Thursday 12 January 2012

Official Android UI Design Guidelines Announced


Google has just announced Android Design guidelines. This is a huge step forwards for the platform! I urge everyone to head to the site at: developer.android.com/design

I think this is going affect my site too. There's no longer need to explain the patterns that Google covers but let's see where we are heading. One thing is sure though: Android as a platform has much brighter future now!

8 comments:

  1. It's a good effort but too little too late. Existing apps are not going to use these guidelines overnight and most of them never.
    And it is not like 99% of devices are not running ICS yet.

    It illustrates well the Google problem of ship it first, think (waaaaaay) later.

    By the time people apply (or not) these guidelines, UI paradigm will have shifted again.
    ActionBars will be verbotten as someone will have realized there's a better way, etc...

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  2. I don't agree with that statement other than I would loved to have seen this earlier.

    ICS was a major shift in the Android UI. This is a good timing to do this. Majority of Android apps on the market are ugly and have very poor usability. Companies and developers who want to stay relevant need to rethink their design strategy and in most cases do redesign to make their apps up to date. This is exactly when companies, designers and devs need these guidelines.

    I also don't believe there will be another majos shift in the UI any time soon. Android UI design was searching its place and it has now found it. Many of the patterns rose dynamically from good apps. We now know how apps should look and feel on this platform. If very specific guidelines were released when 1.5 was published we would be in worse situation.

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  3. From experience, ugly and usability are variable notions. I have users saying the UI in my app is ugly while other saying it is nice.
    The thing being that whatever choice you make, someone will hate it. Also everyone these days is a usuability expert that claims that such or such UI is not usable.

    Uniformity and consistency in app UI and behaviour is a pipe dream on Android, and grossly overrated as "one size fit all" do not exist. It would require Google to go Apple dictator style for the Android Market which hopefully will not happen ever.

    Noone complain endlessly that there is a vast diversity of look & feel in Windows applications, right ?

    So my advice would be to pick recommendations from guidelines that make sense for an app. But do not endlessly tweak the UI to match the flavour of the day if what you have works. In the end, whatever choice you make, someone will hate it.

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  4. Juhani, I don't think that this website is not needed anymore. As a professional software developer for 10 years+ and since a year ago Android, too, I know how important good usability and a streamlined UI is. Of course you can't make everyone happy as the poster before stated, but as Apple has shown, a well-designed UI is a huge reason for people to buy your stuff or not, even if it is dictated by the platform. For android it was always a drag to have to think about good UI yourself. Your website (and androidpatterns[dot]com as well) were helping me and my company a lot in this regard.

    The new UI design website on the android developer space is fantastic. It contains a wealth of information (arguably a bit late). And I'm convinced that in combination with ICS we will see more well-designed apps in the future.

    Your website is driving this process and if it didn't exist there would be even more poorly designed apps out there. So keep on your good work! There will certainly be more to come in the future, with the Android UI continuously evolving!

    Tom

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  5. It's going to affect, not effect your own web site... Shouldn't someone who fusses over details of visual design for a living care about language, too?

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  6. Well, well. Android goes Apple or what? I agree that it is definitely not bad to have a style guide but on the other hand it clearly shows that the guide only targets Honeycomb and later. All those old Android phones + books out there now have to be thrown away.

    Just wondering why that guide does not even mention the word "fragment" although it is one of the most important concepts of the "new" Android.

    And why do they put the confirmation button on the right just like Apple does?

    Another thing is that the new UP button makes the already pretty confusing Android navigation even more confusing now for the user & for the developer. Let me quote http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/navigation.html :
    "In that case, Up can return to a container (Movies) which the user had not previously navigated through."

    Happy designing :)

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  7. Hi Anguel,

    The guide is for ICS. They have no plans to release anything for older devices.

    You bring up a very interesting discussion point. For what version should we design for? ICS won't be the larges version for at least a year. ICS apps will feel foreign on GB or Froyo. I think we are now facing fragmentation that actually matters for the first time. Fortunately, there are many projects working to backport ICS APIs and many of them are already in a very good and support everything from 1.6+. I believe that the safest bet is to design for ICS keeping in mind technical limitations of back-ported API availability. Some apps will look foreign on phones that won't get the update (which is majority) but the ICS style is good and the apps will look and function well although not consistently with all platform apps. That's what Google is doing.

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  8. Olivier, I thank you for your valuable feedback. I have to point out few problems with your comment though. I have zero skills in visual design and therefore cannot fuss over it. I also don't make my living from Android design on any level. :)

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