatever they have to do to keep eyeballs on their products, but only if those products help them sell more ads. See Google Reader - it was neither expensive to maintain nor struggling, but it wasn't as advertiser-friendly as Google's other aggregation products and actively cannibalized users from them, so it went away.

[1] https://investor.google.com/pdf/20131231_google_10K.pdf

I think we are just interpreting "for" differently, in "the UI design is for the customers". I was assuming a very literal interpration, and saying that UI design is to attract more users, while it seems you meant it in the sense that the end goal of the UI design is for Google to serve more ads. I thnk both are true, and it depends on how "for" is interpreted.

I was struck in Bram Cohen's interview by how much care he's taken to avoid changing vim's behavior at all, while still letting nice new features be added. In the case of vim, you have to learn about features and enable them to change the UI. That works, but it does mean that the default vim experience for a new user lacks a lot of its cool features, and it can be hard to learn about features. (I only learned that vim has persistent undo from that interview.)

Imagine if say, firefox, had a UI version number. New users get the current version, and firefox writes that to its config. So upgrades don't have to change the UI the user has gotten used to. It could prompt on upgrade to let the user try out the fresh new version, and if they don't like it, they could revert back. Even if this were only limited to the "chrome" around the web page (no need to version UI for preferences pages etc), I think it would be a nice win.

Gnome 3 sort of did this with its legacy mode, but it's a poor imitation at best of gnome 2.

I'm sure that UI developers would hate this. Having to maintain old UI code, or implement pixel-perfect imitations of it using the new UI code. Needing to worry about how to shoehorn new features into an old UI that was not designed for them. Etc.

It's much easier to put the cognitive load on the shoulders of the user, who is forced to unlearn old habits, develop new muscle memories, and generally grit their teeth and bear it until the new UI fades into the background and stops distracting.. Just in time for a UI refresh to come around!

Programmers and coders would (and do) get blasted for being lazy if the user has to learn something that can be done automatically with code, no matter how difficult. But when a designer changes the UI, we excuse it as "cost of progress". It's about time that UI design is held to the same standard as functional design.

To be fair, we are seeing a natural progression of an entire industry. First make it work -> make it work well -> then make it pretty -> make it work well AND look pretty. This is pretty much the lifecycle of every other industry, and fortunately the tech industry is finally approaching maturity and starting to think about that last stage.

UI versioning sounds like a ridiculously difficult challenge, so difficult that it's worth thinking about more, because most people won't (because it's so hard). I'm gonna take that idea and run with it a bit...

A few things come to mind:

- Added complexity - apps would have two unique versions at the same time "Oh i'm running gmail 15.2 with UI v 12.0"

- I wonder if another ways of achieving something similar is keeping legacy UI by calling it a "theme." While, politically, it might be difficult to get funding for a "theme" over a "redesign," with such an important and widely used application like GMail, it makes total sense to me that there are 2-4 interaction schemas that people could use if they'd like. Maybe "theme" is too weak of a name,--maybe "Schema"? Something else?

- What sort of protocol would a "theme" use to improve? Let's say that "we want to keep the important parts of this theme as much as possible, not mess with them, just add this new feature." How universally possible is that, or do a majority of big new features inherently complicate a UI and the mental models of its users?

- Getting into the nitty gritty details, though, there would almost inherently be splintering--different themes would have microinteractions and microfeatures that others would not. While that's probably good for the end user wanting to differentiate between them, it would make the "Do we add big feature X?" conversation across all "Theme Teams" AND development even more difficult.

- Would the themes themselves have versions?

- In a way, themes are already available as versions. Ex: I am running an older version ("theme") of twitter on my ipad because i just haven't gotten around to updating it. but It still works. What would be great is if twitter could allow me to switch between this version and the newest one so I could see if the newest version worked better for me. I could switch back if it didn't. Right now, I can upgrade, but I can't switch back, so upgrading is "switching permanently and hoping for the best."

- what are your thoughts?

I guess many older people will have these problems, and I can't understand that MS has no clue about the first generation of elderly people using computers.

A friend once said to me "iPhone hasn't changed since day 1, it's still the same stupid square icons, they can't innovate"...I was befuddled. There is a reason things stay the same. They work and users know them like second nature. Unless you have a REALLY good reason to change the paradigm, just don't. Mac OS X and Windows until recently didn't really change that much in terms of usability. Why does Google love to change everything constantly?

What's missing apart from people actually writing and releasing those independent UIs?

If you're just starting out and don't have a feel for the mobile paradigm, those gestures may as well be magic. Maybe you're simply not supposed to refresh anything by hand any more. Maybe it's supposed to be magic.

I agree that this can be a source of frustration. On the flip side, once you're used to it as a global UI pattern you might find certain buttons or indicators to be gratuitous. Now that I'm used to a global back button on Android, I feel totally lost on iOS when I want to go back/up. I'm no longer used to looking for a specific app button for that action because I'm used to it being a system-wide feature.

I'm wondering if this will become less confusing once the lion's share of Android phones and apps are using Material Design, as MD recommends that content is refreshed either a) automatically by sync or b) via the drag-to-refresh action.[1]

[1] http://www.google.com/design/spec/patterns/swipe-to-refresh....

When speaking about productivity and design:

So we should all stay on Windows XP because everybody knows it and how to use it?

The white background doesn't look as good as the transparent one, in the app list. The space between pages makes the screen look smaller.

There are permanent notifications for The Battery save mode and when you Restrict Background Data.

It takes me two swipes to pull down to access the settings.

Notifications on the lock screen are nice but not enough text is shown.

When you use a commandline the UI and Workflow geniuses do not get to have any input, and then you get less surprises of this nature.

When you use a Desktop application, it is easier to keep the software at a version with a UI you like. The trend towards storing your data on other's computers leads to empowering the authors of web programs, so that they don't have to respect your taste in UI as much(among other things).

YES! That's where you scroll! Why would they put a button there?

Oh, I know why: because they painted themselves into a corner by thinking every app needs a cutesy circle button floating with a gross drop shadow.

Wasn't one of the most important UI guidelines for a long time "things that behave like buttons should look like buttons"? The term "mystery meat navigation" was invented to describe the effects of not following this; it's even more difficult with a touchscreen as you cannot "hover" over UI elements to discover if they're clickable.

Articles like this show a lock of imagination. If you can't imagine the shock of looking back at an older design, you can't perceive the benefits.

Then again, perhaps that's just the perception from taking a look from too high an altitude. Personally, I'm focusing on the tools I like using; cautiously evaluating newer tools but not the bleeding edge (I like to avoid scabs); making careful decisions about the stack for my latest creation, and then sticking to those choices; in the last five years, I've felt more like I'm doing a Serious Engineering. If other individuals do similar things, perhaps there's hope for industry maturity after all.