Gadgetory

hi my name is Gary sim try and draw thority were armed tech 2015 here in santa clara and i've met up with roland from ICS hello Roland hi are you doing I'm good thanks tell me about your job here well I am the engineering director for integrated computer solutions we are a consulting and services firm and we provide user experience development for touchscreen devices okay right so we all use using devices every day on our phones microwave ovens even thermostats what are some of the challenges to designing a good user interface well the greatest challenge is to take time and incorporate the process of designing a user interface early from the very beginning in your development project this is especially important if you are under a very tight deadline in a very short time frame user interface is something that has to be done right up front we say lead by design I will give you an example for example we were challenged at some point to create IV Island vehicle infotainment prototype in just nine week it's not just the design it was the design plus the prototype despite this very short time frame we gave our UX engineers time to lead into the project and to take time and understand the challenges that they have so essentially what we did is they came out with a flow diagram of how the IV I was supposed to work and then incorporated ideas sketches that resulted essentially into a user interface diagram that then was transitioned and translated into a working prototype so this working prototype was then implemented by our engineering department within nine weeks deadline we made the deadline and deliver the prototype to our customer so we'll have a look at that user interface in a moment but the key is don't make the user interface a secondary thing it's a primary thing absolutely because your product is going to be used by human beings so you need the HMI the human machine interface needs to be needs to have a dominant role in your process well after a few more iterations and some additional time of course we ended up with a very realistic in vehicle infotainment system that I'm showing here which has the typical functionality that you find in modern cars such as climate applications media applications the phone integration or a diagnostic step that can show you the state of your vehicle in a very appealing and graphically attractive manner with transitions and animations as needed so we're and tell me what tips would you give to Android UI designers well over the past few iterations and releases of Android beginning from KitKat but all the way up till now to lollipop and marshmallow google has invested a great deal of material and into the user interface designer so the biggest tip is read and understand about material design try to unify your applications follow the design guidelines and try to understand what you usually want to do with your applications and make that as easy to do as possible so that will give them consistency with with other applications and of course Google thought a lot about these guidelines and what they mean for a good user interface that's exactly true and that's why they are there and that's why you should follow them that's as a developer you should familiarize yourself with material design and the possibilities that this gives you as a developer to interact with your users in a very straightforward and unified manner now if any of our developers who are watching this are struggling with UI design you offer some services as a company how could you help them absolutely so we do offer a consulting services we can help them with designing and understanding the workflow of the applications we come in house and we can also work from remote understanding with the promises that they struggle with we can help with sketches with workflow analysis with interview process of your users we can help with graphics design in the end and we can help even with implementation services and Android and iOS that's a fantastic well thank you for your time stay Roland thank you