Last year, Google Maps on Android was revamped so that the main view displayed info using sheets, and the full app is getting this redesign.

Last year, Google Maps on Android was revamped so that the main view displayed info using sheets, and the full app is getting this redesign.

  • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
    3·
    3 months ago

    I have to say that the UI designers at Google are smoking crack and their designs are becoming less usable by the day.

    Here’s some, on standard Android:

    • Icons are now all the same shape, using similar colours, causing you to tap the wrong one more often.
    • Google Home is now a confusing mixture of pop-ups, tabs, drop-downs and general weirdness, making something I use a hundred times a day (to control my house) a bad experience.
    • Tap holding a message in Gmail to select it now moves the list to make space, but only in “All” view.
    • Maps are taking up less and less space on the screen, making it harder and harder to see context and relationships between locations.
    • Maps are now unusable in broad daylight because colour contrasts are now almost non-existent.

    That’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s an abomination and getting worse.

    • extremeboredom@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Abandon Google. I’ve been slowly extricating myself and it feels wonderful. Soon I will have an entirely degoogled phone.

    • Carighan Maconar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 months ago

      Icons are now all the same shape, using similar colours, causing you to tap the wrong one more often.

      This is really the wildest thing to me, as its the equivalent of gaming graphics being optimized for screenshots to active gameplay before Youtube-videos for ~everything became too normal to keep that up.

      Yeah sure auto-recoloring icons with all the same background look neat. In screenshots!

      • Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radioEnglish
        1·
        3 months ago

        As a software developer I’ve been dealing with UX design since the Apple Human Interface Guidelines hit the technical bookstores in the 1980’s and it’s staggering just how little any of this seems to matter today.

        Most of the UX designers I’ve met are consummate graphic artists and designers, very few have any clue about what makes a user interface or understand that you can by definition not make the web pixel perfect or understand the nature of information absorption and screen clutter.

        Right now on the screen I’m tapping this I can see 10 lines of text, and that’s counting paragraph breaks as a line. It’s ridiculous.

        Screenshot of the mobile phone display I'm typing this on.