The document discusses the evolution of Android and provides seven tips for designing for the new Android experience. It notes that with Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean, Android now stands toe-to-toe with iOS in performance and appeal. The seven tips are to simplify design patterns, create engaging experiences with gestures and transitions, use intents to build "application villages", avoid directly porting from iOS, design with flexibility in mind, think outside just mobile devices, and that Android applications can be beautiful too.
3. How Ice Cream Sandwich changed everything
Android’s been rapidly improving from version to version, The Evolution of an Android Application: Evernote
but most of those changes took place under the hood.
Gingerbread, for example, introduced NFC. And it made
Android faster, smarter, and easier to understand. But like
its predecessors, it suffered from the same stilted
user experience:
• Important information was left hidden in frustrating
contextual menus
• Transitions were rigid and clunky
• The architecture as a whole felt dense
Evernote released their first Android application in 2010.
and verbose
It suffered from jerky performance, lacked polish, and its
The first major design shift occurred with Honeycomb, design was based closely on iOS. In 2011 they took a first
an innovative UI built specifically for tablets. It was beautiful, crack at the action bar and reorganizing the data to suit
but it was only for tablets. So they replaced this with Ice the platform. But performance was still an issue, and the
Cream Sandwich (ICS), the first Android framework built to application’s hierarchy descended screen by screen to create
span all phones and tablets. an overly dense experience. In 2012, they released their
latest design. Utilizing Jelly Bean’s speed and patterns of
Where Honeycomb hinted at the promise of more
simplicity, they transformed their complicated program into
standardized design, ICS made all devices look and act the
an app that is fluid, intuitive, and extremely easy to use.
same. ICS turned the once dense platform into a cognitive
and consistent experience across all phones and tablets.
By introducing the Action Bar, for example, Android took its A note on user distribution
first step towards consistent navigation. And the Android For the moment, most users are still running
team even took a firm design stance with their definitive Gingerbread. But that’s not by choice; OS upgrades
design guideline (Android’s Design Guidelines) complete are unfortunately at the behest of the device
with an inspiring vision statement and an amazing amount providers. This makes it difficult to predict when we
of instruction. will see the massive shift towards the new Android
As a result, today’s Android is smooth and graceful. frameworks, but at the very least we can expect a
Its navigation is intuitive and wonderfully simplified. constant change as long-time users hit the end of
But most importantly, it is consistent across all devices. their two-year upgrade cycles. And we can expect
Android used to be the platform that challenged us an equally massive shift for consumer companies
designers to create quality applications. Now it challenges and the enterprise as they race to respond to the
us to innovate. huge demand of mainstream Android users.
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5. 2
Create engaging experiences with gestures and transitions
Choppy performance has long been a complaint As mobile design advances, we’ll be able to use this speed
against Android. But no more. to create even more tactile and cognitive experiences.
Google states that “real objects are more fun that buttons
At the unveiling of Jelly Bean, Google revealed the suitably
and menus,” and we’re now seeing designers forgo heavy
named “Project Butter” as their major motion to fix all
arrays of buttons and menus for a much more fluid,
performance issues. Project Butter improves speed to
gesture-based experience.2
approximately 60 frames per second, allowing for smooth
transitions and animations to augment the already simplified Feedly’s delightfully simple navigation (Fig. 2) uses almost
design patterns. By combining this improvement with well nothing but a series of swipes. Their tappable icons have
thought-out gestures (such as the Bezel Swipe), we can been whittled down to almost nothing, and you dismiss
create a truly integrated experience for the user that seems side menus by flicking them closed. Tasks such as
to transcend software entirely. marking, saving, or closing an article are activated by a
series of cognitive gestures that make for a quick and
human experience.
Fig. 2: Feedly relies more on the user’s tactile expression than on memorizing a
button-based navigation. It’s a great example of an application that uses transitions
and gestures to create an immersive experience.
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6. 3
Use intents to build ‘application villages’
Intents are one of Android’s most powerful features. We’ll discuss intents in more detail later on in this series,
They’re not new, but should certainly work their way into but when designing an Android application, it is important
your design. to understand how using intents can make your feature
set extraordinarily robust by simply utilizing functionality
Intents are part of an extremely flexible system in which
provided by other applications. Here is a great list of all the
separate applications share information and speak to
features you can easily utilize from other applications by
each other. On iOS, you have to hard code an application’s
using intents.
communication with Facebook or Twitter. But with Android,
any two applications can share information as long as
they’re both fashioned to utilize intents. This creates a rich
ecosystem of diverse actions and a massive network
of sharing.
Intents in Practice: I decided to take this picture of a Mutual Mobile t-shirt concept. From the gallery, I was able to
choose from any other application on my device that allowed intents. Though I only wanted to document this image
and notate it using Evernote, I could have posted it to Facebook, pinned it to Pinterest, geolocated it with Foursquare,
or sent it to a friend over Skype. Or all of the above. And by combining intents, I could have pinned it to Pinterest and
then commented about the pin on Facebook with just a few taps.
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8. 5
Design with flexibility in mind
Android is an open OS. This has helped Android’s quick rise
to prominence, but it also means there could be any possible Is that all there is to fragmentation?
number of devices to develop and design for. Fortunately, ICS
has helped reign in the problem of developing across screen Fragmentation goes well beyond designing for
sizes, devices, and resolutions. different devices and screen sizes. It refers to how
manufacturers actually customize and release
Today, overcoming Android’s device diversity is as simple distinct versions of the Android framework. This has
as simplifying design patterns. We develop two flexible fueled efforts such as the Amazon Kindle, but it also
layouts—tablet and phone—and utilize ICS’s framework for poses development challenges. We’ll discuss what
adapting these to work across all screens. We also follow fragmentation means—and how to manage it—in a
Android’s qualifying naming conventions (found here) to later piece.
isolate assets based on screen size and density, and use
9patching to keep asset rendering global and flexible.
We’ll explore how to develop across device sizes in much
greater detail in our next piece, but it’s helpful to know that
this is a well-documented, manageable task.
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Think outside the pocket
The Android framework isn’t limited to mobile devices, So the true conversation of Android design lies beyond
and it isn’t just the Android-powered Google TV that’s making the app. You need to think about the experience as a whole,
a splash. Chinese car company Roewe recently released a and the way each touch points communicate with all
car with an Android console4, Nokia and Nikon have released others—from mobile to household appliances to industrial
Android-powered cameras5, and Casio utilizes an Android equipment and devices we haven’t even thought of yet.
POS system6. If you consider that all of these device could It’s time to start thinking about Android design as being not
be using the same code, the possibilities for design just a series of applications, but as an entire lifestyle.
become boundless.
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10. THE NEW ANDROID HAS FINALLY EMERGED
Over the last couple of years, Android has evolved leaps and We’ll take a closer look at this new Android experience in our
bounds into a fascinating and innovative operating system. ongoing series: the Golden Age of Android.
Its start was patchy, but constant iteration and user
feedback have made the Android platform as viable to
design for as iOS, and equally important to consider in any
mobile strategy.
Look out for our next piece on creating a beautiful
experience across devices and screen sizes.
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