| Design should lose its seat at the table if it keeps chasing fads without thinking. Here's my latest pet peeve... Remember when the Android Gmail client first got the feature where you would drag the inbox or any list view down as if you were trying to scroll past the top of the page, and it would put a little colorful horizontal animation bar at the top of the screen while it checked for new messages, and then the messages would show up there? This was brilliant. After all, when a list of messages is sorted with the newest on top, if you want to see an even newer message you'll naturally try to look at what's above the topmost message. There's no real difference between scrolling somewhere in the midst of the list and scrolling when you're already at the top: if you drag the list down, you want to see something newer than what is currently displayed. Then Material Design came along and turned that unobtrusive animated bar at the top into a circle thing that follows you and spins as you drag down and then spins back when you let go. Unlike the animation bar which was displayed exactly where any new messages would appear, the circle jumps up and down saying "Look at me! Look at me!" In fact, the spinning circle obstructs your view of the messages in the list: "Don't look at those messages! I, the spinning circle, am much more important!" A far cry from the previous unobtrusive animated bar. But even though the visual appearance became annoying, at least the gesture still did the right thing. Part of what made this gesture work is the fact that it's non-destructive: Checking for new messages has no effect on the messages already in the list on your screen. But then things went very wrong. The Chrome team for Android saw this and said, "Wow! Dragging down is the new way to refresh. And it has such a cool animation. We'll make that gesture refresh in Chrome too!" So try to scroll to the top of a page and you'll get the spinning circle unless you stop just in time. If you're a very fast thinker, you may see the circle and realize you can cancel that pending reload by dragging back up a bit. (Don't let go!) This is pure stupidity. Reloading a web page is a destructive operation. You may end up with a whole new version of a dynamically generated page. It may blank out the entire page if it can't connect. This doesn't in any way resemble the nondestructive act of checking for new messages at the top of a Gmail list. It's something you're very likely to do by mistake - I've done it hundreds of times since this change rolled out. Refreshing a web page should be something you explicitly request, not something that happens to you when you were just trying to scroll to the top of the page and accidentally dragged a little too far. This chasing of fads is why I am fed up with Design. |