Per qualche ragione, Google insiste nel voler utilizzare Material Design — il linguaggio visivo e guida creata da Google su come realizzare un’UI per Android — anche su iOS. Il risultato è spiacevole: non seguendo le convenzioni di iOS, non utilizzando San Francisco come font, non rispettando lo stile di default dei bottoni e mettendo ombre un po’ ovunque, quando si apre un’app di Google si viene catapultati in un mondo a parte, che stona con il contesto e semplicemente rompe i pattern visivi che gli utenti hanno imparato altrove.
Jason Snell ricorda che anche Microsoft, a un certo punto, ebbe un approccio simile. Word su Macintosh iniziò a funzionare come Word su Windows, a discapito dell’usabilità:
While Microsoft was busy building its Windows empire, from the very beginning it had been a good citizen on the Mac. Word and Excel had been with the Mac since the beginning. Excel was born on the Mac. I would wager that Word and Excel were the two most popular third-party programs on the Mac back in those days.
Then came 1993, and something funny happened: Microsoft released new versions of Microsoft Office for the Mac, all based on the Windows code base. The familiar Mac versions of Microsoft’s apps vanished, replaced by programs that didn’t behave like Mac apps at all. They were very clearly members of the Office for Windows suite, ported over to the Mac.
Why did Microsoft do it? To this day I can’t decide if they were so high on the greatness of Windows that they imagined Mac users would take to the new Office like a glass of ice water in hell, or if they just cared so little for the Mac that it was no longer worth creating apps specifically for the Mac.
