Category: Editorial

No Detail Is Too Small

Design Details

It is still pretty surprising that with the Material Design guidelines available for quite some time (close to 2 years!), there are still many Android apps ignoring the basics of Material Design. Sure, the guideline isn’t meant as a complete design checklist, but many basic design details (keylines, elevation, UI elements etc.) and common interaction patterns (Nav Drawer, Bottom Sheet etc.) shouldn’t be ignored if the app is using Material Design as the design language.

Today the victim is the new (?) IMDb app, which I will show what’s wrong with the app in terms of design (they need to work on performance as well, by the way) and which part of the design guideline is meant to address the mentioned issue. Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 9

Beware of Hidden Rules

 

hidden_rules

Just a quick post to rant about an usability issue I experienced today.

In software development, there are always tons of hidden rules and logics that we made internally for better usability (or may be worse?) and minimizing potential information overload for the user, but if it’s something involved with certain level of user expectation (e.g. user reasonably expecting things should work a certain way), it is always a good idea to ensure that the hidden rules of ours are sufficiently communicated to the user through feedforward or feedback, depending on the situation.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind (and Out of Reach)

Case in point – the funny (may be not so funny) logic in Dashlane that no user can understand (or realize). Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 1

The Fabulous Goes Material

After 264 emails with tons of exchanges, 200+ mock screens, 30+ interaction prototypes, 9 months+, 17156 times of revisions (OK, I made this up) – we finally have The Fabulous app with Material Design pushed to the public on the early September, and we are happy that we reaches our first milestone for the redesign – an honourable feature in Google Play Store under New + Updated Apps category.

Feature in Play Store

You probably have not heard about The Fabulous – It’s a Health and Fitness app uses scientific-based approaches to help people in reaching their health goal through a carefully crafted step-by-step program. We purposefully crafted the journey based on the user goal by slowly showing them relevant information and motivates them during the process, and hopefully get them to form some healthy habits at the end of the journey.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 3

#AndroidDev Interview Series – Jack Underwood

Interview-No-2It’s been a while since the first interview with Ryan Harter, and today let’s continue the series with Jack Underwood.

Jack is a young indie developer that never say no to challenges – how do I know it? I previously worked with Jack for a couple of projects like Now Playing, Reverse Dictionary, and Today Calendar and Widget (pre-Material Design era), and we are really liking that push-and-pull interaction between us during the development.

Without further ado, let’s start with the interview!

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 0

UI Animation in Photoshop – Tutorial #2

Blog-Pic

In the first UI Animation in Photoshop tutorial, I have shown the way to do simple animations in Photoshop like moving, scaling and style changing – if you are new to this and haven’t check that out yet, I recommend you to look into Tutorial #1 before this.

In this second tutorial, I will share my experiences in applying easing into the animation made with Photoshop. Special thanks to Jovie Brett Bardoles for sharing his manual way of applying easing in his animations, which inspire me to explore and dig into the Timeline feature in Photoshop.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 8

Android Design – Think Adaptive

Adaptive Design

Designing for Android devices can be challenging sometimes due to the availability of the Android-powered devices with different screen sizes, however, it is certainly not an issue if adaptive design is considered during the design phase of the app. Some developer/company chose to complain about this, but this likely won’t change anything because it is a deliberate direction that Android meant to go and move forward. The way forward? It’s Adaptive Android Design1.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 0

#AndroidDev Interview Series – Ryan Harter

Interview No 1

Why #AndroidDev Interview Series?

I think it’s no secret that my aim being a GDE is to help to close the gap between designer and developer in order to make awesome products, and as a designer, I always enjoy talking to Android Developer to get insights from them, especially indie developers since most of the time, they pretty much have to wear many different hats themselves in making their app a success in the Play Store.

Thus the idea making a series of interview with awesome Android Developers (especially indie developers) to peek inside their world, and their thoughts on design and designers (which is the insights that I truly appreciate), because I believe I will be able to learn something new from everyone of them with their unique experiences in Android development.

So for the first interview of the series, I proudly present Ryan Harter. I haven’t met Ryan until the recent GDE Summit (yes, he is an Android GDE!), and I definitely love talking to him and appreciate his passion towards Android development. Below is the quick and short email interview with him:

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 1

Papercrafting the Unclouded Launcher Icon

With the latest update in Material Design guideline, Google Design team has shared their design approaches on the product icon design – it’s a comprehensive and pretty complete icon design guideline (at least for me) and I believe many Android Designers are excited about it, that’s, of course, including me.

Explore

After reading through the guideline, I wanted to try something out of it, and Unclouded (a Cloud Storage Management app developed by Christian Gollner and partially designed by me) came into my mind. So I looked at the current icon, and start imagining how it will look like in Material-style. And of course, to make sure the icon is properly sized, I first looked into the 4 suggested keyline shapes and determined that the horizontal rectangle is the right keyline shape to go. This is important because it will help to standardise all the launcher icons at the right size to achieve consistency in terms of visual alignment for the platform, yet unique with their silhouette.

Unclouded - Size Study

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 0

An example of really bad mobile app design – Maybank2u

mbb

Disclaimer: This post is mainly about the author rant about bad mobile app design from the largest bank in Malaysia, but it is also a great example of don’ts in mobile app design.

It’s September 2014. Material Design was introduced few months ago during Google I/O 2014. The predecessor – Holo Design was introduced late 2011 together with the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0), which is about 2-3 years ago, and it’s getting matured as time goes. It’s probably not wrong to expect any Android apps published in the year 2014 embraced with all the lessons that we have learnt in Holo Design and craft the best Android experiences for the user.

Except it’s not for Maybank, the largest bank in Malaysia, and one of the world’s top 100 banks.

Last week, they have officially launched their revamped mobile banking app, claiming that it has the best mobile banking experience compared to the previous version. It does seems to have a refreshed design – except it’s probably one of the worst and most unacceptable mobile design that I ever seen. And it’s 2014.

Continue reading →

Posted on by Taylor Ling 15