UI CHALLENGES
—> Digital vs Print
– Statical design that will never change versus something that is dynamically changing based on user’s influence and device specific factors.
– Static VS user flow.
—> The case of Android: many devices and densities
– Fragmentation: a challenge that a designer cannot control but need to face in order to provide the best experience possible.
THINK USER
—> Focus on the user and user flows instead of pixel perfect design.
– User-centered: the user is the most important thing.
– User will provide the interaction that will trigger the flows.
– App’s purpose is de facto given the user.
HOW TO ACHIEVE THAT UI WISE?
—> Anticipate the user actions and provide a smooth experience: know and use native Android patterns
– Use Animations to provide guides towards actions.
– Don’t be afraid to experiment.
– Provide the user with something he’s already familiar with (native patterns).
– User should be naturally able to navigate through the app and reach his goal.
—> Material Design looks good, let me tell you why
– It has been developed to work everywhere, it’s an adaptive design.
– Since it is using beautiful semi-flat style, it gives you the power to easily create a hierarchy for the content and guide the user.
– Easy to understand.
—> Guide the user: hierarchy of the content matters
– User should not think where the next call to action is, it shall be there in front of him.
—>Think adaptive and define breakpoints to ensure your design is flexible
– There is no pixel perfect design.
– The design will evolve from one screen to the other and through the experience, because it is interactive.
– The designer needs to define k screens, the breakpoints of the design and he should imagine how the design will evolve in between, keeping in mind that it shall always keep the level of visual quality and experience he designed on the k screens.
– The designer will never be able to test the design on all the screens and conditions, so he should rather focus on the best solution for most of the screens than pixel perfect solution that will work only in one case.
THE IMPLEMENTATION CHALLENGE
—> Let’s discuss feasibility and nativeness first
– Having a talk with a developer when you are brainstorming can help you understand the challenge and define the best way to deal with the UX/UI.
—> Developer vs designer: what we can learn from each other.
– Developers and designers not always speak the same language and they focus on different things: talking together can help both to build up a better product, find better solutions and lead to a smoother process.
—> Team work and communication are always better than guidelines.
– Guidelines are still needed though, not all developers are nice.
– Sitting together and use a pair-programming-alike style will help you both in creating something nice and cleaner: from the developer point of view, he will be somehow forced to extract correctly the values and refactor his layouts to make them more flexible. On designer’s side, it will give a runtime overlook on his design.
– Working together will help you being more involved in the product and with that you will gain ownership over the product.
—> Why sanity check matters.
– Because designers like to torture developers. 
– It’s the perfect time to recap all the design (you both might have been focused more on details than on general look) and further improve the process: the more you work together, the faster you will get in achieving the results.
CONCLUSION
—> There is no pixel perfect design on Android.
—> If you focus on the user, think adaptive design and work as a team, your app will be way better.
