Note: I did an IxDA search for "G1" and found only 3 results, none of which really addressed the UI on an element level. I'm hoping a few folks have had a chance to play around with it by now!
I'm working on an existing application which suffers a bit from some inconsistencies in it's design. It was partially modeled after Google's existing apps at the time and made to be contextual to whatever page the user was on. I decided to take a closer look at the menus within Google's Maps, Browser, and Gmail apps and found that they exhibited some of the same inconsistencies. Overall, I've found 3 ways to initiate menus: - MENU hard key (pressing MENU button displays menu) - Touch overlay (touch the screen and menu appears) - "Page" menu (always present on the screen) There are a few different presentations of menus: - Entire page as a menu - Lightbox (some take control of the screen so you can't click anywhere else but the focused content, others allow you to click the screen to cancel out) - Menus that show up in different parts of the page (slides down from top, slides up from bottom, appears in the middle) And finally, multiple methods to exit the menu or command that's been initiated (aside from the Submit/Cancel-style dialog buttons): - Touch screen outside of menu (if space is available) - Press MENU hard key - Press BACK hard key (this option seems to work for just about every situation) I feel the number of combinations these provide make for a confusing experience since a user can't always be sure what to expect when he "clicks" something (with the exception of the BACK button--always takes me back to the previous page/app or exits out of a menu). I'm looking for some general thoughts and discussion on this aspect of the G1 UI. For example, have you found content for which there's a reason you would initiate or present a menu one way or another? Should there be a reserved menu for "global" navigation? My general feeling is to go the iPhone way and to simplify the experience, but maybe there are things I haven't considered that are specific to the G1. Thanks! ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... disc...@ixda.org Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
