Application design [closed]

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I wanna get some help from you guys about, design. I've been working on an application for android, for a while and whats left is the design part. After a few hours of trying and working i'开发者_开发百科ve realized that im not actually not that good at it.

So, i wanna ask all of you:

Where do you get your main ideas from?

How do you start?

What's important to think about, to highlight, and so on?

Any other tips?

Thanks!

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1) Keep all touch surfaces big enough for fingers

Many developers coming from desktop development make the mistake of introducing too many small tap surfaces designed for mouse coursers rather than fingertips

2) Make it obvious what is tap-able

Indenting buttons works wonders for usability.

3) Watch the font size

In general, never go below 8pt fonts. They become unreadable. For anything you expect a user to read on the go (on a moving train), stick to 10pt or larger. (Personal experience, YEMV)

4) Leave out animations

It's always tempting to put animations in menus and screens. Generally, leave them for transitions. On static screens, users will rather be distracted.

5) If necessary, split across several screens

A user has a much easier time processing 2 well-built, easy-to-understand screens of data after one another than making his/her way through one overly complex screen including all those items.

6) Since you also have the iPhone tag, try the iOS Interface Guidelines

If you are a registered developer, you can access them from the Developer Portal. Also, check out this years WWDC talks - a few of them covered interface design.

7) For actual graphics, check out these sites

1. PSDGraphics (3$ royalties)
2. MySiteMyWay (royalty free icons)
3. CGTextures (royalty free textures)

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0x90 has good answers. As you already did a lot of work, I assume by design you mean layout design, not program design I would also add:

1) Make sure it can run on different screen sizes, orientations, and screen densities

Currently over 75% of Android's run on a normal-sized screen with high density per inch. But even that has four big types - both WVGA800 and WVGA854 screen sizes in either portrait or landscape orientation.

Google recommends for niceness that you design for both portrait and landscape, but if you do decide to save time and do only one, make sure to freeze your program to that orientation.

17% of Android users use the older or cheaper HVGA screens, so I design for those as well. I usually check I work in WVGA800, WVGA854 and HVGA in landscape and portrait mode, and if I have time I do the other ones.

2) Don't waste time making your own icons which won't look good anyhow

When making or getting icons for your program (which you will have to do), http://findicons.com and http://iconfinder.com can show you some free-for-commercial or pay icons you can use. They are artist made and will look better than anything you can spend hours doing unless you're an artist. Some people swear by Android Asset Studio, I have not used it yet.

3) XML or programatically?

As you're a programmer and not an XML schlepper, I believe it's a good idea in general to at least know how to do all layout in code. Once you do it at least once, then do it in xml, as it is more convenient to do things in xml with Android for many things.

For very static pages, I find xml works very well. Even if the elements (TextViews, buttons etc.) in a page are static, with the values changing constantly, xml works well. If the elements of a page can change a lot depending on certain conditions, I prefer doing it all in code. It depends on what works better for you, some people are happier being more xml-heavy in everything.