[chrismorgan]

Ah, explanations that are treated as justifications without actually justifying anything.

“Vertical rhythm” in website layout. Utter nonsense. Valuable in print layout (for adjacent columns or double-sided paper), completely useless in digital (unless you have side-by-side columns with headings or pictures mixed in, but this is seldom seen outside print, partly because the web doesn’t support it well).

“Modular scales” in choosing font sizes. Typically worse than utter nonsense, because you want heading levels to be distinctive, and modular scales will harm this by forcing lower heading levels to be too small.

Force all your app icons into a rounded square or squircle or circle, because consistency. No! Now you can’t find anything easily. Android was so much better before that nonsense started.

Monochrome icons deliberately designed to look the same. Now they’re unmemorable. Colour was a useful signal.

(This comment is generic; I’m not saying anything about LiftKit here, for or against.)

[gmurphy]

I agree with your criticism of design dogma - it drives me nuts too - people saying something bad is good because it follows the rules. But since I'm also responsible for the Android icon shape-change you talked about, let me waffle for a bit in case it helps provide a perspective on the other side of that decision:

I agree with that the non-uniform icons are easier to find, and that uniform shapes make it harder (I also agree that uniform colors are awful, but that was after my time so I have no stake in that).

However, usability is not about pure efficiency - a huge amount of it is approachability - people have to _want_ to use the UI. If they don't want to use it, no amount of pure-usability work will mean anything - it will just be "shitty computers" in their heads. In Android's case, the developer-provided weirdly shaped icons were a major sticking point - people would take one look at an Android homescreen with all kinds of mismatched splatters of icons, mentally lump it with Windows and Linux in the must-be-for-geeks bucket, and walk off to the Apple store.

It drove us nuts - in actual tests, people would often find Android easier and more efficient to use, but would still pick iPhone as the "easier" product, because that's the one that was inviting, that fit their style, that looked easy to use.

So we did a lot of work nudging Android to a place where real people would find it desirable, easy, and powerful - making really difficult tradeoffs - sometimes breaking expectations, sometimes sacrificing a little bit here and there to gain a lot somewhere else, sometimes just taking a chance.

It took a lot of effort from a lot of wonderful people, and it involved a stupidly large amount of arguing against "just copy iPhone" laziness and pressure (a major reason I left), but I am still deeply proud of what the team was able to do. We couldn't please everyone, but I think more people were pleased afterwards than before.

[dbdoskey]

Thank you for sharing, this was very insightful.

Do you have another example of something like this that your team had to deal with that was not as easy, but "looked easier" for the users?

[pjmlp]

You only have to watch the WWDC videos from the designers regarding Liquid Glass, and appreciate how much "improved" the macOS with Tahoe experience feels like in practice.

Same applies to sessions on Fluent or Material designs, and how they end up on the respective OSes.

[gyomu]

The whole design rhetoric of the recent years is just so bad. It's all vague feel-words that are straight out of a marketing playbook and don't communicate anything concrete.

The Liquid Glass guidance is so emblematic of this. What in the slop is "providing a more dynamic and expressive user experience that elevates the content" even supposed to mean when we're talking about an app that shows a scrollview with a tab bar and a few buttons?

Reading the early 2010s HIGs is such a breath of fresh air in comparison, where it's just a succession of clear statements like "Controls should look tappable. iOS controls, such as buttons, pickers, and sliders, have contours and gradients that invite touches".

Just two entirely different schools of thought. One based on research, evidence, clear actionable items; the other is just pure vibes. Something of value's been truly lost along the way.

[amadeuspagel]

> unless you have side-by-side columns with headings or pictures mixed in, but this is seldom seen outside print, partly because the web doesn’t support it well

It does now.[1]

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/de/docs/Web/CSS/Guides/Grid_la...