Design Principles of Smart Launcher 3
Debrief of UI/UX design for Smart Launcher 3 on Android.
Moved by reality
What is a good starting point to design a digital interface? Which experiences can be inspiring?
Reality is a good starting point, it offers -almost- all the elements we need, to create a full-immersive experience on a digital interface.
Smart Launcher is an innovative launcher, featuring minimalist design, low resource requirements and a user-friendly interface that allows you to launch any application with just a few taps.
Going beyond the simple description, Smart Launcher is an organizer of your digital and immaterial belongings.
It takes whatever can be kept in a phone and gives it a new shape.
This is an important role.
In our team we think of Smart Launcher as a butler that tidy your room.
So, let’s come back to reality and imagine your desktop belongings in a real situation, they should look more or less like this:
Not all the products on your desktop are useful in a daily-work situation, but we constantly need some of them.
How we can apply this to a digital Interface?
Copy/pasting from reality and simplifying the visual experience will create a new concept of Launcher.
Using the same technique we can notice that our room is full of cabinets, and inside them there are other products divided by their function.
This principle generated the second main page of Smart Launcher: the
auto-categorized drawer.
Why Simple? Why Smart?
There are dozens of meanings for “Simple” and dozens for “Smart”. Understanding the importance of these words makes it easier to understand why we kept them as values.
We really fit in one of the meanings of simple: easy to understand.
To Create an easy-understandable UI means to create
something accessible by everyone.
An human-centered UI, indeed, should be understood by workers, by students, by elderly and so on.
We believe so much in accessibility that every change we do in our UI/UX is tested first by non-techie people, all the interactions with the UI must respond to what the user expect could happen.
Because of designed “simplicity” also less-tech-skilled persons can approach the UI and the more-skilled ones can do the same actions faster and effectively.
If it needs a tutorial, it means it’s not simple enough.
Another shade of simplicity is the absence of ornaments, or what we call “noise”.
Defining an action hierarchy helped us to deleted every unnecessary element from the UI that wasn’t strictly necessary for a quick-usage of the device.
Design a “Smart” product means learn and quickly respond to people needs.
While the project born as a tool to fulfill personal needs, with the diffusion and development of the product it now fulfill multiple and different people needs.
We believe in human-centered design: a product — but also a single function of it grown by unsatisfied needs and develop itself following the changes of these needs.
How we can build “Smartness”?
The key is learning from people.
If you really want to understand human behaviour you have to consider it into a community and not itself, alone. Being human a social-animals, most of our interactions in the real-world are with other people; this attitude is not different in the digital world.
it’s not a matter of chance that design is moving into systems and internet-of-things is becoming a near reality.
Digital communities are an amazing tool to understand people.
Smart Launcher Google+ community is the perfect place where people can share (proudly!) their customized/pimped Smart Launcher, where they can suggest features, help each-other, express thoughts about a new features or new concept proposals. It’s also the place where a single-person idea became multi-person idea. Often these proposals grows into features that more than 2.000.000 people use everyday.
We believe the community is a resource for the product development and not just a testing area
People are not just “taken in consideration” but are a living part of the design process; Google+ indeed offers useful tools to collect numerical data such as “Pools”, but we also need an human data and this is solved by some Co-Design Sessions where we push people to think and let them express not a choice but a thought, some thoughts turns into design insights.
In this way we can have design directions to follow to achieve the final visual identity of the launcher.
Why customer journey map doesn’t works. (for us)
The customer journey map is an oriented graph that describes the journey of a user by representing the different touch-points that characterize his interaction with the service.
It documents the customer experience through their perspective, helping you best understand how customers are interacting with you now and helps you identify areas for improvement moving forward.
There many and many different statements of what a customer journey map is. Above are written just two of them with 2 mins-research time.
If we consider Human Behaviours acting into an environment it’s difficult to state that our actions can be explained as a series of actions going from A to B. If we try again to imagine ourselves into our room (just to keep the same real-space in mind) we could do hundred of actions with thousand of sub-actions. It’s impossible to sum them as “5 main actions from A to B”, the risk is to consider only what we think is necessary.
The same happen in a “home” digital environment.
When in our team we asked ourselves to describe the main flux of activities that a person could do with Smart Launcher we understood that were too many: considering the different type of people with their different needs, their different ways to accomplish what they what to do, their different time of usage, their different background and usability capabilities we understood we were fucked up.
We realized we had to think in a different way.
What we noticed is that in daily life people act with a set-up of activities giving them different priorities. We noticed also that people change these priorities according to variables as time, resources, environment etc.
We applied this concept to Smart Launcher defining hierarchies of target-actions aimed to understand high-priority activities allowing the user to have a flexible navigation.
It happens that you are in hurry and you call a contact directly by the search-bar, late in the same day — in a chill moment — you will call someone else by opening first the dialer, then searching for the contact and finally call him.
It could also happens that Mark is more tech-addicted, he set up an app on the Flower by double-tap, and use it every time the app by the homescreen.
Lucas has a “pen and paper” attitude, he will probably always first open the drawer, find that app and finally open it.
Well-know difficulties
Difficulties are part of the game, if there are no difficulties it means you are standing between the past and your achieved goals meanwhile everyone is surpassing you.
Design a Launcher is different than design an App. Just consider that usually we use apps for short/mid period in time during the day, instead a launcher is 24h 7/7 days active.
Designing an app it’s like designing a room of an apartment, while designing a launcher it’s more like designing your living room.
When you have to renovate a room it has to be consistent as the rest of the house but it keeps its own identity (kids room different from parents room, bathroom different from laundry etc.).
The most important aspect when you have to renovate your living room instead is to build a livable space. Being the central element of an house and being the connector to the other rooms it has to be really consistent with the rest of the house and it has to play with the same visual language of the rest of the house.
For Smart Luncher this is a big tread:
How we can build an “home” that can match with all the different style of the apps icon?
How we can match the visual style with people customized elements as colors, wallpapers, icons, etc?
SL3 faced and solved in part these problems: the introduction of Google Material Design, the use of shadows, colored default icons and adjusted brightness of the background are some the improvements did in this release.
Keep it Simple, Light, Fast is a cost
Simple, light, fast are the values of Smart Launcher and the reason why people love it, every single new solution that born in our mind has to answer to the S.L.F. requirement, it is something we have to deal with everyday.
The actual package is big 3.1 mb, you can download it everywhere and in any situation (also with 2G).
To do that we simplified the process to build SL3 and reduced the raster-image package, but mostly we avoid non-meaningful elements.
Animations, for example, are useful to transport users between navigational contexts, and let user understand changes in UI, but a trade-off between beauty and lightness is a must-do if you want to let your application works on low-performance phone to extend your user target.
If you are interested to have a look to the final results here some links.