Consistency and Predictability Disappearing Confusion of Android App Menus, How Can I Improve?

In the early days, so far from now, around 2010, Android was close to a set of promising, but unstructured, fragmentary efforts. It was new, full of strength and potential, and it was really interesting. However, since there was no central point of being a de facto standard, it was a confusing impression that the interface style and design pattern collided.

“Android is inconsistent. There is no connectivity. The fact that there is no elegant user experience” was a frequent criticism of early Apple preferred users.

And in many ways this criticism was right. Android offered a number of features from the outset, especially over Apple's closed, tightly controlled approach at the time, with some interesting advantages. But design and interface consistency were clearly not their strengths. Anyone who says not is either mistaken or forgot exactly what the experience with early Android devices like Gingerbread was. It was powerful, but not sophisticated. 

All of this began to change in 2012 when Google emphasized the first official interface for Android and design guidelines known as Holo. At the time, Google said, “Using a system theme means that developers can take advantage of users' existing expectations. With guidelines across platforms, developers can design apps with a single, predictable look and feel.” 

This made a huge difference. The existence of the design guidelines provided a consistent look and feel not only for Android itself but also for related apps. As a result, the platform has grown much more, yet has gained the necessary cohesion, and it has become much easier to know what to expect as a user. Even when users aren't actively thinking, they can see that certain functions always work in a certain way in a certain location, making it easy and natural to use the smartphone all the time without constant intention or effort. Before the design guidelines, Android and related apps were like a desolate frontier, but after that, the way of using the platform was completely changed as a sense of unity added. 

Google didn't stop there. Two years later, the material design standard was released, further expanding the integration. There have been so many advances. Nevertheless, almost 7 years later, the Android platform feels like it's going back in the opposite direction.

Even now, Android has a standard where the concept of material design has evolved, but the consistency, which was the original goal of the standard, seems to disappear every month. And the experience of using an Android device is a pity, but it is disappearing with it. 

Android and the decline of design standards

A design standard, as its name implies, establishes the standard and all the important characteristics of its accompanying consistency, coherence, and integration. But with Android today, you hardly know what to expect when moving between apps or processes. 

For example, take a look at the system-level share menu. The share menu is a key element of the Android experience and one of the operating system's oldest strengths. To help you understand, this is an option that appears when you tap a command and share something between apps. For example, sharing an article via email from a browser or sharing an image from a photo to a cloud storage service.  

When you tap on these basic system-level commands, you need to know exactly what to expect. The follow-up should only be remembered by the movements of the muscles. However, while Android has a system-level standard (a significant improvement over previous Android versions), the menu that appears when you hit the share command in an app is completely unpredictable. 

The reason is actually very simple. This is because most apps develop their own shared menus instead of sticking to the standard system interface. They usually provide the same functionality as the system standard, but the interfaces are completely different and are often arbitrarily reconfigured. This includes numerous popular third-party apps such as Pocket and Firefox. And the most surprising thing is that this trend is increasing even in apps made by Google. Chrome, Google News, Google Maps, Photos, YouTube, and YouTube Music also develop different interfaces.

Here is the actual system sharing menu on Android:

This menu displays a specific suggested sharing target in the top row, and below it creates a row of favorite apps to share. You can then see a scrolling list of all other sharing targets available on the device. This is a very useful feature. But if you want to share something in Firefox, you can see a screen like this instead of the standard menu:

Another screen opens in Pocket.

Google's own Chrome browser (the default built-in browser for Android) looks like this:

What's even more annoying is that you can use the standard system-sharing menu in an unsophisticated alternative browser, and you often need a standard menu. This is because the non-standard custom menu contains only some of the things that can be shared on the smartphone. To see it all, you need to scroll horizontally from the middle line of the menu all the way to the right, then tap the ``More'' option at the very end. It seems difficult to make it less intuitive or convenient than this.

To make matters worse, confusing menus that scroll horizontally are almost standard in some Google apps. The same goes for sharing something on Google News, as in the following image.

The sharing screen of the Photos app looks like this:

YouTube and YouTube Music use their own sharing interface and are completely different standards.

Now, interfaces have a clear purpose and reason for existence. For example, the Photos app includes app-specific options for sharing images within the service in addition to general external targets. In the case of interfaces of other apps such as YouTube and YouTube Music, it seems that there is no clear purpose other than just differentiation. And in either case, ultimately, regardless of the reason for existence, they do the same thing. Confusion and inconsistency occur, and Android's refinement, coherence, and convenience are undermined. 

This regression is not limited to the sharing menu. Between Android apps and even within Google's own apps, you can see basic system elements such as the default app menu and set of settings are arranged clutteredly. Sometimes, you need to find settings in the tab of the three-line menu icon in the top left corner of the app. In other cases, tap the three-dot menu icon in the top-right corner of the app to find the settings. Or tap your profile picture in the top-right corner to find a hidden menu with settings and other important options. 

The problem gets bigger there. Even in the profile picture menu settings, the style, design, and purpose of the interface differ greatly for each Google app. For example, in Gmail, Documents, and Drive, a three-line menu icon is responsible for setting, so a simple profile icon is only responsible for account switching. It looks like the following screenshot.

The Maps app has a similar interface, but the configuration that the profile icon is responsible for is completely different, such as the account switching settings options, links to app settings, and many other top-level commands. 

On the other hand, YouTube has a similar kind of setup, but a different design. There are fewer overlay cards and more separate area menus for the entire screen. 

When it comes to menus, Google has been implementing clear and prudent guidelines for years that prevent the use of the bottom bar menu within the app, before starting to freely use these elements in its own apps and actively encourage its use in other apps as well. However, the actual result is not the notion of a standard change, but a lack of standards and confusion about what kind of patterns are encountered in Google's own apps and other apps.

Again, this leads to the main inconsistency and unpredictability of effective and efficient interface design.

Looking more broadly

Now let's step back for a while and ask ourselves. Are you taking a minor problem seriously? Some may say yes. After all, it is undeniable that most users who are not familiar with general technology cannot consciously think about or notice UI design. 

Any professional designer will admit it, but it's also true that people, even implicitly, notice when certain apps or experiences are more effective than others. And this is the right way. Good design is about creating an interface that is easy and fun to use, and it is not something that users consciously think about. According to a commonly quoted adage, "A good user interface design helps you get the job done at hand without getting unnecessary attention."

What you see on Android right now is exactly the opposite, from the lack of consistency and standards compliance of shared menus to different approaches to menu placement and default command location. Even if you don't clearly think that "the location of this feature wasn't what you expected" or "I had to search here and there to find the settings I needed", you might notice that it's not so intuitive. You notice that you are making things more difficult to accomplish that you can easily achieve. And to some extent, you can see that the Android phone experience isn't as smooth and simple as expected. 

Google has pushed itself to a corner with a regression of consistent design standards, but it's not too late. What is needed is to be consistent within its own class and to coordinate communication with the rest of the ecosystem. In the same way as when Google launched the Holo Standard in 2012 and Material Design again in 2014, taking Android to a new level of sophistication and cohesion.

“There's nothing worse than the physics of an inconsistent world,” said Matthias Duarte, Google's design expert and head of material design. Because it means you are constantly learning. "Because everything is new, amazing and inconsistent, like a child who has to keep learning, it can never be secured to optimize efficiently." 

"Material design has all contributed to creating a system that is optimized for the user's brain to work as little as possible," he added. 

This simple, rudimentary strategy has disappeared over the years and has not been found. But with a little dedication and a lot of restandardization, Google can regain consistency. The only question will be whether Google really wants to implement this strategy.