Android UX design chief Matias Duarte talks exclusively with Wired on design, competitors and the future of mobile.Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
By most measures, the Android platform is an enormous success. It dominates the smartphone space in terms of market share, with over a quarter of a billion currently activated devices. It’s on phones and tablets made by four of the largest smartphone manufacturers in the world. And its reach isn’t slowing.
But with enormous growth comes problems, many of which Google knows quite well. App stores. Competitors. That dirty word: “fragmentation.” All of this bogs down Android during a critical phase of its development, just a few years since its initial launch.
Android needs a hero — someone who can unify the platform and work on the many weaknesses that critics attack, and even supportive users grumble about. And Matias Duarte, Android’s head of user experience, wants to take that role.
Under Duarte, Android launched Ice Cream Sandwich — aka Android 4.0 — late last year. It’s the team’s strongest effort yet in offering a robust, well-designed operating system that can measure up to the likes of Apple’s and Microsoft’s OS platforms. And at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, Duarte launched the other half of the plan, the Android Design web site, which aims to make it easier for designers to create better, more user-friendly apps.
I sat down with Duarte at CES for an exclusive pre-launch interview, and picked his brain about Android, design in general, and competing operating systems like Windows Phone and webOS — the platform he architected for Palm years ago.
On Android Design
Wired: So tell me the philosophy behind launching the Android Design developer site. Is it specifically for what users are going to see in the interface, or is this more engineering focused?
Matias Duarte: It’s both what the user sees and how the application functions. Thus far, Android has had a lot of terrific developer API-level documentation. But we haven’t really had a style guide, we haven’t had interaction guidelines.
We haven’t, for example, given you a lot of guidance on how to migrate your application from a phone perhaps to a tablet. We’ve done so only by example, by showing you the way all the apps function in Ice Cream Sandwich. So we want to just kind of open up our studio’s doors, if you will. We want to show you how we think, and how we designed Ice Cream Sandwich to work. What all its principals and its rules and its conventions are so you don’t have to try and discover that yourself.
Wired: Is this a response to feedback you’ve been getting from the Android community?
Duarte: This is something that developers and designers are really hungry for. For any platform, it’s really important to understand what its conventions and patterns are. And so this is our chance — now that we’ve finished running the marathon to get the product out the door — to show them how they too can make apps that look and work as simply and as beautifully as the apps that we’ve made for Ice Cream Sandwich.
Wired: You know what this strikes me as? Like my Bible, the AP Style Guide, only for developers.
Duarte: That’s exactly what it is. There’s a lot of generally agreed-upon good interaction design practices, as well as universal mobile interaction practices. Still, every operating system does things a little differently, has its own conventions. The frameworks are different.
Wired: So does this mean — “rules?” There’s direction, and then there’s mandate.
Duarte: Well, it’s a slightly different situation because we don’t have an editor who’s going to yell at you if you’re out of line. In computer ecosystems, the public decides how successful applications will be after they hit the market. So within our style guide we have certain things that we think are absolutely how one should make an Android app. But there are other variables — examples in which code is good in some cases and bad in others. There it’s left up to you to make a judgment call as to which pattern you should adopt. There, we don’t have a hard and fast rule. But in either case, there’s nothing that we do to enforce that.
The new UI of Ice Cream Sandwich. Photo: Mike Isaac/Wired.com
On Tablets vs. Smartphones
Wired: I’m thinking of tablets versus smartphones specifically, and where Ice Cream Sandwich fits in. Is this going to help bridge that gap? This is something that — in terms of tablets — people have wanted for a long time.
We have some portions of the guide that are specifically focused on that topic. How to design an app that takes advantage of the extra space on the tablet. How to design an app that will adapt and use a different type of user interface when it recognizes on a screen that is appropriately phone-size, and on a screen that’s tablet size.
So what we’ve launched — it’s not a document, it’s not a book, it’s a site. It’s a destination where we continuously add more detail to some of the documentation that we have, and some of it is very nitty-gritty.
To be honest, some of the most valuable content is in our design patterns. It’s our thinking that goes into certain conventions, or paradigms, practices. And in these we’ve started with a set of some of what we think are the most important or new patterns that we’ve introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich.
Wired: Do you expect this to bolster tablet apps in general?
Duarte: I think it should help tablet apps. Honestly, again, it wasn’t a particular goal of ours to focus on tablet apps because we don’t really think of tablet apps internally. But I think there’s no doubt that several sections of the guide do focus on some of the problems unique to larger screens, and so by nature that will help tablet apps.
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