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Saturday, December 13, 2014

Android Lollipop--Slouching the Way of Microsoft Updates?

My initial reaction to the Lollipop UI changes--eye-candy. Seems beautiful, flashy, but without enhancing usability and probably degrading it. Feels a little like some of Microsoft's efforts to freshen mature products--upsetting well-known UI conventions for sake of a cooler, more modern look.

For instance, I have lots of muscle memory for the CLEAR button top right on the notifications windowshade. But now it is at the bottom. And it doesn't say "CLEAR", it uses that weird "Dismiss" icon, that looks way too much like the stacked "hamburger" menu icon, except pushed sideways so it has the footprint of a parallelogram.

That alone would be bad, but the coup de grace is, if you have more than a screen's worth of notifications, you have to scroll down to get to the CLEAR icon. I think I get the logic behind that--you scroll down through all notifications, and then you are ready to CLEAR--but it still seems weird and less discoverable.

The bounciness of the windowshade, where if you keep scrolling down, until it bottoms out, and then causes the settings shortcuts to pull down, compressing the notifications, also is very weird and disorienting.

The rolodex-style recently-used app thumbnails from the multi-tasking button seems worse. You see a little more in the thumbnail, but I think you see fewer apps without scrolling, and scrolling is more disorienting than when every thumbnail had a fixed position.

These all seem like they would be super-cool things in a hobbyist ROM. Not the stock Android experience.

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