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As a mobile developer, the main pain point with collaborating with a designers over the years has been their complete lack of knowledge when it comes to norms o

As a mobile developer, the main pain point with collaborating with a designers over the years has been their complete lack of knowledge when it comes to norms on Android. All have been exclusively iOS users, with no feel for how the two platforms differ, and I have had to take it up on my self to translate and adjust the designs given to me so that they follow norms and practices on Android.

kubik369 4y ago
Are you in the US? I seem to be having the same problem, but in reverse - Android-isms in iOS; I am in central EU, designers/client are from Ireland. It appears to me that they also do not differentiate between screens and modals and just pick at random which flow will be which. I am not faulting them for that, as Apple has gone pretty wild with modals lately too, but still, at least some consistency would be nice.
- corrral 4y ago
  My last experience in mobile dev was that everyone wanted everything to look like Material UI everywhere, because that's what was trendy on the Web. And that even Android had, bizarrely, pretty poor support for Material compared with the Web, so it ended up being a huge pain on both mobile platforms. I guess it's like how you used to have to call out to JavaScript on Android to get a decent Google Maps address & location library because the Web versions were better than the native Android one, which made no damn sense but seems to be part of a pattern with Google of treating their own mobile OS as a second class citizen compared to the Web.
jamil7 4y ago
You're lucky, some I've worked with seem oblivious to mobile platform conventions altogether. Is it that hard to sit down and spend some time reading the HIG?
JamesSwift 4y ago
Yeah for mobile it was always: - "Just do the same as iOS" when asking about Android - Hardcoded assumptions about layout size (less an issue now since iOS is more fragmented than before) - Not handing edge cases, especially long string lengths - Way overusing opacity (or blur before apple gave tools for it) which tanked performance for an absolutely minimal visual flourish - Terrible tap targets
- david_allison 4y ago
  > Terrible tap targets See if you can get your designers/developers to install Google's Accessibility Scanner[0]. It brings tap targets and accessibility to the front of their minds when working. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.accessibility.auditor https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
kitsunesoba 4y ago
I would take this further to say that as an engineer, my most frequent issue with designers is lack of technical understanding in general. As you've noted, platform norms are often overlooked, but so is what's feasible to implement on the platform in question. Generally, the further a design strays from native UI elements the more difficult it's going to be to implement in a way that covers edge cases well and is accessibility-friendly. Sure I can bodge something that looks like the mockup but it's not going to feel half as nice to use in practice because it required me to write a lot more bespoke widget code, and there are considerations that went into the stock widgets that the designer probably isn't taking into account. In these situations a little bit of leeway to bend designs to be closer to the OS baseline help quite a lot (e.g. do you really need that custom typeface which isn't built for use in UIs? Probably not), and so I greatly value designers who have the skill to build around what's already there instead of trying to replace it outright. That kind of design work isn't as sexy but it's far more practical.

kubik369 4y ago

Are you in the US? I seem to be having the same problem, but in reverse - Android-isms in iOS; I am in central EU, designers/client are from Ireland. It appears to me that they also do not differentiate between screens and modals and just pick at random which flow will be which. I am not faulting them for that, as Apple has gone pretty wild with modals lately too, but still, at least some consistency would be nice.

corrral 4y ago
My last experience in mobile dev was that everyone wanted everything to look like Material UI everywhere, because that's what was trendy on the Web. And that even Android had, bizarrely, pretty poor support for Material compared with the Web, so it ended up being a huge pain on both mobile platforms. I guess it's like how you used to have to call out to JavaScript on Android to get a decent Google Maps address & location library because the Web versions were better than the native Android one, which made no damn sense but seems to be part of a pattern with Google of treating their own mobile OS as a second class citizen compared to the Web.

jamil7 4y ago

You're lucky, some I've worked with seem oblivious to mobile platform conventions altogether. Is it that hard to sit down and spend some time reading the HIG?

JamesSwift 4y ago

Yeah for mobile it was always: - "Just do the same as iOS" when asking about Android - Hardcoded assumptions about layout size (less an issue now since iOS is more fragmented than before) - Not handing edge cases, especially long string lengths - Way overusing opacity (or blur before apple gave tools for it) which tanked performance for an absolutely minimal visual flourish - Terrible tap targets

david_allison 4y ago
> Terrible tap targets See if you can get your designers/developers to install Google's Accessibility Scanner[0]. It brings tap targets and accessibility to the front of their minds when working. [0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.accessibility.auditor https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

kitsunesoba 4y ago

I would take this further to say that as an engineer, my most frequent issue with designers is lack of technical understanding in general. As you've noted, platform norms are often overlooked, but so is what's feasible to implement on the platform in question. Generally, the further a design strays from native UI elements the more difficult it's going to be to implement in a way that covers edge cases well and is accessibility-friendly. Sure I can bodge something that looks like the mockup but it's not going to feel half as nice to use in practice because it required me to write a lot more bespoke widget code, and there are considerations that went into the stock widgets that the designer probably isn't taking into account. In these situations a little bit of leeway to bend designs to be closer to the OS baseline help quite a lot (e.g. do you really need that custom typeface which isn't built for use in UIs? Probably not), and so I greatly value designers who have the skill to build around what's already there instead of trying to replace it outright. That kind of design work isn't as sexy but it's far more practical.