> Relatively no one who walks into a store to buy a phone understands any of those words you just said.
> They just know they bought the most popular android phone and I guess this is what android is?
SifJar was talking to you, not the average person who walks into any store.
> Edit: By your definition you can't compare anything to android because android doesn't exist.
He didn't try to (re)define anything. To give you a clue, when someone talks about Android to me, I think about the Android Open Source Project, the OS managed by Google. It's essentially what the Nexus devices come with.
The problem with the study is that they claim to compare different operating systems, while more precisely, they are comparing different user experiences on different OSs. Big difference, I'm explaining it below, and they should know better.
In the case of Android, most OEMs do everything they can to differentiate their devices from other Android devices, and thus they offer a fundamentally different experience. They even give names to these experiences, e.g. TouchWiz or Sense. So the authors were actually comparing TouchWiz to other operating systems. This is evident by the fact that some of the features they felt were lacking are actually in Android trunk, and some of the features they found problematic are not.
Thus, I feel like the people who did this UX study didn't actually know what exactly they were studying, based on their choice of words (TouchWiz is not mentioned at all).
Exactly, I thought -- before reading the report -- that they're going to compare AOSP. The different skins OEMs put on their phones massively cripple the UX of AOSP, I think pretty much everyone agrees with this. So while it makes sense to include some of the more popular UIs, it's very short-sighted to equate those to Android. It would have been much more interesting if we could see what the OEMs start with, and how they make Android overly complicated and awful.
What? The text box expands as you type to fit the content. I would be very frustrated if it took up most of the screen space for no reason at all and I couldn't see the email I'm replying to.
2. Edit subject (when replying)
When you reply and edit the subject you're starting a new conversation. It's what the big "compose" button is for, except now your conversation starting email contains junk from other emails. I'm happy if this UI change discourages people from doing this.
3. Formatting (when replying)
First valid point, hiding this under a button makes no sense to those who use formatting. I'm just glad if I receive less HTML emails because of this change.
4. Adding cc and bcc (when replying)
Second somewhat valid point. Although I think it's still intuitive while keeping the UI uncluttered.
5. New email (compose)
You have several options to make the area larger. I love that I can look up other emails while composing a new one without the need to open a new window. In fact, I would like to see this while replying. The "feel there is no more space to write anything" is a ridiculous argument to hinder a useful feature.
edit: I would even make the point that if your emails are most often so long that they take up most of the screen you're doing communication wrong.
> They just know they bought the most popular android phone and I guess this is what android is?
SifJar was talking to you, not the average person who walks into any store.
> Edit: By your definition you can't compare anything to android because android doesn't exist.
He didn't try to (re)define anything. To give you a clue, when someone talks about Android to me, I think about the Android Open Source Project, the OS managed by Google. It's essentially what the Nexus devices come with.
The problem with the study is that they claim to compare different operating systems, while more precisely, they are comparing different user experiences on different OSs. Big difference, I'm explaining it below, and they should know better.
In the case of Android, most OEMs do everything they can to differentiate their devices from other Android devices, and thus they offer a fundamentally different experience. They even give names to these experiences, e.g. TouchWiz or Sense. So the authors were actually comparing TouchWiz to other operating systems. This is evident by the fact that some of the features they felt were lacking are actually in Android trunk, and some of the features they found problematic are not.
Thus, I feel like the people who did this UX study didn't actually know what exactly they were studying, based on their choice of words (TouchWiz is not mentioned at all).