[imissmyjuno]

The article's point still stands though: sticking to a platform's design == jarring user experience.

Not to say that I agree that it's necessarily bad: his example of Word on Mac vs. Windows is actually interesting bc, given sufficient differences, users would have a hard time switching between the two if they own both platforms and the applications look completely different. I think it should be possible to retain certain UI paradigms (e.g. back buttons, toolbars) while staying uniform across all platforms in other respects.

[TheAnimus]

Which is true enough. Maybe they should look at iTunes on Windows for a good example of why it's horrible to ignore the host UI designs.

Or maybe QuickTime.

[dsyko]

They could look at iTunes on any operating system for examples of horrible UI design.

[danudey]

The whole 'app consistency' vs. 'platform consistency' ignores that most users (probably very close to 'all users') change back and forth between apps on a given platform far more than they change between platforms for a given app. I use Google Inbox, and I switch between that and iOS Mail, Tweetbot, FB Messenger, etc. extremely often. I can't imagine a circumstance where I would have an Android device and switch back and forth between Google Inbox on iOS and Google Inbox on Android more frequently than switching between apps on iOS.

Switching to Google Inbox to read an e-mail and then not being able to swipe back, like you can in basically every other iOS app, is jarring and ridiculous. There's no reason for it, other than arrogance. They could keep 'material design' and still make it feel like an iOS app, but they don't bother. Likewise, they seem to have reimplemented text input and text fields, and done so extremely badly, for no reason that I can tell, causing significant problems with selecting text or using third-party keyboards.

If you're switching from Windows to Mac (or Android to iOS) and back frequently, then you're going to be frequently switching UI paradigms, but you'll be dealing with consistency in a given context. You use iOS for a bit and everything behaves one way, then you pick up an Android device and everything works another way.

When you pick up an iOS device and all your paradigms change, except for this one app where they change back and nothing you're used to works, that's more jarring than switching to iOS and having Google Inbox behave like an iOS app, the way every other app on that device works.

In other words, it's not even about material design; it's about fundamental interaction with the app and breaking all of the user's expectations and habits, for no real gain other than, maybe, developer time.

[Zombieball]

Is it a jarring experience though? I imagine many Google product users use more than just one app, be it Gmail on iOS and the web browser, or docs, etc. Material design creates a consistent experience across devices and platforms for Google apps.

I think the result is not jarring but a feeling of familiarity.

[MBCook]

It's jarring, because basically EVERY OTHER iOS APP behaves similarly.

If you spend all your time on Android and the Web, an for some reason occasionally use a Google app on an iPhone it may feel familiar to you.

But if you have an iPhone chances are you spend a lot of time using other iOS apps (including the system ones) and are used to that design language.

It's nice that it's consistent with other Google products, the problem is that's the wrong thing to do on iOS because it feels so out of place. You can still use your colors and many of your other schemes, but basic platform conventions like share buttons and menu locations should be respected.

[lumberingjack]

>but basic platform conventions like share buttons and menu locations should be respected.

most iOS users I know don't use share buttons anyway. I always get a stupid screen shoot of a web page with a url

[MBCook]

I use the share screen quite a bit, but I also recognize that it sucks. Hopefully they'll fix it.

I imagine part of the problem is they added it 5+ years into the platform when most people already had a way of doing things, even if it was sub-par, and they haven't been able to convince people to use it much.

[ajoy39]

but if you're a google docs user isn't it safe to assume you probably use it on more than one device, and google docs looking and working the same across devices is more important than the individual docs iOS app looking like all your other iOS apps?

[MBCook]

Answered here (since you posted a similar comment):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11786857

[emodendroket]

I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one and they probably should have hewed more closely to the Windows look and feel. It's like emacs -- how many people choose to use Aquamacs or something instead of just the traditional one?

[dpark]

> I've always felt like people who were buying Office for Mac probably cared more about having a consistent experience than having a Mac-like one

Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

That could be true for some customers. It's certainly not true for all customers. It's probably also not a given that even someone very familiar with Office for Windows would want Office for Mac to act like that, instead of like a Mac app.

[Aldo_MX]

> Why would you assume that someone buying Office for Mac is more familiar with Office for Windows than the Mac they own that they want to run Office on?

Because Windows had like 90% of the market share?

[dpark]

That's the 90% that didn't buy a Mac. Why does the 10% want a Windows-feeling app when they didn't buy a Windows device?

[emodendroket]

Well it was certainly true of me and I think it's true of a lot of people who want to buy Office because it's what they use at work and are familiar with. I think if you cared more about a Mac-like experience you'd buy Pages and such (although it is not as feature-rich, to be fair).

[dpark]

As AdrianN pointed out, the primary use case for Office for Mac is interoperability. If you don't care about interoperability, you probably would buy Pages. Or just use Google Docs. You buy Office for Mac because that's the format your office uses, or your professor expects, or whatever. You probably don't buy Office for Mac out of some longing for a Windows interface.

If "familiarity because I use it at work" is the primary criterion, you'd probably have bought a PC.

[emodendroket]

I basically think of it like something like emacs, where it doesn't conform to the OS at all but instead works exactly the same throughout different platforms (and users who are intimately familiar with it expect that). The interop in Office for Mac was also just about as lousy as Pages for a long time although I think more recent versions may have improved it.

[dpark]

I don't think the two are comparable. Emacs is a bizarre beast that fits no common UI paradigm/design language/whatever. It has its own shortcut system, its own undo/redo behavior, its buffer concept, etc. Everything about it is EMACS. If you use Emacs, it's specifically because you want to use Emacs and all it's uniqueness. It's consequently a love-it-or-hate it tool, and it's extremely niche relative to Word, or I bet even gedit.

Office, on the other hand, you probably use because you need to create Office-formatted docs. Very few people are likely buying Office because they long for the Office interface. Office doesn't even have a consistent interface paradigm. They've reinvented it repeatedly, culminating in the Ribbon UI. But at the end of the day, Office's interface is a Windows interface. They've done their own thing, but it's still clearly Windows, and shoehorning that interface onto a Mac feels out of place in a way it doesn't on Windows.

I can't comment on interop. It's been a while since I used Office for Mac. I don't recall any notable interop issues, but I mostly used the mail client (Entourage, later Outlook). I used Word sometimes but wasn't exactly writing for publication.

[adrianN]

In my experience, the people buying Office for mac care most about seamless interoperating with all the people who insist on using Office to for all their business needs.

[emodendroket]

And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

Anyway, at least in 2011 it failed in that metric too, because documents would look quite different on the Mac version than on the Windows version in many cases.

What I really wanted, at the time, was the exact same experience on both platforms, from feature set, to way of use, to the look of documents rendered, and since it didn't really deliver that I was disappointed.

[dpark]

> And you don't think a consistent interface is part of that seamlessness?

No, not at all. I don't care that my UI is consistent with yours. I care that you can open the doc I sent you.

[danielweber]

It's also a jarring experience if I switch from using Google Maps on Android to using Google Maps on iOS and it's totally different. Granted this is less common.