Prettifying my Android App? [closed]

Question

I've been "Googling" for a while now but I am coming up empty on any decent tutorials on how to "prettify"my android app.

Currently, my android app is fully functional but all it is is a bunch of buttons,text on several views.

What options or techniques exist to make it look beautiful, other than changing the font type, size or colour. Also changing the background colour or image isn't exactly a job done.

I appreciate any guidance on this!

Update

I am not looking for a designer. I just want know how else is someone supposed to design beautiful android apps - surely its just not the XML? Is it just about making a great background and fitting everything around that?

Answer 1

I know the pain you're going through - I'm still coding my app but I'm also on my third design iteration. UI design is definitely out of my comfort zone but then again, it's good to push yourself into other areas, now and again, if only to appreciate the skills which the pros have. That said, check out the new Android UI patterns here and you should definitely consider things like a colour scheme, fonts and overall look-and-feel. There's another good article here by Reto Meier about his approach. Good luck.

Answer 2

Although it is sacrilege of the highest degree, you could sneak a peek (sic) at the UI guidelines for iPhone.

In general, there are two approaches to making a good looking UI.

The first approach is to specialise. Pick a particular resolution, set your font sizes in stone, use precisely positioned images for rounded corners etc.

The second approach is to generalise. Make sure that your layout looks 'okay' on most of the screen sizes. Make sure it still looks good when the user changes the font sizes (etc). Try to keep the graphical elements away from the text elements (e.g. you might put a graphical border around the edges of your app - whereas the specialist would have a graphic filling the whole background with 'holes' for the text to go in)

Thirdly ( generalisations are made to be broken :D ) you can make your app skinnable. It is hard for one person to come up with a design that everyone likes. But if you allow the user control over the ui elements (especially colours and contrasts) they can personalise it and achieve something that is better for them than anything you could come up with. Everyone else on the planet might hate the colour scheme they pick, but they feel that it is perfect.

Fourthly ( sorry ) you can try customising the controls. On the iPhone (for instance) the built in buttons that come with the API are incredibly ugly on anything other than a white or light grey background (their shadow is wrong) - but you have no control over the appearance of the button! You can't even change its colour. So in order to have buttons that don't suck, you pretty much have to roll your own custom control. I highly recommend looking at the Donut Games iPhone apps - they have a 'big round bouncy button' that they re-use a lot.

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Don't clutter your app.

Make sure your controls are a fair distance apart. Find someone with 'fat fingers' to user test it for you (use a frozen sausage if you don't have any friends).

Keep in mind that a touch UI is fundamentally different from a mouse and keyboard UI. For starters the tip of a mouse is 1x1, the tip of a finger (according to Apple HIG (and again, apologies for mentioning Apple)) is 40x40 on the old (non-retina) displays. Presumably it is 80x80 on the new one. That means a finger is somewhere between 1600 and 6400 times less accurate than a mouse. One implication of this is that no control should be smaller than 40x40. If you were making a boardgame for instance, that would imply that (on older iPhones) that a chessboard is about the smallest your squares/hexes should get (8 across at 40 pixels is 320 pixels, the same as the phone width).

You can see this effect (a control being too small) with the default Apple info button (the i in a white circle) - it is something like 18x17 pixels, and sometimes can be quite hard to hit (sometimes you get it first go, it creates an inconsistent feel to the app). Cunning developers stick a 40x40 invisible 'panel' behind the button and delegate the clicks that go through to that back to the button.

Don't use small controls!