Parentheticals & Excursions

When I’m tussling with the design of a UI for an Android application, it’s often the case that I’m struggling to find some extra screen-space in at least one activity. So I’m always on the lookout for how other designers and developers have tackled the problem in their applications. Here are three interesting adaptations that I’ve noted as I’ve used my phone.

Music

I use the stock music player to listen to music, audio books and other recordings. I always get a little satisfaction from noticing how the application neatly switches the “Now Playing” control from being a button in portrait orientation into an extra tab in landscape, where vertical screen-space is always at a premium (also - nice attention to detail: gently separating the extra tab from the other standard ones).

StreamFurious

I’m a very occasional user of the StreamFurious streaming audio application. But I’ve used it enough to discover this gem.

Audio applications (like the Music app above) that play tracks into which you can ‘seek’, can elide “Stop” and “Pause” since there is no difference in how the track will be resumed: the application will just seek to the position at which play stopped/paused and start playing.

But applications that stream live radio can’t do this as easily. Pausing implies that the application needs to continue running, constantly buffering data from the stream until the user resumes play. Stopping, on the other hand, is generally taken as an indication that the application should cease reading the stream.

StreamFurious avoids having two buttons (one for “Pause” and one for “Stop”) by retaining the regular Play/Pause button and using a long-press during play to fully stop the stream. Perhaps this is a common idiom, but it’s new to me and I find it elegant and intuitive.

GMail

Guessing from the approach taken, the developers of the GMail application on Android have particular difficulties with implementing a UI for it. Preserving GMail’s distinctive conversation view has resulted in HTML controls that masquerade as native Android components (I guess a list of web views was just too problematic).

In recent versions of the application, to make it easier for users to follow which email is currently being viewed within a conversation, the email header pops-up over the conversation below at exactly the point where the information would have been hidden by scrolling, and scrolls away at exactly the point where the email message ends. This is an efficient use of space, because the design ensures that the header is only occupying space on-screen at the same time as the email message it relates to (which is also the only thing it ever obscures).

I think this is a really nice touch, and demonstrates the effort that has gone into producing some of these UIs, especially since I have a hunch that the overlay is produced using Android widgets and not HTML, which presumably means careful tweaking of both the HTML and the layout XML to make the switch between both seamless.