To material or not to material

Background: I supervise the product development of my own start-up and deal with mobile related challenges every day.

Perhaps most of you already heard about Material Design of Android 5.0 OS Lollipop. For those who don’t know yet - material is all about adding back the 3rd dimension (z on top of x-y) to mobile interfaces.

So what’s the big deal? Most UI-UX people explain material by just talking about the famous “floating button”. Floating button is just an example but it doesn’t help explain why material can be so important. Long story short: material helps pack “more content, focus and action” in “relatively small mobile interfaces”.

So - the big question: Should you design your new Android app based on “Material Design Guidelines”or not? The default answer seems to be yes, why not? But indeed going material is difficult because:

• Too few UI people know Material Design guidelines well (indeed most UI people I worked with hardly knew Android Guidelines, yet alone MD).
• MD requires a UX overhaul, ie re-organize all the elements along the 3rd dimension. This can be a substantial investment yet failing it is quite dangerous (you end up with users unable to find the major action).

Answer? I don’t know the answer, if you should go material or not :) But here is our story (spoiler: we happened to end up with material, yet we had no intention at the start)

We recently tested our beta app in the field. The main takeaway of the test was - our app had so much to say and so many functions to play around, our users got completely lost in it (I will share more of this in the coming days, some stories to learn from :-)

So we decided, our new UX had to solve at least one major problem - “all the critical information and functionality will be easy to discover and retrieve. i.e., the app will always guide the user on what to do next”.

In order to create a smooth experience, we re-designed our data architecture and created new flows based on the core user stories. It turned out that - we could not just classify information/functionality into isolated silos (i.e. Menu tabs, inboxes and etc.) and expect the user to dig in and find what is needed.

Rather we needed an interface that smartly brings “the top priority to the surface” and therefore getting the user to complete the key actions and not missing them (I will provide visual examples once the app is in the store).

In order to bring the top priority to the surface, we needed a “surface” and therefore also “below surface” as well :) We therefore used the 3rd dimension for critical info layer. Each info is actionable, redirects the user to related section of the app. However, the user can easily “go home” to the next most important item.

Once the UX got completed, we were surprised to end up with something that fit in the Material Design, although we didn’t plan for that at all. Indeed MD helps solve complex interactions loaded with extensive data. I will explain other benefits of MD with new examples, stay tuned :)