The back button concept is good and bad. I find it hard to know (a) exactly what will happen when I press it in all situations and thus (b) exactly when to use it to get what I want to happen, to happen. So I end up pressing it when I shouldn't, and not pressing it when I should. Grn.

Nice how Chrome puts the same bookmark into the bookmarks as many times as I bookmark it. No kind of nuance to the ux what-so-evar.

"building such functionality into the program strikes us as a misguided effort that is likely to confuse the user."

i made this. and, er, this.

(well, i mean, somebody else made the site that let me make that. and somebody before them drew the comic. but, ya know...)

Somehow I think most of those words don't mean what they think they mean, or that there are apparently at least 2 different universes of connotations for them. And that in order to clean the Cat in the Hat ring around the tub, they are throwing the baby out a the same time. Just because there are (yes, truly, honestly, horribly, evilly) bad static type disciplines doesn't mean the best answer is to jettison static type checking entirely. If you ask me. Which you didn't. But I told you anyway. So there.

I wanted to vent and write a post about issues in Android L's UX around phone numbers (among other things) but then I sort of realized how to sum it up: There are a lot of user interfaces these days -- not solely picking on Android, believe me / all too unfortunately -- where the nuance is in all the wrong places. There is tricky stuff like animation or customized 'non-standard' look and feel all over the place, but the end result is to actively make the user experience worse.

Consider the volume controls. They are a train wreck on all devices. But one thing in particular will serve as a case in point for what I'm trying to get at: When I'm on speakerphone, the volume apparently cannot go down to zero. But there's no visible indication of that restriction in the volume bar UI. Also missing is any way for me to know how close I am to the button press that would actually mute, were I allowed to mute.

So there are 2 subtle things that could be nuances incorporated into the UI, and thus the whole UX, around this that are completely and utterly missing. Instead I guess people spent their time worrying about animations zooming around, I dunno. (The one thing I can never, ever, at all, remotely fathom about all these things: did they literally never ever use the thing themselves? Completely mind boggling. (In certain cases I am pretty sure they literally do not, e.g. the work-outsourced 401k vendor web site oh lord the blood the blood!))

I would like to make a modest proposal: If you are going to ship a demo/tutorial/sample/example app for somebody to use in order to start learning how to make use of some new, unfamiliar, and (at least under the covers) pretty complicated thing, it would be best to make sure that the very first and only thing the app did was to only put up a dialog box saying, "Unknown Error" and nothing else other than an "OK" button.