Android’s Head Of UX Matias Duarte Makes Fun Of iOS And Windows Phone UX ! !
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I know many of you won’t believe the title but yes, It is true. He did that in a interview with Joshua Topolsky of This is My Next. Its a long interview about Android UX story, I just took an excerpt from the interview on which he discusses Windows Phone and iOS. He compared iOS and Windows Phone’s Metro UI as faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend. I can’t stop laughing after reading his comments today morning. I just want to know what would he then call his own Android UX so far ?? I don’t want to comment on his views since I’m not a expert UX designer like him.
“Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously,” Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. “There’s this thing that’s happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend.” He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and… airport lavatory signage. It’s an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.
“The biggest problem behind these trends is not anything about the aesthetic quality about them, but rather the framework that they impose on everything else,” he opines. “Right now if you look at all of these applications that are designed in this real-objecty, faux wood paneling, faux brushed metal, faux jelly button kind of thing… if you step back and you really look at them, they look kind of juvenile. They’re not photorealistic, they’re illustrations.”
He’s on a roll now. Clearly Matias has spent a lot of time thinking about what he doesn’t like. “If you look back at the web, people did the same thing. All these cartoony things hanging off a page. If you tried that today, people would be laughing, unless you were doing it in a kitsch, poking-fun-at-yourself, retro art way.”
But what about Microsoft and their “authentically digital” design? “The problem with going too starkly systematic, forcing everything into this completely constrained, modernist palette, for both of them, you’re not leaving any room for the content to express itself.”
