 So, good afternoon everyone, hope everyone is not sleepy yet, I saw some people leaving. Can you all hear me, is this better, cool. So, I am Ram and I am today I am going to talk about something I am really fond of which is basically Android and specifically design for Android because I have seen its evolution for some time and wanted to talk to all of you about some experiences that I have had over the last 4 to 5 years in designing for Android. So, I thought I will talk a little bit about myself first and I am basically from Madras I have been born and brought up there and I have been living in Bangalore for the last 5 years or so. And like any cliche designer would do I sort of put out a timeline of places I have been over the since 2009 and currently I am working with a startup incubator called Costa Labs that aims to solve large scale problems in India across several domains like mobile payments, retail, health care being some. And primarily I want to sort of share some of my perspectives on design in general and 3 really important values that I have learnt. The first being sensitivity. So, sensitivity according to me is caring who you are designing for moving pixels, really taking care of and feeling towards what pixel perfect design actually means choosing the right shade of color or choosing a color scheme and basically connecting with people. And to talk a little bit about how I learnt that sensitivity is important was through a project that I did in my recent past with a company called Frog and we designed this along with a small set of friends. We designed this suite of apps and services for this company called Jaipur which was e-commerce startup and they their main goal was to enchant people with stories, stories about craft. And they sold products of craftsmen through these stories and as you can see it was an apple centric sort of approach that they wanted and this was the first sort of my first experience in knowing what it means to really care for the details. How many of you sort of relate to this? Does anyone recognize what this is? Pardon? No. So, in the design process this is basically specking out writing design specifications for your visuals. We also call it redlining and it is a fairly laborious process because you need to take care of every pixel that you are creating. And to any designer to some designers I should say me being one of them this could be a nightmare if you are doing it for a very long time because it is a very time consuming and very sort of boring process to be honest. But over time this sort of made me understand what it is to value each pixel and why people would see beauty in that. Sometimes it really shows when things are off by even one pixel I would show some examples in some of my later slides and this is actually a friend of mine who his name is Alvin who worked with me on this project and basically I wanted to share with all of you that sensitivity is not just about caring about work or about your perspective towards work but it is also about the people you work with and you got to really know who you are working with and understand where they are from and basically connect with them at a relationship level. So, and the second value I learnt which I connect to at a subconscious level is taste. I might be an ask to say that taste is something that people either have or not but it is usually it is towards different things like I may have taste to something and my taste would be different from someone else's taste and automatically does not mean that the other person does not have taste because the other person has taste in different things and there is also the sort of I would not call it a concept but acquired taste where if one is exposed to a certain environment for a long time then they would feel emotionally towards things like things like food or things like color or things like music for example and an example of that is the art of color picking. For me that is something that I usually do based on my situation or based on my mood or where I have been to at that point and it usually comes from the gut it is an in question of intuition and a lot about that about taste in general can be sort of hinted through a documentary I watched sometime last year it is called zero dreams of sushi it is about a Japanese sushi maker who is really passionate about his work he is pretty old I think he is probably in his 80s and he still makes sushi every day in Japan and this is a quote from that documentary all of you should watch it at some point if you get a chance if you already have it. I really connect with the second bit which says the quality of ingredients is important but one must develop a palette capable of discerning good and bad one can always argue what is good and what is bad but in the overall sense when it comes to taste you would either frown or smile when you think of something and that is actually taste and another value I learnt was humility which actually has been through some funny experiences and interesting experiences I have had over the last four years and it is something that is usually learnt over time and it is learnt over time by working with people from different cultures people from different backgrounds and entrepreneurs engineers designers creative directors the more people you collaborate with the more you learn and the more humble you become and at least for me collaboration I have found that leads to really fruitful results and how I came to learn about this was through a story I wish to share with you which happened during my design college days and this was during a color and form course and as you can see I am a fan of Batman and I tried to show a color and form transition of the Batman logo symbol and during my semester jury in design school I had a panel of four or five people and one of them was really a senior an old designer who has been with the college for a very long time and he asked me a question towards the end of my presentation asking me so what have you learnt Ram and I told him the basic things anyone would tell my friends learnt a lot about design and things like that but I ended with a note of saying that I mean he was I forgot to mention he was the art professor of color and form so I told him I really enjoyed the color and form course and after your course I actually felt that I my sense of color has improved and that's when someone got up from the panel and told me that Ram Professor Parmar in his 50 years of service not once has he uttered those words his color sense has improved and starting that day onwards working with different people I learnt what it is to sort of value humility and that's why I feel sensitivity taste and humility are really important qualities for any designer because we never stop learning we should never stop learning and I'll leave everyone with this quote from one of my favorite authors Carl Sagan he's written a book called pale blue dot apart from cosmos which basically talks about the universe and the humans relationship with the galaxies and stuff so next I'm going to show you something a little different a little bit more about things I value and things I care if you ever get a chance to work together in the future this might be immensely useful for all of you which are basically the South Indian Thali I love rice taking apart android phones bit by bit and of course Batman let me jump right into it I'm sure I would have bored everyone already today I'm going to talk about two really important aspects when it comes to android the first being how do you care when you're designing for android and how do you care for details let's go into android I want to once again touch upon android's philosophy for a moment they started off really young everyone knows right from the g1 days to the nexus 5 today and how I see this evolution is it's just change android is about change every year new things come out not only in the UI and in terms of technology in terms of platform so just the constant need to change is a mindset which might be worth just zooming out and thinking about for a second and today even things like it's grown beyond the phone right it started off with the phone and today people are thinking about new use cases for it it's gone to wearables people are sending phones into space to do research universities are exploring robotics lots of interesting things are happening in android and just to get out of that bubble of let's not just think about phones or apps let's go back and see what it was envisioned for and then it might be easier for us to know how important it is to design something after that and so how do we do this how do we how do we go into android design some of these things that I found useful in my experience are definitely designed for a specific culture it's very important because people have different behaviors people think differently your idea of how something should work might not really work for everyone design for scalability which means don't just think of design as a process towards the end which says okay let's just make this pretty but think of how long it will be used for and how valuable it will be and pick your own process which means different companies work differently or if you're working on your own as most of us here are entrepreneurs we might be used to a certain way of working but the ability to say let's change that so that things work best for that moment is really important I'll jump right into it what do you mean by design for scalability designing is not just about designing screens wireframes and apps when you think of design think of your entire environment think of the organizations organizations you're working with think of the processes they follow think of what they do the people talk at all in the in the organization to communicate with each other do they hang out do they get to know each other well think of how other people see what you're building or who you are which is your identity which could be a brand your website the people you work with partners apart from your products and services which is the core of what everyone's used to and what I've been used to all these years and maintenance because once you build something it's out there people are going to use it and design is for people they have to feel comfortable they have to feel happy delighted so think of how that lifecycle of post usage and post updates and improvements could be as well so when you think of all these things when you're sitting and either designing or creating or developing or testing an app or anything for that matter you will make sure that it will be more informed and it could probably survive the test of time just to touch upon something that most of us are familiar with android has guidelines everyone's use them some of them don't use them it's important to know the rules first like once we know the rules and understand them like we just spoke about what it means to understand something first before you actually get down to doing things because once you know the rules you can break them and you break them right I wanted to show another example of something that we've spoken about in the design process everyone must be aware of that if not there is a design process where one would start from research and go on to figuring out how concepts are built and then how designs are built then how they are fine tuned and how they are tested and how you get feedback from the user so that's a generic design process in a nutshell but an example I want to talk about are flows how do you define tasks how does one task blend into another one and this example is basically a small shopping sort of an app where you have a list of items and you want to add them to your card so first you search for these items and they show up as you can see I think they're detergents and stuff but to add them to card you can either tap on the small add button at every list item or assuming that you want to change quantity you tap on the left side and you get a quantity selector and you can then add that many items to the card now what if in some cases you want to add loose items like rice or dal or something the only difference here is that once you tap on an item to change quantity you tap on the quantity to change it to a loose item quantity so you want 1.5 kilos of rice so I just wanted to touch upon the fact that when you think of flows right think of tasks basically search add items and then you add it to your card or search add items and then add change it to lose items and then you add it to card so what this conveys is that you break anything down into simple contextual tasks it need not be just screens it can be anything it can be about your website it can be about your marketing material it could be anything and don't overload a task with features because there could be several ways of changing quantity for lose items right maybe that's not the ideal way maybe there is an ideal way but the minute we start adding new features to each task the overall flow gets really bulky and you lose users in that process people won't find it useful to use so that was about flows and the next important thing is about color sorry for this I would like to show an app by this developer called Nada Fima it's an app called cliffhanger it's free you can download on the play store I just wanted to sort of I really appreciate this app for its usage of color if you can actually if you have used the app or seen the app it's basically just one main color it has a lime green um and it has one accent color which is red which is minimally used but all the other colors are shades of gray so there isn't actually five or six colors being used the actual sort of photogenic feel of the app comes from the content itself which are photos which are photos of the TV shows so a combination of these actually make the app look really clean and beautiful so when you think of adding colors to your visual design you don't necessarily have to go all the way by choosing seven or eight colors and the other thing is about typography typography is again something that's very taste driven as I would call it the point here is that when you're designing something you don't need to use a lot of gradients you don't need to use a lot of shapes to make things beautiful just plain content upfront can make things look really pretty and the way in which content is laid out as Pooja was saying also in terms of priority or in terms of hierarchy that really shows what people should look at first and understand so and about iconography so think of what kind of icons you want to use a lot of people use flat icons these days it's become a trend but think of whether you want want real shapes or you have to be abstract whether it's 3d or flat whether it's detailed or simple because these decisions will impact that whole environment I spoke about before what if you're printing out a small envelope and you need an icon will a detailed icon work in that case probably not so the decisions you make when you think of the larger system will impact your entire design process so to summarize we've seen designing for scalability is designing think a design language rather than just beautification and these are the items so what do you mean by designing for a specific culture you can probably give icons in text fields because people may not understand English a semi-literate audience may not understand English or think behavior where this behavior is really common in India you have signs written on walls lamp posts advertising things or even the way people use phones people use dual SIM cards in India to save to save money they have multiple phones they have shared phones and you have the missed call culture so it's really important for the audience you're designing for they have certain behaviors it's important to know what those behaviors are because only then will your design be sort of thought through this is an example of someone storing their music collection a lot of us store it on our computers through folders of artists or genres and things like that but this particular person had an interesting way of storing music through the people they got the music from so if Kiran gives me a music there would be a folder called Kiran and that's how that person relates to music so all these behaviors are really sort of important to know as I mentioned then there is trust when you're designing something for people the first thing you ask is how can you make them trust you how can you make them trust what you're making an example of that is the katha system in Indian shops where if you don't have money and you're buying something the shop owner says okay pay me tomorrow I'll just write it down that's because they know you and they trust you so these kind of behaviors are really important how do you generate trust make things clear to them make things apparent don't hide things let them do what they are already good at and specifically in India things like adding brand logos or recognize brands actually work like if you have if you're doing a payment service if you have a public bank logo somewhere that people are going to trust you more so think of those kind of things so to summarize think people using technology and not just technology because in the end that's what really matters and what do I mean by pick your own process get feedback from as many people as is humanly possible you need not just get feedback from your peers get feedback from the development teams the support teams the marketing teams or even your parents your siblings even someone who passes by on the street if if at all that that could work and think of ways in which you can improvise that's what I that's juga think don't think just always in in process and a little bit about iteration and this is an example of how I've been used to iterating design I don't do like say weeks and weeks of wireframe revisions and then handed it over to the development teams and then work with them to get it created the first design would always be created but the rest of the iterations would be done in code directly so I some of my friends developers I work with them to sort of make sure that actually the design changes in wireframing actually happen in the SDK encode and a way to do that is basically let the develop developers share their drawable folders with you in android because then the designer actually controls the drawable folder you can make changes there directly you can add things to it and inform them rather than always zipping assets and sending it to them and or or if you have a better workflow for doing that and there are some tools that even let you automate this this one is called cut and slice it automates asset generation and photoshop you can check it out it's cut and slice dot ma is the website this is a video there's another paid tool called png express which I'll skip due to the lack of time and to summarize when you think of a process think context what works for you and what works for that process you're building for which is basically talking to a lot of people and making sure you have a efficient process to iterate let's get into the next section which is about care in detail here I'll I wish to talk about some really fine finer grain details on how you can step it up a notch how do you go beyond just designing for the usual an example that inspires me is the is the Japanese toothpick if some of you could have seen this it has a small set of wedges on the side and what it's used for is basically once you've used the toothpick you can break it to indicate that it's already been used or you can keep it on a table and rest the used to toothpick on it so it's a really nice way of paying attention and detail into something as simple as a toothpick and how do you go about doing this how do you go about paying that much attention in your work pay attention to content and think of things like transitions and animations so getting into content really think about spelling and grammar this is I think one of the earlier boxes of the galaxy s2 for the Indian market where they had a typo right there in front which said super amulet plus instead of super amulet and that really stands out you should be able to sort of pick these small errors everywhere and make sure that they don't happen because people see them and when people see them it's really bad for the product or whatever you're sort of making think of tone of voice a friend of mine actually designed this this is the cloud magic mail app which is newly launched the sort of tone that you wish to give make it friendly make sure people appreciated make sure people connect to it things like a quick heads up it may take a few minutes for things to settle down just to give you a hint rather than saying loading dot dot dot think of consistency an abstraction consistency is basically when google is probably one of the many examples but it's a pretty fairly reasonable example where their flight card that shows up in google now to give just before you get on a flight it gives you just the right information at the right time as they call it it works consistently even across platforms like even when you open a ticket in your email it shows the same kind of card so people expect that in every case like you shouldn't change expectation an abstraction which basically means that don't show all that extra information in that ticket which isn't really useful show exactly what is needed and that those are things that you actually think about when you're thinking of content think of accuracy of content rather than just placeholder text most designers use loram epsom for everything so lots of other products like zomato clear trip feedly are good examples of presenting good content and think about detailing which basically is i don't know if all of you can see this clearly but there is a one pixel mismatch in some of google's own icons and this could be due to various justifiable reasons but just the fact that they are not consistent the ability to pick that one pixel out is really important and even sometimes this doesn't happen on all phones i think it's a layout layout issue which is basically a small pixel level mismatch in the calculator app you've seen this i i think in some of the smaller resolution phones this doesn't show up but in the bigger xx hdpi phones it it is just off by two or three pixels and that's just not right and that is sensitivity i mean feeling that it is not right and wanting to do something about it that is key and this is the newly launched newstand app which i really liked an animation there i wanted to share is basically as you're scrolling up the icon that shows up for that category just sticks up to the action bar or this other app called expense manager where when you're writing your expenses and you discard it it just drops down so these smaller level details that might not be really important in the process or in the beginning of developing an app is actually really important it makes a difference in the end because when someone's using it that's what interests them that's what delights them so to summarize think microscopic think microscopic not only in screens um going back to that slide of the environment think about this level of detail in every aspect of the design you do because that's what shows and having said all of that um i'd like to sort of wind up because i think i've overshot my time almost first we spoke about care and android which will which is basically to help everyone think holistically of the platform and then see how these principles apply to how you can actually design and how do you step it up a notch when you go into details so one sort of encompasses the other so initially you need to have the basic design principles like scalability working the specific culture all of that working but then you add the other layer of detail because that makes your that actually differentiates what you're creating from everything else hope these stories like shed some light into helping everyone make meaningful and compelling ideas come to life um any questions it's a question of taste i've just used uh robot oh because i kind of like it yeah so um i i notice you're using robot or right at the start i'm looking at this is okay someone's using robot oh that's uh that's interesting because the use of robot oh outside of android has been fairly limited it's a font that doesn't really work well on low resolution displays especially like a projector screen it's it's designed for high-rise um so i was curious about why you chose to use that for slides uh for some reason i actually uh connected with the font's symmetry in some way uh right when ice cream sandwich came out i felt that the combination of weights was something really worth uh playing with and i wouldn't say it's some the best font i would choose but it's something that i like and uh since this i wanted to talk about android i thought it's just obvious that i go with robot oh of course i had a different font before i actually uh finished the presentation uh it was called benton sounds i have a question yeah i think multiple set of questions uh how do you design for design the button sizes for different finger sizes how do you design when you keep left-handed right-handed people in mind or people who prefer to use your app with a single hand instead of both the hands correct so um we could logically approach that uh in in one way of doing things and the other is just seeing what works well just by gut it's very important to obviously first go through the layer of logically creating that by saying what is the minimum touch affordance for the sort of device you're using uh which could be like 48 uh device independent pixels or even more than that but then after you actually go over the basics you go beyond what the guidelines are what the basics are you actually see for what you're building uh contextually if what you're feeling is right in terms of the size you use or the placement you use or where how many times you're using it things like uh one-handed use so you won't obviously keep them too far apart but those are basic logical decisions that have to be sort of thought about initially but on top of that use your layer of gut like use what you feel is the best way to do it so i would do it that way hi um i had a small question um you spoke about designing for culture which works for a whole host of you know applications and products today but a lot of things that we design are not for one culture and you know just the fact that we're putting them out there on something like the play store means that you know you can't say so you you're not indian this app was not for you you can't download it you know you can't do that sort of a thing so how do you sort of work with the friction between designing for one culture and designing things which you know a large number of people actually understand well or know how to use um really yeah so one of the first ways in which that actually affects you is when you simply move from a left to right to a right left reading order your whole layout changes then how do you deal with that then again it's a problem that can be approached both logically and design wise logically the first thing would be to sort of design a universal layout that would work for both it's probably just one of the methods you can choose probably there is a better way of doing it to see if you design a universal system how easy it is to adapt to the cultural system if a change needs to be done say for example the left right or left but the other way of doing it is actually thinking about how you're presenting content don't restrict yourself to layouts see if there is a better way to present content and and choose that mode instead because that mode would most be most appropriate to that culture like saying I'm trying to see if an example I can give what about the use of icons the use of icons is a way to transcend cultural barriers definitely and one thing about usage of icons is that you can always debate to say if an icon actually communicates something to a specific culture but there is always a small learning curve in technology if you see how mobile mobiles were adapted in India people really did not know how to use smartphones but they used it anyway to do and it just took a couple of weeks to months to sort of go over that learning curve because the need was so great so if the need of communicating something through icons is that great then even if the icon is not exactly probably suiting that context assuming that the learning curve would be overcome and it would be a much more effective approach than probably localizing text because you can't localize text for all cultures right because sometimes you can't just do a translation or a transliteration you actually need to rephrase or present content differently for a particular language so I mean did that help see you guys were talking about icons and how you know I mean I suppose it's very easy for let's say urban people across the world to understand the same icons but it's very different if you suddenly start to look at people from you know different places I mean I have a friend who's mom is a designer and she works with rural people in India and they once did this really simple icon for saying that you know when you put water in a ghada outside your house make sure you cover it so they made a simple ghada and they put a line over it which they figured would look like a plate and then they put like a tick sign over it the people in that village had never seen a tick sign they thought when you keep water in a ghada you should cover it and put a spoon on it like it was something that was so completely out of the realm of their visual vocabulary and we are so sort of caught up in the narrow bubbles that we live in we don't even realize that there are people who live maybe 200 kilometers away from us who don't know what a tick is and that's fine but you know we use these icons not realizing that that actually happens so in in in many ways it's really important to understand that visual vocabulary because only if we understand that language and speak the same language or at least put ourselves in their shoes we'll know what would be useful to that audience like from an urban perspective it's very easy to just use a tick mark but just that decision to use a tick mark itself is wrong so one must take the time and effort to sort of know what it means to sort of know that culture and then make something for that I'm sure that would be the ideal approach so I've been you know I mean studying visual communication on digital media so per se website or mobile apps and stuff for the last three to four years more so as an entrepreneur since you mentioned sensitivity you know in your presentation I feel that there could be some kind of a correlation between the tone of voice as well as the color story so I'd like your views on it then again I think it really boils down to what you're trying to convey and how would people find that enchanting so if you're trying to use a specific tone of voice to bring about a friendly perspective to someone to say that make what your building is approachable then you can make that perhaps you can make that better through the addition of color as well if that's what you meant or more so to do with solid colors right I mean I find that you know I mean solids per se like blue green and also the darker tones they don't do too well with a more affable personality when it comes to the tone of voice you're talking about the intensity in colors itself yes of course you can definitely experiment with that too okay I think to make something really stand out you use probably a lot of people use bright but then again that's culturally independent like that works differently for different cultures I think we have two more minutes any questions hi Ram which are here just a quick question on the recent changes in the UI side that's flat UI design concepts what I felt is for example when Apple actually drastically changed from their previous design language to flat concept so it looked like they changed it and then started building a story behind the change of the language so what's your take on it as a designer I'm sure they would have thought through a lot of these aspects but I mean I have to agree with you when you say that it hasn't been thought through entirely sorry sorry and that it's something that somehow I see it as a the absence of the visionary right now is causing a lot of change which they're going through and of course that's just my opinion I'm sure that will also evolve over time anyone else thank you