> When we added pull to refresh to our app there weren’t many apps using this technique and it added a premium feel to our app.
This makes me want to vomit. I can't wait until implementing flashy UI is so trivial and common that shallow things like this don't actually affect an application's perceived value. I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is.
Seriously though, you contest the idea that an interface with interactions which hide complexity and have been shown to be pretty intuitive could be decisive in how users value a product?
No, I agree that in the current mobile app world UI flourishes really do make a difference in how users perceive an application. I'm hopeful for the day when such flourishes are so common that they are no longer perceived as valuable and we can get back to working on things that matter.
This isn't just a cosmetic thing; it makes it substantially easier to perform an operation (in this case refreshing) and to see the status of that operation.
Don't bet on UX enhancements ever going away, by the way; people come up with new things all the time. Pull-to-refresh didn't come from any platform vendor; it came from a third party Twitter client.
I'm using MOAI. Implementing flashy UI's is so trivial, its not even funny. What I'm finding though, is that its very much better to keep things simple, and well .. for my clients at least, its working.
Pull to refresh isn't flashy, shallow or trivial, and it shouldn't bring on emesis: It is a simple, convenient user interaction that saves putting a big refresh button or the like.
This makes me want to vomit. I can't wait until implementing flashy UI is so trivial and common that shallow things like this don't actually affect an application's perceived value. I don't remember the transition to GUI in the 80s as being as shallow as the mobile app market is.