Android, the people platform
Originally posted on August 12, 2010
I now am in possession of two phones. I place them in either side pockets of my jeans which leaves my keys to go in the back. Admittedly its a bit uncomfortable and asinine, but such sacrifices must be made for ‘usability studies’. They take up all the room in my pockets, and, as a friend reminded me, are giving an equal amount of radiation to my hanging fruit.
After one week of having both, I can say with absolute certainty that there will be an ongoing coexistence between the iOS and Android platforms. They both have their faults, however what they do well they really exceed in.
The ‘HTC Sense’ UI is amazingly easy to navigate through once you spend some time with it. However, notice I said ‘spend time with it’. The iPhone on the other hand is intuitive from the start -you just can’t beat the ‘one button to rule them all’ feature. I admit that when switching between the two devices, an act which in public makes you look like a total douche, I find myself reminding myself to press the back button on the Evo 4G.
Amidst usability differences, I’ve found that camps have formed around each platform not so dissimilar to that of Mac and Unix/PC users. I suppose this is natural being that each platform has been independently created by Mac and PC/Unix developers, however its the alarming adoption rate of both which has been unrivaled in any device for a while.
I find it interesting how the news reports on how much larger the adoption rate of the Android platform is opposed to iOS given that the iOS is limited to Apple devices and because of this, can’t possibly compete when it comes to the open-environment Android provides to any manufacturer. I’m not an economist, but I feel that this ‘fact’ falls under the ‘duh’ category.
Being a designer, what I am interested is in how each platform goes about usability. How do you get from one application to another? How to switch between them? What is the buying experience like?
The iPhone definitely has the upper hand when it comes to how to input queries and get desired outputs. However the Android, especially when interacting with the ‘Sense’ UI is coming very close and that says a lot for it.
The reason for this is because Apple has had control of the market for nearly five years. In such time, it has successfully ‘defined’ gestural navigation, making it so any divergence is perceived as being unintuitive. Apple deserves all their accolades for making a device that even a grandma can use (believe me, I’ve seen a few). And that is a huge accomplishment. Being first, and being smart about it has its rewards.
On the other hand, the fact that the three-year old Droid is compared, and in some cases seen as superior to the iPhone, means a lot more. There have been plenty of companies which have tried to compete with Apple in the past and failed, such as Microsoft’s Zune (and various other Microsoft products). Google’s Android is not one of them. I can’t stress enough how important it is to consider its time to market vs. Apple’s two year lead start. In tech-years this is an insane accomplishment. Sure there are a lot of things that could be better, but the fact that Android is an open platform means that it isn’t anchored to any ‘bad ideas’. For instance don’t like the way you input text? Then download Swype. Don’t like the experience of the default Android UI? Create a better one like what HTC has done with Sense.
The Android platform allows for more experimentation not only for developers, but also visual designers. Sure, there will be mistakes made along the way, but we’ll learn from them as a collective and not behind the locked doors of 1 Infinite Loop.
