Designing Form Screens

Form screens are an essential part of user interface design in many ways because their history is a lesson in how not to do things. Most applications need to capture input from their users at some point, and you need input widgets for that, but you should always consider the minimum amount of information you need to ask the user for, rather than try to get all the information you may need in the future. This approach will keep the user focused on the task they are trying to carry out. Presenting them with a wall of input fields is overwhelming to most users and breaks their focus, which in turn can lead to them abandoning what they were trying to do with your application.

This chapter is focused on form screens, and will walk you through a bit of their history before ping into a method for actually designing form screens. This approach can and should be reused whenever you need to design a screen for an app. It's always important to take a step back from your code work and consider how things will look and fit together for the user; it's often the difference between a successful app and failure.

In this chapter, we'll develop a practical form screen using Android Studio and the layout editor. Starting from an empty template in a new project, you'll learn the following:

• How to break up and then arrange a form layout to be most effective for your users
• How to use resources to keep your user interface consistent
• How to style widgets to help the user understand what the widget should be used for
• How to build drawable resources that respond to state changes