Friday 28 September 2012

Field Trip App Demonstrates a Bezel Swipe Indicator

Google's new Field Trip app (US-only, side load from XDA-developers for the rest of the world) is not one one of the most Android design guidelines compliant apps out there but it has an interesting UI feature that I thought would we worth pointing out: fully scrollable map component inside a swipable container.

The main navigation of this app is swiping between "workspaces". The leftmost workspace contains a map. This map can be panned by the normal dragging gesture as well as zoomed with pinching. These gestures badly overlap with the swipe navigation of the app. In this case Google has solved this issue pretty elegantly. They leave a small strip as a handle for swiping back to right. In the gesture to navigate back to right is a bezel swipe (I've written about bezel swipe before).

One of the biggest problems with bezel swipe is its discoverability. This  small handle solves the problem. It is instantly intuitive and easy to use.

While some valid concerns about the visual unbalance were raised in Google+ by Cyril Mottier I find this solution being a good one or at least a very good approach in many cases. I'd encourage designers to explore this solution.




4 comments:

  1. Link to XDA (for download):
    http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1908635

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  2. And the mapview is not the mapview in the SDK. It is the same mapview that Google Maps uses itself. I want that one too. It is faster and more beautiful. It is not fair. :)

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  3. Yes, this indicator is nicely done and works here very good. That's the only place where this paper/cardboard look works good :-)

    But it wouldn't look nice on Chrome (to use just an example where you can use bezel swipes from the left and from the right). Takes too much place and would look stupid, if you had it on both sides. Maybe if it were much thinner, but even then I doubt it would look good.

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  4. It is not available in my country so I never able to explore this app, but surprisingly the bezel swipe indicator is very close to the one I proposed few months back in my 1st post in androiduiux.com talking about side navigation. :P

    https://androiduiux.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/icon_for_side_navigation.png

    http://androiduiux.com/2012/06/15/side-navigation-ui-pattern-in-android/

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