It is well known that one of the main issues with the Android platform today, is the inconsistent user interface among the Market apps and the lack of standard guidelines. The different manufacturers using the Android platform developed their own graphical user interface, based on the pure Android default design, and this created a big variety of non great references and “standards” for designers.

[The HTC Sense - a graphical user interface developed by HTC for mobile devices running Android.]

Luckily Matias Duarte, the Director of Android operating system User Experience at Google, announced at CES 2012, the Android Design, a website for learning how to design exceptional Android apps.

The goal of the new site is to provide guidelines for designing and integrating apps with Ice Cream Sandwich, and help developers to make their apps usable and beautiful. The site describes the creative vision, and the design approaches, used while designing Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4.0) UI.

The site is very usable, allowing designers to learn about the different devices, displays, styles, and themes. It also contains a very useful patterns section, providing many references, and examples, which guides you while planing and designing your application.

Another cool section is called “Building Blocks”, where you can find the different elements, including: tabs, lists, buttons, fields, bars and dialogs. These will help you to use standard design elements and make your app consistent with the general look & feel of the Android platform.

This site is an important tool for designers and it comes along with much better user interface provided by Google, as they expanded the design approaches introduced in Honeycomb tablets to all types of mobile devices. Design standards always come together with thoughts about creativity, as they make it difficult to be design-innovative because of the tight guidelines, and borderlines. I think that Apple’s approach proved that providing guidelines make apps consistent, usable, and still designers can make them beautiful (see: Tweetbot, linkedin, Path, and Flipboard). Now we are out of excuses and it is about time to make apps look beautiful on Android.

Resources: 
* Android Design website:  http://developer.android.com/design/
* The image was originally posted to Flickr by closari at http://flickr.com/photos/9472272@N08/4636918166