Monday 9 April 2012

Android Design Guidelines Updated


Google has just updated the official Android Design guidelines page by adding new section for settings and updating the navigation section. Head to the Android Design page to read the updates.


Patterns - Navigation

  • Updated section: Navigation into Your App via Home Screen Widgets and Notifications.
  • New section: Navigation Between Apps.

Patterns - Settings

  • All new section.

Also check out Roman Nurik's G+ post.

3 comments:

  1. I will be interested to hear your take on the updated design guidelines, particularly the controversy over the back button.

    I just read a response from the commons guy:
    http://commonsware.com/blog/2012/04/10/making-back-way-too-complicated.html

    I think this sums up the developer response (as I read it on G+), and I agree.

    And I would add that, if it doesn't make sense to developers then it will get implemented haphhazardly, and this will lead to the worst possible outcome: inconsistency.

    I'm also baffled that Google would want to make a change that causes behavior on their two platforms to diverge - I expected to see them come together.

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    Replies
    1. I'm not a big fan of the back / up functionality. I've written about it before
      http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/12/back-button-androids-achilles-heel.html
      http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2011/12/android-back-button-take-two.html

      I think back combined to up functionality is way to complicated and users will have hard time understanding it.

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    2. The back button is one of those things that if implemented correctly requires no thought at all on the part of the user, but whose behavior is incredibly complex. In any particular situation, it's very obvious what the back button should do, but coming up with general rules to govern it looks intense. Most of the time the default behavior is the correct one (assuming you're doing your fragment transactions properly). Most of the times it's different are when you're changing Tasks in the middle of user flow, and the latest version of the compatibility library has tools for handling that case quite nicely.

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