Material Design?

Now that Android 5.0 is around the corner and the final preview images and SDK are already released, do you have any plans for implementing any material design guidelines? E.g. the new 'hamburger' menu, colored or fully transparent status bar, etc.

Yes - new hamburger and other generic Material stuff (alerts, settings, etc) almost immediately, colored toolbars a bit farther off as part of a larger reskin (they look terrible with the current type design, has to be adjusted a bit). Which in general I think you'll like since it will make things less iPhone-ish.

(Personally I'm not a fan of Material at all - takes a lot of bad ideas from iOS 7 and only a few good ones, and feels like it's forcing us to adopt not only Google's UI but also their larger UX even when it's not a good fit for the app - so I'm kind of torn now between back porting it to Android 4 via AppCompat or only making it available on 5 and letting 4 users stick with nice clean Holo)

mikelove said:

Yes - new hamburger and other generic Material stuff (alerts, settings, etc) almost immediately, colored toolbars a bit farther off as part of a larger reskin (they look terrible with the current type design, has to be adjusted a bit). Which in general I think you'll like since it will make things less iPhone-ish.

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Awesome that you're already working on it!

mikelove said:

(Personally I'm not a fan of Material at all - takes a lot of bad ideas from iOS 7 and only a few good ones, and feels like it's forcing us to adopt not only Google's UI but also their larger UX even when it's not a good fit for the app - so I'm kind of torn now between back porting it to Android 4 via AppCompat or only making it available on 5 and letting 4 users stick with nice clean Holo)

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Why bother with two versions of UI? Everything but the colored status bar can be used on 4.x. And truth to be told, most people are pretty excited about material design. I guess, if you want to be on the safe side, you could make a thread and post some screenshots of what you have and ask for suggestions in order to make sure that everyone's going to be happy.

A lot of Android fans may be excited about Material Design, sure, but the same was true with Apple fans on iOS 7 - didn't change the fact that a huge number of our users hated it. And while it would certainly be easier to give everybody the same UI, I'm a little worried about changing things again on people so soon after last summer's redesign - a lot of our users are not especially computer-savvy and already had an uncomfortable couple of weeks getting used to that new design.

What we might end up doing is adopting AppCompat now (so we only have to design around one theme) but keep it somewhat Holo-ish in its details - gray (but Material) toolbars, e.g. - and then introduce other changes more gradually: tinted toolbars in one update, CardLayout in another, and so on. A lot of them can be done as easily-rolled-back options, too - we're pretty thorough in our use of themes as of Pleco 3 and that makes app-wide changes relatively easy to apply - so if we pull the trigger on blue toolbars and get a bunch of angry emails about how distracting that giant block of color at the top of the screen is (we have in fact had quite a few emails of that sort over the past year) we won't be so committed to it that we can't easily add a checkbox to go back to gray.

But basically, having ridden out a month or so of angry emails about v3 on iOS and then another month or so of them about v3 on Android, I'm inclined to take a more careful / conservative approach to UI changes going forward.

mikelove said:

But basically, having ridden out a month or so of angry emails about v3 on iOS and then another month or so of them about v3 on Android, I'm inclined to take a more careful / conservative approach to UI changes going forward.

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That is bound to happen with any significant change to the UI, positive or otherwise - people take some time to get used to it and are much noisier when they are unhappy about it than when they are happy about it. To begin with I was a bit sceptical of the new UI in v3, but given the choice I wouldn't go back to the v2 UI now.

I started using Pleco on my iPad (yeah, I know this is the Android forum, but the point still applies) when it was v2 and hated it. I couldn't figure out what buttons meant and the UI was, for me, completely confusing. So, I seldom used it, instead looking up things online. Then v3 came out and it was SOOOOOO much more intuitive. I thought the changes were phenomenal. Since then I've purchased the professional bundle and several additional add-ons. I understand that people get attached to 'how things were', but at the same time, the UI changes can help bring in more customers if done well.

@alex_hk90 / @JD - thanks!

I certainly don't think change in general is a bad idea, but v3 caused me to question the wisdom of doing everything in one update - it does have the benefit of making a big splash / getting people who might have dismissed our app for poor UI before to take another look, but it can also be quite jarring for our users.

If we'd made the same changes we made in v3 over the course of several releases, we might have lost a little bit of buzz but we would have also created a lot fewer (temporarily) unhappy customers.

Update: I think we've actually come up with a way to make full Material work without too heavily overhauling the rest of the design - can do more tweaking later but a couple of other minor adjustments seem to be enough to make colored toolbars not look awful.

Looking forward to seeing some screenshots.

Put one up on Facebook but we're still refining it. (search field will probably get a drop shadow, action bar will probably have a shorter drop shadow, bottom bar needs some more depth, and we may end up extending the search field rectangle to include the dictionary switch button too)

Pretty nice actually. But yeah, the drop shadow's a bit too long. Also, what about a colored status bar (the one with the clock etc), like here for example?

One more thing, what do you think about making the search field the same color as the action bar, sort of like Google Play's search box?

We'll definitely have a colored status bar, yes - we're using AppCompat so that has to be set manually and we haven't gotten around to adding the code yet.

A colored search box feels like it makes things harder to read - Google Play can get away with it since they're doing fewer searches and people don't need to see what they're writing that well, but with Chinese characters we need every bit of clarity we can get. (the Phone app likewise has a white search box floating on a colored action bar, so it's not an unusual approach)

Here's a shot of the definition screen, with a tinted status bar, slightly more refined shadows, and - I know a particularly big item for @Yiliya - Android-style tabs at last:

Normally I do not care very much about design - I would prefer some more flashcard functions instead. But with light colors on white or on other light colors some people will enjoy the result only in night mode.

Fair enough, but as of Android 5 it's a somewhat more "Android-like" look, and it also saves us a lot of time - means that we only need one color version for each icon instead of two (and since we're doing everything at 3 different pixel densities that's a *lot* of icons). If we get a lot of complaints we can always consider a third theme option, though.

Man, that's some sexy design.

Well, Lollipop is finally out! Any updates on the progress, mikelove?

Beta any day now, had to spend another week on iOS bug fixes in the interim.

Beta finally available here. Extra wait because of an Android-5-necessitated rewrite of some document reader code, and once we were doing that anyway we availed ourselves of a convenient opportunity to add support for pagination. (still no EPUB but a goodly portion of the groundwork for that has now been laid at least)