Again in Android’s earliest days — means, means again within the prehistoric period of 2010 and the years round it — the platform was a promising however messy piecemeal effort. It was contemporary, it was full of energy and potential, and it was completely thrilling. Nevertheless it additionally had nearly no requirements surrounding it, and it consequently felt like a mishmosh of conflicting interface kinds and design patterns.
In these early days, in truth, that was a frequent criticism you’d hear from people on the Apple aspect of the fence: Android was inconsistent. It was disjointed. It wasn’t, ahem, an elegant person expertise.
And you already know what? In some ways, they had been proper. Android had loads to supply from the get-go and offered some intriguing benefits over Apple’s then particularly locked-down and tightly managed method, however design and interface consistency had been actually not strengths of the platform at that time. Anybody who tries to inform you in any other case is both delusional or forgetting what, precisely, the expertise of utilizing a Gingerbread-era Android machine was like. Highly effective? Yup — you’d higher imagine it. However polished? Yeah — not a lot.
That every one began to vary in 2012, when Google started to emphasise its first formal set of interface and design pointers for Android — a mode often called Holo. “Utilizing system themes means builders can make the most of a person’s current expectations,” as Google put it on the time. Having platform-wide pointers, the corporate went on to elucidate, would permit builders to “design an app with a single predictable feel and look.”
And boy, did that make a world of distinction. The presence of design pointers helped deliver a constant feel and look not solely to Android itself but additionally to the apps round it — which in flip introduced a much-needed sense of cohesiveness to the broader platform and made it immeasurably simpler, as a person, to know what to anticipate. Even while you aren’t actively fascinated with it, realizing that sure features will all the time be in sure locations and act a sure means permits you to transfer round your cellphone naturally and simply, with none ongoing thought or effort. And coming from the Wild West that Android and its apps had been as much as that time, having that added sense of unity utterly modified what the platform was like to make use of.
And Google wasn’t completed but. The unification prolonged even additional with the launch of the Materials Design commonplace two years later. A lot progress! And but by some means, virtually seven years down the highway, it seems like we’re transferring again in the other way.
Android at this time nonetheless has a design commonplace — an developed model of that very same Materials Design idea — however the consistency that commonplace was initially created to attain appears to be slipping away extra with each passing month. And the expertise of utilizing an Android machine, I am sorry to say, is slipping proper alongside it.
Android and the decline of the design commonplace
Your entire level of getting a design commonplace, because the time period suggests, is to determine, y’know, a commonplace — and the all-important qualities of consistency, cohesiveness, and unity that include it. And but, utilizing Android at this time, you not often know what to anticipate when transferring from one app or course of to the following.
Take the system-level sharing menu, as an example — a key a part of the Android expertise and one of many working system’s longest-standing strengths. The sharing menu, in case you aren’t acquainted, is that collection of choices that comes up while you faucet the command to share one thing from one app to a different — like sharing an article out of your browser into an electronic mail or sharing a picture from Images right into a cloud storage service.
While you faucet a primary, system-level command like that, you must know precisely what to anticipate. The next actions ought to be little greater than muscle reminiscence. And but, even if Android has a system-level commonplace — one which’s been improved immensely over the past a number of Android variations — the menu that pops up upon urgent a share command in an app is totally unpredictable.
The explanation why is definitely fairly easy: As a substitute of sticking with the usual system interface, a lot of apps now decide to create their personal sharing menus — menus that present the identical precise operate because the system commonplace, in lots of instances, however with a very totally different and sometimes arbitrarily reorganized interface. That is true of quite a few high-profile third-party apps, reminiscent of Pocket and Firefox. And, maybe most stunning of all, it is true of an ever-expanding variety of Google-made apps — together with Chrome, Google Information, Google Maps, Images, YouTube, and YouTube Music.
Right here, for illustration, is the precise system sharing menu in Android:
JR It options particular instructed sharing targets on its high row and provides you the flexibility to create a row of your personal favourite apps for sharing beneath that, after which you see a scrolling record of each different obtainable share goal in your machine. Useful, proper? Completely! However then you definately go to share one thing from, say, Firefox — and as an alternative of getting that commonplace menu, you get this:
JR In Pocket, it is this:
JR And in Google’s personal Chrome browser — the default inventory browser app for Android — you get this:
JR Much more vexing, if you wish to get to the usual system share menu from that clumsy Chrome various, you possibly can — and you may often must, since that customized menu consists of solely a small portion of the obtainable targets in your cellphone — however so as to take action, it’s a must to scroll horizontally, all the way in which to the precise of the menu’s center line, after which faucet a “Extra” possibility at its far finish. I am undecided you would make that course of a lot much less intuitive or handy in case you tried.
Worse but, that horizontally-scrolling mess is sort of turning into a little bit of an alternate commonplace for a few of Google’s apps. It is vaguely much like what you see when sharing one thing from Google Information:
JR And likewise from Images:
JR YouTube and YouTube Music have their very own completely totally different alternate commonplace with their customized share interfaces. Egads?!
JR Now, a few of these interfaces have obvious functions and causes for current — just like the one in Images, which incorporates app-specific choices for sharing photographs inside that service along with the same old exterior locations. Others, like those in YouTube and YouTube Music, appear to serve no discernible objective different than simply being totally different for the sake of being totally different. And all of them, no matter their motive for current, in the end accomplish the identical factor: creating confusion and inconsistency and making Android meaningfully much less polished, cohesive, and nice to make use of.
This backwards progress does not cease with share menus, both. Transfer from one Android app to the following — even inside Google’s personal home made functions — and you may see a dizzying array of kinds for primary system components like the primary app menu and the collection of settings inside it. Generally, you faucet a three-line menu icon in an app’s upper-left nook to seek out its settings. Different instances, you faucet a three-dot menu in an app’s upper-proper nook to seek out the identical factor. And different instances, you faucet your profile picture within the upper-right nook to uncover a hidden menu with settings and different vital choices.
The difficulty goes deeper from there: Even inside that profile picture menu setup, the type, design, and objective of the interface varies wildly from one Google app to the following. In Gmail, Docs, and Drive, as an example, it takes on a simple-looking type and holds solely instructions for switching accounts, because the apps’ different settings are accessed through a three-line menu icon.
JR In Maps, the interface is analogous however the contents are completely totally different — with choices for switching accounts together with a hyperlink to the app’s settings and many different top-level instructions.
JR YouTube, in the meantime, has an identical type of setup however with a unique design — one which’s much less of an overlay card and extra of a full-screen, separate-area menu.
JR And talking of menus, after years of clear and deliberate pointers discouraging using bottom-bar menus inside apps, Google has began utilizing these components liberally in its personal apps and actively encouraging their use elsewhere as effectively. The notion of a change in commonplace is one factor, however the precise end result here’s a new lack of any commonplace and a mishmosh in what types of patterns you encounter, inside Google’s personal apps and beyonds.
Once more, it results in inconsistency and unpredictability — the enemies of efficient and efficiency-aiding interface design.
Some broader perspective
Now, let’s step again for a minute and ask ourselves: Is all of this making a mountain of a molehill? I can see how some may say that. In any case, it is simple that by and huge, regular, non-tech-nerd customers do not consciously take into consideration or discover issues like person interface design — nor ought to they.
However as any skilled designer will inform you, it is additionally simple that people do discover, even when implicitly, when sure apps or experiences are simpler than others. And that, pricey pals, is strictly the way it oughta be. Good design should not be one thing you actively take into consideration; it ought to be one thing that simply makes interfaces simple and fulfilling to make use of. As one oft-quoted maxim places it: “Good person interface design facilitates ending the duty at hand with out drawing pointless consideration to itself.”
What we’re seeing now in Android — from the shortage of consistency and standard-adherence with the share menu to the disjointed, various approaches to menu placement and primary command positioning — is strictly the other of that. Even in case you do not explicitly assume, “Hey, this operate is not the place I anticipated it to be!” or “Hmm, I’ve actually needed to dig round to seek out that setting I want,” you do discover that issues aren’t as intuitive as they might be. You do discover that you simply’re working more durable to do the stuff that ought to be simple to perform. And also you do discover, on some stage, that the expertise of utilizing the cellphone is not fairly as easy and easy as you may anticipate.
Google’s dug itself into an unlucky gap with this, but it surely is not too late. All it’d take to vary course is a dedication to consistency inside its personal ranks after which an identical communication to the remainder of the ecosystem — the identical means the corporate did again in 2012, when the Holo commonplace emerged, and once more in 2014, when Materials Design arrived and pushed Android towards a newfound stage of polish and cohesiveness.
As Google design guru and Materials Design mastermind Matias Duarte mentioned at the moment: “There’s nothing worse than the physics of a world being inconsistent, as a result of it means you are continually studying — continually a baby and continually studying as a result of all the pieces is new and a shock and it is inconsistent, and you may by no means cool down into being environment friendly and optimizing.”
Materials Design, he went on to say, was “all within the service of making a system that is optimized for serving to your mind do as little work as potential.”
That straightforward, foundational technique is exactly what’s been misplaced over time. However with a bit of dedication and a variety of recommitment, good golly, Google can get it again. The one query is that if it really needs to make that occur.
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