It’s been almost 10 years since I started designing for Android. What an amazing journey! 🤖💚
Those early days in the Android world were like living in the Wild West.
The platform design language was far from being mature, Material Design didn’t exist yet and UI patterns and components were rough or inconsistently used.
Also the gap between Android and iOS was much bigger than today.
Over the years the two platforms have come closer to each other and they now share much more elements than before.
Looking at these trends, does it still make sense to talk about platform-specific…
What I learned running online workshops with a distributed team.
Recently on one of our projects at Elli, the team was just about to start developing the concept for a new product, facing big questions and getting familiar with new personas.
Before jumping into any kind of scoping or roadmap definition, we wanted to take a step back and get the team aligned on the core problem we were trying to solve.
In other words, it was the perfect moment for a Design Sprint!
Moderating a team of 8 people over 5 days in a fully remote setup can be quite challenging. …
This year Juhani Lehtimäki and I are attending a few conferences giving a talk on the topic “Meaningful animations and how to implement it”.
During the presentation we show how designers and developers can collaborate together to create meaningful motion on Android and which tools they use in their workflow.
We bring as examples real use cases taken from one of our internal projects, Shutter Points (Juhani explained more in detail the idea behind the app in a previous post).
In this post I want to describe from a design point of view the different approaches and tools that we…
Bringing the dark UI on Android apps
This year at I/O 2019 Google announced that Android will now support Dark Theme at OS level. At the same time we’re seeing more Google apps being rolled out with dark UI support.
This will become soon a common pattern and other apps will follow on this path.
In this post I will describe how I adapted the design for the Dark Theme on one of our apps: Shutter Points.
Color optimization
The color palette
The Shutter Points UI is mainly monochromatic. This allows the photographic content to stand out and to take most of the scene. …
Learn Cyrillic is a simple app risen from a personal need. It’s an exploration of flash-cards for a simple use case of learning to read Cyrillic alphabet.
After iterations of interaction studies the dating-app-like swiping yes/no interface felt the most natural approach in combination with the card metaphor.
Challenge your friends to walk more
Update on Social Steps Android:
Why SocialSteps?
People track their steps to see how much they walk every day and measure their activity.
Social Steps is a step counter app that lets users connect with their friends and motivate each other to walk more.
The full story of how this project was born and the journey to its launch as MVP to market is described more in detail in this separate article:
How SocialSteps works
Simple Navigation
The core feature of SocialSteps is a simple and intuitive navigation. The main information is located within the Home screen. From here users can access additional content.
Take a note in one shot
Why Shutter Points?
Stress-free table planning
Why Table Planner?
Seating plans can be quite challenging to put together.
Table Planner lets you easily play around with table positioning and arrange guests to get the perfect match for your event.
The app uses drag and drop as the core interaction to move elements within the interface and it’s specifically optimised for larger screen devices such as the iPad.
Scalable app design to support tablets and chromebooks
With the evolution of the Chrome OS and large screen devices the topic of scalable mobile UI has never been so actual.
During a short tour of conferences Juhani Lehtimäki and I showcased on stage some of the UX patterns we applied while building responsive layouts and how we experimented with transitions using ConstraintLayout (although the techniques shown in the talk have since become outdated as Google introduced a platform way to achieve the same).
The talk is about 30 min. Here’s the video from Droidcon Italy:
Unfortunately the animations are not visible in the recording, but they work…
How we released a side project and what we learned from it
Side projects are a great opportunity to work on something we love and at the same time a good occasion to learn things and train new skills.
Unfortunately we are often too busy with our main occupation and most of our ideas never get shipped.
At the beginning of 2017 I was at SnappMobile talking with Juhani Lehtimäki and José Jeria about a common use case that José usually experiences in his daily life:
José walks a lot and he uses Apple Health to count his daily steps. …
Pierluigi Rufo
Design lead at Snapp Mobile. http://snappmobile.io/
