Matias Duarte on the design philosophy of Android

mathias

Well written piece by Joshua Topolsky:

"With Android, people were not responding emotionally, they weren't forming emotional relationships with the product. They needed it, but they didn't necessarily love it."

Matias says that the studies showed that users felt empowered by their devices, but often found Android phones overly complex. That they needed to invest more time in learning the phones, more time in becoming an expert. The phones also made users feel more aware of their limitations -- they knew there was more they could do with the device, but couldn't figure out how to unlock that power.

The company has created a new typeface for Ice Cream Sandwich dubbed Roboto, designed in-house at Google, something the company has never done before. It's clean and modern, but not overly futuristic -- not a science fiction font. Matias says that it's been designed for "high resolution mobile displays" as "a complete typeface, in a great many more varieties than have existed for Android before." He adds "It's a modern typeface, it's trying to take a point of view and is not ashamed to do so."

Unfortunately it's a complete helvetica rip-off. See also Roboto is a Four-headed Frankenfont.

Across the board Google and Android is taking design a lot more seriously," Matias says, and points out that Roboto is used throughout the system. "There's this thing that's happening right now in user interface design that I find kind of shackling. The faux wood paneling trend, and the airport lavatory signage trend." He laughs when he says this and pulls up a slide on his computer, a split screen of an Atari 2600 and... airport lavatory signage. It's an obvious dig at both Apple and Microsoft.

"The biggest problem behind these trends is not anything about the aesthetic quality about them, but rather the framework that they impose on everything else," he opines. "Right now if you look at all of these applications that are designed in this real-objecty, faux wood paneling, faux brushed metal, faux jelly button kind of thing... if you step back and you really look at them, they look kind of juvenile. They're not photorealistic, they're illustrations."

I agree with him here. I'm so tired of Apple skeumorpic approach to interface design. They have taken the emotional connection to the interface to a ridiculous level.

But what about Microsoft and their "authentically digital" design? "The problem with going too starkly systematic, forcing everything into this completely constrained, modernist palette, for both of them, you're not leaving any room for the content to express itself."

Exclusive: Matias Duarte on the philosophy of Android, and an in-depth look at Ice Cream Sandwich