I recently attended Speaking About Design, a meetup about Android tablet design hosted by The London Android Group (Londroid) at TechHub on 23 February, 2011. Presentations and speakers

  • Greg Taylor; Head of UX at the digital design agency TigerSpike
  • Really fast wireframes - Kevin McDonagh; Novoda
  • Honeycomb UI Patterns - Nick Butcher; Android developer advocate at Google

This event was of particular interest to me as it's theme was the partnership between designers and developers. After three very relevant presentations I came away with a new platform and OS to think about.

Here are a few takeaways...

Tablet devices offer immersive experiences Designing for a tablet is very different to designing for web and mobile. Tablets allow us to exercise our primal urge to move things around with our hands. They are predominantly used at home in the evenings and it's likely that you will be focused on a particular task. This differs from smart phones where we often have lots going on at once and dip in and out of apps as we go. All useful insights to bear in mind when designing.

In addition tablets are:

  • Portable; we can use them whenever and wherever we like, unrestricted by the need for tools and other paraphernalia
  • Consumable; we use them to absorb visually data such as news, photos and video
  • Personal; we might let others have a play but at the end of the day it's our Facebook and Twitter accounts that are linked to the device and our own personal data that's stored on it
  • Fun!

Gestural languages

A gestural language is evolving and patterns are developing. People are getting used to certain gestures producing certain results, for example the pinch zoom. It's important to know and utilise these patterns as we expect certain things to happen and it can be very frustrating when a gesture that does one thing on one app produces a totally outcome on another.

Android Honeycomb 3.0

The recently released Android Honeycomb 3.0 has been optimised for tablet devices and includes smoother transitions and animations, support for multi-touch gestures, new widgets (including some great looking stacks) and drag and drop features. Rather than accessing other pages, actions and options from a menu, Honeycomb 3.0 has introduced an "Action Bar" UI element at the top of the screen that can be customised with different options depending on which application you're using.

"Fragments are your friends"

(Some good advice from Nick Butcher!) Tablets can be rotated and used in any orientation that you like so this should be considered when designing. Some orientations are better suited to a task than others and you should optimise your design to make the most of each orientation. When designing think about separating content into fragments, the layout and relative proportion of which adjust on rotation. Fragments allow you to scroll through certain sections of content independently of others, useful for lists and sidebars against a main panel with full, expanded content.

The Honeycomb GMail app is an excellent exponent of this; in landscape mode you have a sidebar inbox panel that disappears when you rotate the device into a portrait position. This layout is often favoured for long-form reading as it provides the reader with a less cluttered interface. The sidebar can be easily retrieved by clicking the sidebar arrow that appears in this view. This latest release also allows you to drag and drop emails into folders.

Related articles

First Impressions Using Android Honeycomb, Google's iPad Rival (TechCrunch) Honeycomb Hands-on: Why Android 3.0 is Seriously Sweet (LAPTOP Magazine)