Sunday, January 15, 2012

Update: GUIs, Here's How They Work

So here's an update to a recent post : Android recently released their design guidelines for Ice Cream Sandwich. It can be found here. Some interesting things to note:

The design principals are abstract and lofty. Things like "Enchant Me", "Simplify My Life", and "Make Me Amazing" are pretty open to interpretation, but at least it gives you an idea what the designers were thinking when they created the interface.

The Style section of the site describes things like how to design for different resolutions, what themes would compliment the native UI, their Roboto font, icons, and finally writing style

The writing style is most interesting to me. Here are their main guidelines.

  • Keep it brief
  • Keep it Simple
  • Be Friendly
  • Put the most important thing first
  • Describe only what's necessary and no more
It's interesting because most of the examples they used seem to have came from their older UIs. Maybe they have gotten things right with ICS. If you got the time, I would encourage you to check out their other guidelines -- it's in interesting read (if you're in to that kind of thing).

5 comments:

  1. Thanks I was looking for some better explanation of GUIs, nice blog by the way.

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  2. i think android are starting to edge out the ios software, also android is better in my opinion.

    I just started blogging again btw, hope you can check out some of my posts, will be posting either everyday or every other day

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  3. I really like this and I think they've got something great with ICS.

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  4. I also find that ICS has make the jump to a better OS as iOS... Maybe there are little perfomance things where the iOS is better but overall I think in future Android will be dominant

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  5. Very informative post Bryan.

    I agree with you wholeheartedly. A good GUI can make or break an apps popularity. It's important for google to realize they have a responsibility to help young programmers make great products for their system.

    +1 follower!

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