UI Wars - Greens for Apples or Robots...??
So there’s a raging war being waged for a few years now among the grounds of UI Design that broke UX in two major sides with a few misfits scattered around the battle field.
With the goal of differentiation, distinctive styles and iconography have been applied to buttons, input controls, and even the navigation flows when developing apps... impacting significantly the experiences users have when interacting with both platforms.
A few examples to entertain for my own solo assignment for this week are included in the following comparative analysis:
In-between Screens and In-App Navigation Patterns
iOS: Tab navigation bar at the bottom of the screen, swiping to the left to go back, back button in the top left corner,
Android: Tab navigation bar at the top of the screen, standard navigation bar at the bottom, hamburger menu (drawer) for secondary flows, swiping for navigation between tabs
Button Styles
Both iOS and Android environments have specific standards in regard to the way they use buttons as call to action elements, applying to dimensions, colours, text labels, appearance, etc. Android in particular uses a floating button as a main call to action element.
Typography
Android and iOS have both specific standards for displaying test according to hierarchy.
Iconography & Input Controls
iOS: Toggle switches, checked marks, tabs menu. settings button, labels under icons.
Android: Checkboxes, radio buttons,
Micro Interactions
Android: Bottom sheets with options lists
iOS: Bottom sheets with icons and apps
I’m a well discerned Apple boy, so I’m not entirely impartial... I went through an inadequate Blackberry phase and subsequently migrated to Android with my first full touch-screen smartphone before getting my first iPhone. I always felt like a stranger with Android even though I’d never had an apple mobile device of my own to compare performances, usability and visual design... but I must say that once I got adapted to the iOS flow, it was like seeing colours for the first time.
Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more similar UI’s that aim for no differentiation in the designs at all when building apps for both platforms, and it seems that Android’s progressive migration towards iOS standards clearly favor the “Rule of Thumb” as a more natural and practical approach.
My take will always stack against working double shifts... It’s just not productive, and in times where the online virtual universe gravitates towards standardization and normalization, human interaction should be the main focus and not differentiation as this is about user-centred Design, meaning it should be about performance and not branding communications.
Cheers for the sour apples lovers as I believe this waging’s victory is sour apple green, greener than Android, and certainly Dollars green friendly.
PS: I didn’t appreciate Andrew Ow’s comparison of UI standards among platforms with Martial Arts styles... That’s a very specific opportunity to, on the contrary, appreciate differentiation and recognise that a punch is not just a punch.
