There is no question that Android interface design has caught up with Apple IOS in terms of delivering a premium user experience, and with the release of Android 4 (or Ice Cream Sandwich) it appears that two opposing philosophies are emerging in mobile UI design.

An interview at fastcodesign.com with Android UX Design Chief Matias Duarte makes interesting reading. Duarte’s design thinking seems to be opposite of Apple’s – while Apple go for a skeuomorphic design heavy on using metaphors, Duarte opts for the opposite. His rational (and I’m para-phrasing here, you can check out his interview here) is that people don’t care for real looking buttons or metaphors – they are a hang up of  a 30 year old computer interface design, and over-designed buttons with a 3D effect look great on their own but overwhelming when all put together. In his words: “…when you assemble the individual elements on a screen, each one becomes prominent on its own… Each is very pretty, but when you try to make a wall or a house out of them, all the embellishments fight with the larger building.”

In the fastcodesign.com interview with Duarte, references to Android’s new UI design being ‘like a magazine’ crop up rather a lot – although never directly attributed to Duarte as far as I can tell, the magazine as UI metaphor gets mentioned a few times – on the surface this seems at odds with his design thinking, as a magazine inspired layout, complete with turning pages, is of course… a metaphor. Magazines have been around a lot longer than computer interfaces, and can hardly be called a current and modern interaction model.

And then there is that problem of the ‘Pictures Under Glass’ technology, a phrase nicked from the very insightful Bret Victor. In this great blog post, Victor rants (his word) that “Pictures Under Glass is an interaction paradigm of permanent numbness.” – we can’t ‘feel’ the pages of a magazine through the interface of a touch screen device. Using ‘real’ objects as interactive elements within an interface helps a little with this problem – buttons under the glass of a touch screen will never be tactile, but they can have the appearance of being tactile, which can only help.

I am not a huge fan of using metaphors but I often find myself encouraging their use. I have found them useful for quickly communicating functionality – the one great advantage of using metaphors and skeuomorphic design is that you already know how something is going to work – if there is a dial, I know that I have to turn up or down. A toggle? I can toggle it. The big downside is that we tie ourselves to the limitations of the objects we are basing our metaphors on, we lose the chance to innovate or create new methods of interaction.

I would like to think that the average smart phone user is capable of learning new interactive conventions and can get by without the blatant signposting of metaphors, and that decent UI design can be accomplished with new interaction conventions; but to make sure a UI is understandable quickly, without instruction and by a broad demographic I will choose a metaphor. This piece of advice I have lifted from http://developer.android.com sums it up: “Real objects are more fun than buttons and menus: Allow people to directly touch and manipulate objects in your app. It reduces the cognitive effort needed to perform a task while making it more emotionally satisfying.”

Android 4 is promising a much more refined and improved user experience. As more people upgrade and as Android’s market penetration continues to grow it will be interesting to see how Apple reacts.

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Related links:

1. John Siracusa at arstechnica.com writing about Lion and Apple’s use of the Skeuomorph. (Part of a much larger article)
2. Info on Android 4

Related posts:

1. Design process for mobile devices: Part 1
2. Wordagon: A Kerb iphone app

As there is currently no standardized methodology for designing across multiple mobile devices (an assumption based on our own research that was confirmed by various speakers at this years dConstruct conference) I thought I would post up some of our design processes.

This first post is about our initial reaction to the task of converting art and design assets for use on multiple mobile devices.

As is with many projects, time-lines were challenging and we had to get a working version on one particular Android device before we ported the game to the other devices – so we went ahead with the one Android version of the game before we went to work porting the game to other handsets.

The challenge for the design team is to take an existing game that has been designed for one particular handset and then make that design look intentional and considered across 33 other devices which all have different screen dimensions and resolutions.

Now, I must point out that I am not talking about amending the functionality of the game to fit with the functionality of different handsets – I am talking about the graphical aspects, the visual language, and in particular how the interface and art assets would scale to fit different aspect ratios. Our overall user experience, in terms of user interaction, is the same across all the devices.

This process is also particular to our game, other apps and games would not necessarily have the same process; our game is a visually rich experience with lots of animation and illustration all based on our clients IP. Visually simple games and apps would not need the same approach.

So, our initial challenge was to simplify the information we had about the different handsets, and then re-present this information to the design team. This information will help us create a clear strategy for amending our art and design assets with the least amount of impact on time and budget.

We simplified the mobile phone specifications with three simple steps.

1.
Firstly we grouped our device list into their respective screen dimensions. We did not worry about screen resolution at this point as we would deal with resolution as part of the export process (a process I will talk about in a later post).

This grouping helps simplify the list, we can quickly see that there are four different screen dimensions from a list of 33 devices – which means we have four different aspect ratios to consider.

2.
Our first comparison of screen sizes – by anchoring the different screens top left we can see the differences in the aspect ratios and how they will impact our design. We have rich illustrated backgrounds to our game levels – What will be the simplest way to amend our assets to fit these different aspect ratios? Can we keep a consistent grid?

3.
Our next comparison of screen sizes gives us the solution. By giving the four different aspect ratios the same fixed height and aligning the screens on a central vertical axis we can further simplify the amends we have to make – we can now see that the differences in the screens can be restricted to width, and the amends to the relationship of elements within the design (art assets and UI) can be restricted to the vertical edges of the device screen. We are now in a position to make decisions on whether to apply a fixed or a relative structure to our design.

By presenting the information in this way solutions arise, and complex looking tasks appear much simpler and far less daunting.

The next step in our process is the physical amending of the art and design assets and their export to sprite sheets and mobile-ready assets, which we do with both off-the-shelf software and bespoke components we write internally. I will write up these next steps in another post with the help of Kerb’s Technical Director, Pete Hobson.

…And for any Brighton/Sussex based developers, Pete is doing a talk at DotBrighton about developing for mobile on the 28th of September.

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Related posts:

1. Tankboys: Manifesto project 2010
2. Wordagon: A Kerb iphone app

The design was produced by Kerb designer Will Weaver and the game concept came out of the head of Kerb Interactive Director Carl Hodler. There are still a few tweaks to be made: some re-working of some of the interface elements, extra work laying out the instructions (and re-writing them too) and a little bit of colour correction. We are also going to implement a global high score table with the next Wordagon release – and we will possibly then start to charge for the app.

With absolutely no promotion apart from Kerb employees spreading the word, Wordagon has managed over 900 downloads with a user rating of 4+ (as of Febuary 2010).

Some screenshots:

From the itunes store description: (please excuse the excessive use of exclamation marks!)

Wordagon is a game of high pressure and mental agility. Battle against time and space… and by space, we mean words!

With each letter tile having a value, the bigger the word, the more points you score! The longer it takes it to find a word and submit it, the closer you get to falling foul of the onslaught of new letters taking their place.

Before you get trapped beneath an alphabet avalanche, you need to find words and remove them, but as you progress through the levels, the words you must come up with keep getting longer!

• Key features:
• Bonus tiles for letters
• Bonus tiles for words
• 5 levels of difficulty
• Highscore table to allow you to challenge yourself or your friends

Get it for free from the itunes store here

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