Research Android UI/UX patterns in preparation for final tweaking

[hwray]

I'd like to shift the focus of our UI discussion to a slightly higher level. We should continue to iterate on our fonts/buttons/color schemes, but it's much more important to ensure that the overall flow of our app is intuitive for Android users.

I think we should do some more extensive research on current design patterns in Android UI/UX. This will help us better understand our users' expectations, and how to design our interactions for maximum intuitiveness.

[hwray]

Android Design in Action: Common UI/UX Issues

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEGWcMTxs3I

[hwray]

Official Android Action Bar guidelines

http://developer.android.com/design/patterns/actionbar.html

Other official Android patterns and guidelines

https://developer.android.com/design/patterns/new.html

Unofficial list of Android patterns and recommendations

http://www.androiduipatterns.com/p/android-ui-pattern-collection.html

[hwray]

General Android patterns

http://www.androidpatterns.com/

[hwray]

Dont's of Android Design

http://www.androiduipatterns.com/2013/06/donts-of-android-design.html

I'd like to highlight the warning against needlessly re-skinning and customizing everything. With just 1 month to go, I think our time would best be spent fine-tuning the UX and flow as opposed to custom-designing and perfecting our own original UI elements.

[hwray]

Summary of Points

• We should reincorporate the standard Action Bar. It should display the title/function of the current view, and have a three-dot button in the upper-right which gives access to the Settings menu.
• Most well-designed Android apps use a monochromatic, grey/black scheme, with a single primary accent color to highlight key areas of interaction (and promote branding). I think we're doing great in this respect so far.

[hwray]

• We should think about making the Jam player controls global in some kind of horizontal tab or slide-out drawer element.

[JayThomason]

Whoops.

[JayThomason]

Another idea would be to move the search functionality to a search fragment that appears when the user clicks on a magnifying glass icon in the action bar. I don't know if we need the search bar to constantly take up part of the available screen space like it is right now. I think that this is how the native Android music player does it.

[hwray]

I think I've successfully completed (and/or decided against) all the UI enhancements specifically mentioned here:

• Action Bar is back, with improved titles, "settings" menu button, and global search bar (as Jay suggested).
• I've decided against making the Jam controls global. Realistically, users should not be interacting with the controls that often; only when they need to pause the Jam or skip directly to the next/previous song. We also want to reserve as much screen real estate as possible for our music browser, and minimize the chance that users will accidentally interact with the Jam controls as they're navigating around.
• We're still doing great on maintaining an Android aesthetic, and we're continuing to iterate the rest of our UI elements.