Preface

User interfaces represent the single most important aspect of any modern mobile application. They are the primary point of contact with your user, and a good user interface can be the difference between the success and failure of an application. This book will guide you down the path of user interface excellence, teaching you the techniques of great user interface design for Android, and showing you how to implement them.

Building user interfaces is all about building for the user and making their lives easier. It's important that the user interface helps the user achieve their goals within the application without distracting them. This means that each screen must serve a purpose, and every widget must work for its place on the screen. Widgets that are seldom used are distractions and should be moved, or removed, from the application entirely.

User interfaces are not just about pretty colors, fonts, and graphics; they are at the heart of the user experience within an application. How you create your user interfaces is built on the underlying structures you build in your applications code base. If the foundations of the application are not solid, the user experience will suffer. Every action taken by the user should have a quick and positive result, reinforcing their confidence that they can reach their goals within the application.

In this book, we'll be exploring not just how to write user interface code, but how to go about designing great user interfaces as well. We'll look at how lower layers like data storage can impact the user experience, and how to leverage the Android platform and its support libraries to build better applications, applications that look great, run fast, and help ensure that the user can understand the application quickly and is guided through with minimal distractions.