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Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't *ing no
by lnanek2 14y ago
Honestly, Android's newer holo theming suffers the same exact problems. I've watched countless users and received support emails where people just don't *ing notice/try/use the action items in the new action bar pattern we're all supposed to be using. This pattern has us place very sparsely decorated icons in the top bar, generally without even text. Tons of users completely miss them vs. big, chrome, 3D styled, pushable-looking buttons on the bottom of an app.
Even worse, the icons aren't supposed to have text and users are supposed to know to long press on them to find out what exactly they do. I've never in my life seen a user do that. I emailed a Google Dev Advocate about all this, asking if they actually had statistics and user studies to back up this new direction they are taking the UI, if it actually helped users in the metrics or was just designers trying to make things look pretty without actually helping. No answer.
- drivebyacct2 14y agoIn that case, I'll start thanking God everytime I open my phone that Duarte gets his say and not idiot users.
- RivieraKid 14y ago100% agree with the icons without labels. Do you have an idea how to solve this?
- king_jester 14y agoYou can provide labels with action bar action items inline instead of just relying on a long press to get a popup hint by using android:showAsAction="ifRoom|withText" on any menu item in the menu XML. You can also do this programmatically. The big downside to this is that one phone devices you basically will only be able to show 1 action item with an overflow menu since you'll run out of space with just the first action item. The best work around is to make actions very obvious based on the icon used for the action item. You could also consider moving non-obvious UI behaviors into the main content of the page where there is more room for labeling.