the alpha mini-newswire

“The menu button was a source of frustration for users,” Duarte says. “You never knew if there was going to be any functionality hiding behind that button or not.” While doing baseline user research, the Android team discovered that many users felt dumb using the system because they couldn’t figure out how to access all its features. “We went through and eliminated all the hidden affordances [controls], places in the system where it wasn’t clear what you had to do, or where somebody would have to teach you, or where you’d have to just try it [to figure out what it did],” Duarte says. To reduce the learning curve, all essential actions in each application are right up on the surface screen. “That makes everything much more discoverable and much faster.”

(Emphasis mine.) Remind you of anything? That’s right - this is the same motivation that Apple had in shipping one-button mice by default. Force developers to really think about UX, instead of just cramming everything into the context menu.