SEO Werkt!

The following is this week’s Radar DDB 10am One Thing that I wrote for the DDBlog.

TV, newspapers, human resources, taxis and hotel rooms. So many industries have been and continue to be disrupted by the internet and social media. The latest is the very act of making a payment. American Express has already integrated its offers with Foursquare (check-in to redeem), with Facebook (sync, like, save) and with Twitter (sync, tweet, save) but now other start-ups believe they have the secret sauce to revolutionise the payment industry.

The recently launched Cover app is self-styled as the “Uber of restaurants” – your credit card is kept on file and charged after every meal, tip included. No awkward moments of waiting for the cheque, no more using your phone to work out how much to tip. Just book, eat and leave.

Online and on the social web, Chirpify connects your credit card to your social activity – users simply need to comment or reply “buy” to content in order to purchase that item. The “social commerce and payments platform” promises no linking to other experiences, no shopping carts, no complicated checkout process. Just an instant sale.

On a personal level, flattr allows users to “tip” content creators by sharing a set monthly donation across all the pieces of content they have liked. The service has been around for a few years, but has recently expanded from a simple button included on blog posts to integration with some of social media’s hottest sites like Soundcloud and Instagram.

Social money is a new way of thinking about paying for things on and offline. It takes an existing process and reimagines it, redesigns it, disrupts it by using the power of digital and the social connections digital can forge. Do you think this digital disruption will stop at money? We think it has a long way to go.

Cover, covered by Wired: http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/dine-and-dash-guilt-free/

The One Thing is a result of the daily 10am meetings held in the DDB Canada offices, where our digital teams meet to discuss new online trends, tools and technologies. Today’s One Thing was written by Ed Lee, Tribal DDB Director, Social Media.

For an archive of the 10am links, visit our Pinterest board.

Follow Radar on Twitter

Photo: Steve Snodgrass/Flickr

SEO is about your customers not the search engines

Nope, we haven’t gone mad; search engine optimisation really is all about your customers.

Most SEO companies are now playing nicely and not condoning devious techniques such as link buying, hidden text and generally exploiting every loophole and short cut they can find.

Why?

Apart from the fact that they were attracting hefty penalties for their clients, they’ve now realised that search engine marketing is more like social marketing and everything must be centred around the customer not the search engines.To be successful on line today, your strategy must include not only general keyword optimisation for your website’s structure and content, it must also involve social media marketing aimed at your customers.

No, that doesn’t mean sending out a raft of marketing messages every minute in the hope that you’ll wear down your customers and make them buy from you. Instead it’s about engaging with your audience, providing them with useful content and information and optimising your web content to reflect your customers’ needs.

For many start ups all of this can be quite confusing so this 10 minute video by Maile Ohye of Google might help. In 10 minutes she talks you through some basic search engine optimisation techniques for start ups to help you get on the right track.

It’s well worth a watch, so grab a coffee.

“

The challenge for VCs is that it is easy to spend a lot of time going nowhere on advised deals. Good advisors know that the way to reach the highest price is to keep investors guessing about whether they are going to win the deal. As a result there is usually at least one VC who invests a lot of resources and then loses. And when you lose a deal as a VC you are left with very little, and often precisely nothing, to show for your efforts.

I am much more excited, however, to see an email from someone I respect who is helping a company because he is on the board or board of advisors. I generally feel that my chances of success are much higher from this kind of introduction because it will be less widely shopped, and, ceteris paribus, it will get more attention than an advised deal.

”

–

– Nic Brisbourne, Advisors: they don’t help VCs, but they can help start-ups via The Kernel

This is one of the reasons that I recommend to my startup clients that they create a real advisory board, people that will play an active, although very part-time role working with the company, and that the introductions from those advisory board members are worth a lot. 

I don’t approach VCs with seven deals a month, so if I were to contact Nic Brisbourne with something, he’d likely take a meeting. (Nic’s a friend, by the way.)

Blog monetization start-up Skyscrpr is launching a new service for small and medium-sized blogs to sell, manage, and place their own ad inventory … all in about 5 minutes, flat.

“The site actually springs out of our own needs in prior publishing start-ups,” co-founder Jacob Reiss told me yesterday. “We were trying to monetize through advertising — our own direct-sale advertising.”

But the creation of media kits, management of inventory, and billing/collection were simply too onerous. Realizing that this was a problem for most small and medium-sized bloggers who don’t want to just collect AdSense pennies, they built the ad-management and optimization solution they wanted for themselves.

“Out of the gate we’re focusing on three things: placement, management, and the actual sale,” sad Reiss.

Placement is simple: after signing up and entering the site, publishers are presented with a framed view of their sites. Then they simply drag and drop ads right where they want them.

I tried it on my own personal blog … the grey block at left under my tag cloud is an ad unit — a skyscraper, ironically — that I simply dragged into my sidebar:

After setting up ads exactly where they want them, bloggers simply include one line of Javascript code into their sites to activate the ads … which means the solution works with any blogging platform, including WordPress, tumblr, SquareSpace, and even venerable old Blogger.

To manage ads, publishers log in to a dashboard and review sales, performance of existing ads, and suggestions for improvement. Currently, the suggestions are just that, but soon Reiss expects to have a more sophisticated solution:

“We’re getting to a point where soon we’ll be able to auto-optimize ad placement and mix,” he told VentureBeat.

That means that, after initial set-up, Skyscrpr would vary ad selection, placement, and frequency to maximize blogger revenue. This feature will not be available at launch tomorrow, but Reiss expects it within a few months.

The sale itself is, of course, the most critical component: nothing else matters without it.

“Tomorrow we’re also launching automated media kits,” Reiss said. “We create a beautiful infographic-style media kit automatically based on your Klout, Compete.com, and Twitter information.”

Then Skyscrpr allows advertisers to purchase inventory right there on the publisher’s own blog, and handles all the payment details.

At launch only direct on-site sales will be enabled, but an ad marketplace that will aggregate all participating bloggers’ inventory and allow advertisers to purchase audiences and demographics is forthcoming.

“You’ll be able to slice and dice and pick exactly what you want,” says Reiss.

Skyscrpr is funded with angel and founder money, plus $20,000 from the GrowLab accelerator/incubator program. The company is currently raising a seed round which it anticipates closing in late August.

Here’s the publisher or blogger on-boarding process:

Image credit: Jorge Salcedo/ShutterStock

Filed under: Entrepreneur, media, VentureBeat

I am not sure if you followed the Digg saga, but here’s what happened lately: after the huge decline we all saw one company came out of the woods with an interest to buy the social news site. Called Betaworks, they supposedly paid $500,000 for Digg (remember they were valued at $160 million back in the day…).

Here’s a quote from the article Once a Social Media Star, Digg Sells for $500,000 that appeared on the Wall Street Journal:

Digg confirmed Thursday it sold its brand, website and technology to Betaworks. The price is a pittance for a company that raised $45 million from prominent investors including Facebook investor Greylock Partners, LinkedIn Inc. founder Reid Hoffman, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.

Digg received higher offers from bidders that included technology and publishing companies and start-ups but ultimately decided Betaworks had the best plan for reviving its brand, these people said. In May, Washington Post Co. hired 15 members of Digg’s engineering team—more than half of the company’s overall staff—for its SocialCode digital media subsidiary.

After the purchase Betaworks said they would be rethinking Digg completely, and that a new version, called version 1 or V1, was coming.

Well, that version is out and you can go take a look already (Digg.com). And if you ask me it looks like they want to be the Pinterest of social news.

Sure, the visual model that Pinterest uses gained a lot of attention and got pretty successful, but I am not sure if that is the right one for a) social news and b) Digg’s community.

Time will tell I guess. What do you guys think?

---

Original Post: Digg Goes Version Pinterest – I mean Version 1

Start up businesses nowadays aim to include social media marketing with their promotional efforts. That’s because this strategy has been proven to boost their web traffic, help them reach a wider range of audience, and leverage their brand further.

However, not everyone is successful with incorporating social media to their marketing mix. In fact, it requires a lot of time and money, which is the two biggest saboteurs for start ups. That’s why newbies are advised to start with the basic: Knowing what you need.

Every business that wants to jump on the social media marketing pool must have the following:

Blog

In the World Wide Web, it is always said that content is king. That’s because it is the part of your online marketing that could bring traffic to your business’ website. If you know how to write a compelling content for the right audience and optimize it, your blog will help you establish your brand’s credibility online. Furthermore, it will help you generate qualified traffic for your website, which could be converted to loyal customers.

Twitter Account

Twitter is a great way of promoting your business and sharing your content in 140 characters or less. And because you have limited characters, this micro-blogging site lets you bring out your creativity to get your message across in a short-message format.

Additionally, it is also an effective tool for marketing research. Through Twitter, you can check out what your competitors are doing to gain a large and active follower base, see who follows them and who they are following. That, way you can have an idea on how you can take advantage of this social media.

Facebook Pages

There are two ways on how you can promote your brand through Facebook. First, create a Facebook Page for your business. Second, create a Facebook Page for the “face” of your business—whether it’s the owner or a renowned spokesperson of your brand.

What makes this social networking giant ideal for social media marketing is the fact that it now has about 900 million users. This would enable your to reach millions of your potential customers.

YouTube Account

Not every Internet users have the time to read a lengthy text. Some of them prefer to watch a video when they want to learn something on the web. That’s why it will also be helpful for your social media marketing strategy to add video content.

 

With these social media basics, even the most budget restrained and time deprived entrepreneur can start to create an online presence that could help boost their business.

 

Source: Social Media Icon Set by Nishad Muhammad | All Free Vectors

The post Getting Started with Social Media Marketing appeared first on About Social Media.

While the eyes of the world are focused on the global competition in London at the moment, it’s still quite rare to hear of English start-up entrepreneurs able to successfully compete globally with the Yanks. But one London based entrepreneur who might buck this trend is Dan Wagner, the founder of the successful publishing platform M.A.I.D and the current chairman of Bright Station Ventures. Indeed, his latest ecommerce venture, mPowa, has been in the news recently because of accusations from Jack Dorsey’s Square that Wagner’s mPowa has been copying Square’s images in their promotional material. But when I sat down with Wagner in his central London office, he not only rejected the idea that mPowa had borrowed anything from Square but he told me that American entrepreneurs are “slightly parochial” in their approach to the increasingly global Internet marketplace.

Wagner’s ambitious play with mPowa and with Powa, the technology that powers it, is as an international payments platform specifically designed to conform to the needs of local merchants around the world. And while Jack Dorsey announced earlier this month that he intends to take Square international, Wagner remains confident that mPowa is a technological device much more suited to non-U.S. markets. That said, Wagner acknowledged to me that the English digital ecosystem lags behind Silicon Valley. What’s missing, he confessed to me, are angels able to write checks to fund start-ups from scratch. And until this changes, he said, the eyes of the world will always be focused on the U.S. when it comes to successful innovation in digital start-ups.

Rumors are flying around about Apple investing strategically in Twitter.

Apple Is Said to Discuss an Investment in Twitter – Evelyn Rusli and Nick Bilton via NYTimes.com

Apple doesn’t have to own a social network,” Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, said at a recent technology conference. “But does Apple need to be social? Yes.”

Twitter and Apple have already been working together. Recently, Apple has tightly sewn Twitter features into its software for phones, tablets and computers, while, behind the scenes, Twitter has put more resources into managing its relationship with Apple.

Though an investment in Twitter would not be a big financial move for Apple by any stretch — it has $117 billion in liquid investments, and it quietly agreed to buy a mobile security company for $356 million on Friday — it would be one of Mr. Cook’s most important strategic decisions as chief executive. And it would be an uncommon arrangement for Apple, which tends to buy small start-ups that are then absorbed into the company.

But such a deal would give Apple more access to Twitter’s deep understanding of the social Web, and pave the way for closer Twitter integration into Apple’s products.

Twitter has grown quickly, amassing more than 140 million monthly active users who generate a vast stream of short messages about their lives, the news and everything else. An Apple investment would give it the glow of a close relationship with a technology icon, and would instantly bolster its valuation, which, like that of other start-ups, has languished in the wake of Facebook’s lackluster market debut. In fact, word of the talks comes at a time when some are asking whether expectations for the potential of social media companies have gotten out of hand, and shares of Facebook, Zynga and other companies have wilted.

Apple should take $20B and buy Twitter.

Twitter otherwise could spiral off into being a media company, pouring its energies into competing with HuffPo and Mayer’s Yahoo. Or worse, being acquired by Yahoo, AOL, or Microsoft.

Apple needs to bake social into a future version of all its OSs, before Google does.

Android is an attractive platform for developers, but not all designers share our enthusiasm. Making an app look and feel great across hundreds of devices with different combinations of screen size, pixel density and aspect ratio is no mean feat. Android’s diversity provides plenty of challenges, but creating apps that run on an entire ecosystem of devices is rewarding too.

There are hundreds of Android devices with different screen sizes and resolutions. (Image credit: Android Design. Used under Creative Commons license.)

At Novoda, we build Android software for brands, start-ups and device manufacturers. We often work with visual designers who are new to Android. The new Android Design site is the first resource we recommend. You should definitely check it out. However, there is plenty more to pick up! The goal is to create apps that people love to use. Thoughtful UX and aesthetically pleasing visual designs help us get there.

This article provides a set of practical tips and design considerations for creating Android apps. I’ve tried to include something useful whether you’re crafting pixel-perfect graphic assets, finding an optimal user flow or getting your hands dirty developing XML layouts.

Pixels

Visual design is hugely important in the perceived quality of an app. It might even improve usability. Most developers have some exposure to UI patterns, but developers with visual design skills are rare. They really need you. Delivering high-fidelity mock-ups, drawable resources (i.e. graphic assets) and guidance to developers is the best way to deliver an aesthetically pleasing experience to the end user.

Scale Nicely

Android is a platform of many screen densities. There is no set of resolutions to target, rather a density independent measurement scheme for graphics, widgets and layouts. This is covered in depth in a previous Smashing article and the official documentation, so I’ll just add a mention of this neat web tool for calculating density pixels.

Optimize graphics for different screen densities. (Image credit: Android Design. Used under Creative Commons license.)

It’s not always practical to hand optimize graphic assets for each density. The platform can scale resources down reasonably well. However, it’s always worth testing designs on low-end devices and optimizing resources that scale badly.

Be State Friendly

Touch states provide important confirmation of clicks and selections. When customizing widgets such as buttons, it’s important to create drawables for all necessary states (such as default, focused, pressed and disabled). The focused state is essential user feedback on devices that support directional pad or trackball navigation.

Size is important too. Touch input is imprecise and fingers occlude the UI as they interact with the screen. Touch targets should normally be at least 45 density pixels in width and height.

Use Fonts

Android has two fonts: Droid Sans and Roboto. Roboto was released in Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4). It’s been compared to Helvetica, but it’s a little condensed, which is great for small screens. You’re not limited to Roboto or Droid Sans, though. Any font can be packaged within an app in TTF format (with some memory overhead).

Roboto is Android’s new font, introduced in Ice Cream Sandwich. (Image credit: Android Design. Used under Creative Commons license.)

Use 9-patch Drawables

9-patch drawables allow PNGs to stretch and scale nicely in pre-defined ways. Markings along the top and left edges define the stretchable areas. The padded content area can optionally be defined with markings along the bottom and right edges. 9-patches are essential for creating and customizing UI widgets.

Create scalable widgets with Draw 9-patch.

It’s possible to create 9-patches manually, but the Android SDK comes with an nice, simple tool called Draw 9-patch. This makes it quick and easy to convert a regular PNG in to a 9-patch. It highlights the stretchable area and displays previews of the resulting drawable with different widths and heights.

Handle Design Legacy

Honeycomb (Android 3) and Ice Cream Sandwich (Android 4) modernized Android’s visual design with the Holo theme. However, some device manufacturers have a poor reputation for keeping platform versions up-to-date. Some of today’s most popular devices will never be upgraded to Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Meetup app makes everybody feel at home with separate Gingerbread (Android 2.3) and Ice Cream Sandwich widgets.

So what can be done? There are two options. Deliver the current look, feel and experience to all devices or use a separate set of widgets styles and drawables for Gingerbread and below. Both approaches are valid. Would your users prefer modern or comfortably familiar?

Showcase the Brand

Sometimes clients fear that sticking to recognized UI design patterns will make their apps less distinctive. I think the opposite is true. As patterns like the action bar become ubiquitous, they fade into the background. Users can spend less time wondering how to use an app and more time appreciating how elegantly your app solved their problem. That experience is much more valuable for the brand than a one-of-a-kind UI for the sake of differentiation.

The original Color app had an online FAQ for the UI controls. Make sure that navigation is intuitive.

Branding can be expressed through design of icons, drawables and widgets, as well as in the choice of colours and fonts. Subtle customization of the standard platform widgets can achieve a nice balance of brand values and platform consistency.

Create High-Fidelity Mock-Ups

High fidelity mock-ups are the best way to communicate visual design to developer responsible for implementation. The Android Design website provides templates in PSD and other formats. It’s important to try mock-ups out on real devices to confirm that they feel right, with UI components sensibly sized and placed. The Android Design Preview tool allows you to mirror mock-ups directly from your favourite design software to an attached Android device.

A practical approach for mock-ups is to work against the screen characteristics of the most popular devices. Ideally, create mock-ups for each alternative layout required by screen size or orientation.

Polish

Attention to detail is key. Become involved in the development process to ensure that your designs are realized. As a developer, I would always prefer to work with active designers than those who deliver mock-ups and resources before disappearing into thin air. Designs need to be iterated and refined as the app develops.

Animated transitions provide some visual polish that many Android apps lack. Developers might not include such things on their own initiative. Make them part of the design when they make sense. Aside from transitions, animations are a great way to keep users distracted or entertained when the app needs to make them wait.

User Experience

Android has patterns and conventions like any other platform. These help users to form expectations about how an unfamiliar app will behave. Porting an iOS experience directly to the Android platform almost always results in a poor user experience.

Back is a platform affordance in Android. In contrast, labeled back buttons within the app layout are the norm for iOS.

The back button is the best illustration of the interaction differences between Android and iOS. All Android devices have a hardware back button or on-screen navigation bar (including back button). This is universally available as a feature of the platform. Finding a back button within an Android app layout feels weird as an Android user. It makes me pause to think about which one to use and whether the behaviour will differ.

Design User Flows

At the very simplest level, Android apps consist of a stack of screens. You can navigate in to the stack with buttons, action bar icons and list items. The platform back button allows you to reverse out of the stack.

The action bar mirrors a web convention, where the app icon to the left of the action bar usually takes you to the top level of the app. However, there is also the up affordance, intended to take advantage of structural rather than temporal memory. This is represented by a backwards facing chevron to the left of the app icon. This signals that pressing the icon will navigate one level up in the information hierarchy.

The up affordance allows the user to navigate up an information hierarchy instead of going to the top level of the app.

The purpose of the up affordance might be subtle at first. Android apps can have several entry points in addition to the launcher. The Intent system allows apps to deep link each other and home screen widgets or notifications might take you directly to specific content. The up affordance allows you to navigate up the information hierarchy regardless of where you came from.

Try user flows on potential users with wireframes or mock-ups and iterate. Prototypes on real devices are ideal because they allow you to test in realistic mobile environments. This might seem like a lot of effort, but remember, you only need to try things out with a few users.

Be Platform Consistent

UI patterns are your friend. It’s much better to think of these patterns as tools than constraints. Users would prefer not to have to learn to use your app, so patterns provide familiar hints about how to navigate and interact.

Action bar is the most widely adopted Android pattern. It tells you where you are and what you can do. It’s a native feature of the platform since Honeycomb and the excellent Action Bar Sherlock library makes it available on older platform versions too.

An example of the dashboard and action bar patterns.

The dashboard pattern is also quite widely used. These grids of icons are usually presented to the user when they launch an app. Dashboards provide top level navigation and describe the primary areas of the app.

I worked on the Songkick app, where we used a dashboard draw out the content of the app with full-bleed images.

The  workspaces pattern can be implemented with the ViewPager component. This allows users to swipe screens left and right between content. This can be used in conjunction with tabs to provide a more fluid browsing experience with tabbed data.

ViewPagers allow users to swipe left and right. Page indicators or tabs make this navigation discoverable.

The ribbon menu is an emerging navigation pattern. This allows us to launch the user directly into content and provide the top level navigation in a menu, which slides in from the left side of the screen when you press up.

The ribbon menu is an alternative to dashboard navigation.

Tablet optimized apps often take advantage of multi-pane layouts. A single tablet screen can display the content of several separate phone screens side by side. Optimising for tablets can involve creating several alternative layouts for different screen widths. Sections of UI can be designed once and laid out in different configurations for different screen sizes. Multi-pane layouts help to avoid overly wide list items and sparse layouts.

The Economist news app uses multi-pane tablet layouts so users can explore the hierarchy of content on a single screen.

These are familiar and proven UI patterns. They’re the best tools for starting to sketch out your app layouts and navigation. However, they shouldn’t discourage you from trying something new. Just ensure that the app behaves predictably.

Design Responsively

Android is a platform of many screen sizes. The devices that I can lay my hands on in our office compose a spectrum of screen sizes from 1.8 to 10.1 inches (as long as we ignore the Google TV). With variable screen area, Android has something in common with responsive web design. There is no getting away from the fact that design and implementation of a responsive experience across the full range of devices takes a lot of work. Supporting every screen is the ideal, but there are also sensible strategies for coping with the diversity of the platform.

Knowing a little about your target users and popular devices can help focus efforts and avoid premature optimisation. A good default strategy is to target popular, middle sized phones (3.2″ – 4.6″) and then optimize as necessary with alternate layouts and user flows for particularly small (<3″) devices and tablets.

It’s always best to be orientation agnostic. Some devices have physical keyboards that require the device to be held in landscape. The on-screen keyboard is also easier to use in landscape. Text entry on touch screens is awkward an error prone, so let’s at least give our users the benefit of the landscape keyboard.

Understand Mobile Interactions

People interact with mobile apps differently from websites or desktop software. Mobile apps rarely have the undivided attention of a user and most interactions use touch input, which is not as precise as we might like.

Mobile interactions can often be measured in seconds. We recently developed a location-based app that allows users to check-in at bars. We counted the clicks on user paths such as check-in, considering whether each step could be avoided or simplified. We specify everything that an app should do as user stories. The most frequent stories should be as quick and easy to accomplish as possible. It’s particularly important in this scenario, because the user might be under the influence of alcohol…

Optimize First Use

First launch experience is crucial. Apps are often installed in response to a real world problem. If the first run isn’t satisfying then the user might never return. If the app requires sign up, offer preview functionality so that users get a feel for the experience. They probably need to be convinced that it’s worth filling out that sign-up form. Also consider using analytics to measure points where users drop off in the launch and sign-up process.

Many apps launch with a tutorial. This is usually an admission that the app is too complicated, but if you’re sure that you need one, keep it brief and visual. You might also want to use analytics to confirm that a tutorial serving a purpose. Are users that complete the tutorial more active? How many users just skip the tutorial?

Bring the App to Play

User experience considerations shouldn’t end in the app. It’s worth putting a bit of thought in to the Google Play Store listing to ensure that it’s immediately obvious what the app does and why the user would want it.

These Graphic Asset Guidelines will help you to create promotional material suitable for the various contexts and scales in which they appear. Some of these graphics are a pre-requisite for being featured too.

Layouts, Styles and Themes

Android has a visual layout editor and it’s getting better all the time. However, I still find myself developing XML layouts by hand. This section gets down to implementation details, covering some best practices for crafting maintainable and performant layouts. Visual designers might want to skim this section, but some awareness of implementation details can’t hurt.

The most general purpose layouts are RelativeLayout and LinearLayout. RelativeLayout should be favoured for efficiency, whilst LinearLayout is useful for distributing space between views using weights. GridLayout was new in Honeycomb. This is useful for creating complex layouts on large screens without nesting. Nesting layouts too deep is bad for performance and code readability alike!

Let the Framework Do the Work

The Android framework provides automated resource switching based on folder structure. This means that you can have separate graphic assets and layouts for different screen sizes and densities by arranging them in the correct folders. It goes much further than that. For example, you could switch color resources for different platform versions or even animation durations for different screen sizes.

The framework provides automatic resource switching.

Since Honeycomb, it’s also possible to switch resources on available screen width in density pixels. This is a move away from the bucketed small, normal, large and extra-large screen size switching. It facilitates responsive design and allows multiple layout switching points (perhaps switching to a tablet-optimized layout at 600dp with another alternative at 800dp). It’s typical to have multiple layout files with different configurations of the same components for different screen characteristics.

State list drawables make being state-friendly easy. These allow you to specify different drawables for different states of a UI component in an XML file. As mentioned earlier, representing states properly provides important user feedback.

<selector xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android">

  <item
    android:state_focused="true"
    android:state_pressed="true"
    android:drawable="@drawable/my_button_pressed_focused" />

  <item
    android:state_focused="false"
    android:state_pressed="true"
    android:drawable="@drawable/my_button_pressed" />

  <item
    android:state_focused="true"
    android:drawable="@drawable/my_button_focused" />

  <item
    android:state_focused="false"
    android:state_pressed="false"
    android:drawable="@drawable/my_button_default" />

</selector>

Extract Values

It’s good practice to keep layout XML clean of explicit colours and dimensions. These can be defined separately and referenced in your layouts. Defining colours and dimensions separately promotes visual consistency and makes things easier to change later on. Extracting these values allows switching of dimensions on different screen sizes, orientations and platform versions. This is useful for tweaking padding for small screens or increasing text size for readability on large screens, which tend to be held further away from the face. Perhaps res/values/dimens.xml contains:

<dimen name="my_text_size">16sp</dimen>

whilst res/values-sw600dp/dimens.xml contains:

<dimen name="my_text_size">20sp</dimen>.

Use Styles and Themes

A good technique to keep layout XML maintainable is to separate the styling concern from the positioning concern. Every View in a layout needs to have at least a width and height attribute. This results in a lot of boilerplate, which you can eliminate by inheriting from a set of base parent styles.

<style name="Match">
  <item name="android:layout_width">match_parent</item>
  <item name="android:layout_height">match_parent</item>
</style>

<style name="Wrap">
  <item name="android:layout_width">wrap_content</item>
  <item name="android:layout_height">wrap_content</item>
</style>

<style
  name="MatchHeight"
  parent="Match">
  <item name="android:layout_width">wrap_content</item>
</style>

<style
  name="MatchWidth"
  parent="Match">
  <item name="android:layout_height">wrap_content</item>
</style>

Recurring sets of attributes can be moved into styles. Widget styles that occur almost universally throughout the app can be moved into the theme. If a particular type of button always has the same text color and padding, it’s much cleaner to specify the style than duplicate these attributes for each occurrence.

<style
  name="MyButtonStyle"
  parent="MatchWidth">
  <item name="android:padding">@dimen/my_button_padding</item>
  <item name="android:textColor">@color/my_button_text_color</item>
</style>

We save four lines of attributes when we add the button to a layout. The layout file can be concerned with just the positioning and unique attributes of widgets.

<Button
  android:id="@+id/my_button"
  style="@style/MyButtonStyle"
  android:text="Hello, styled world!">

You can take this further by overriding default button style in a theme and applying it to an Activity or the entire app in the AndroidManifest.xml.

<style
  name="MyTheme"
  parent="@android:style/Theme.Holo">
  <item name="android:buttonStyle">@style/MyButtonStyle</item>
</style>

<style
  name="MyButtonStyle"
  parent="@android:style/Widget.Button">
  <item name="android:padding">@dimen/my_button_padding</item>
  <item name="android:textColor">@color/my_button_text_color</item>
</style>

Optimize

The include and merge XML tags allow you to drop reusable sections of UI into your layouts, minimizing duplicate XML when the same set of views occurs in multiple layout configurations.

<include
  layout="@layout/my_layout"
  style="@style/MatchWidth" />

A relatively new addition to the Android Developer Tools is Lint. This tool scans the resources in a project and creates warnings about potential performance optimizations and unused or duplicated resources. This is incredibly useful for eliminating clutter as an app changes over time and it’s certainly worth checking lint for warnings regularly during your development process.

Debug

Sometimes layouts just don’t turn out how you expected. It can be hard to spot bugs amongst all those angle brackets. This is where Hierarchy Viewer comes in. This tool allows you to inspect the layout tree of an app running in the emulator. You can inspect the detailed properties of each view.

Inspect your layout trees with Hierarchy Viewer. Those colored dots can tell you about your layout performance.

Hierarchy Viewer has a couple neat tricks for visual designers too. It allows you to inspect screens in zoomed pixel perfect mode and export the layers of a layout as a PSD.

Conclusion

So you’ve been introduced to the platform and the tools. What next? Ultimately, the best way to get a feel for Android is to use it every day. The most satisfying app designs have a few things in common: platform consistency, attention to detail and clean visual design. The first two, at least, can be picked up by using and analysing existing Android apps.

Android has come a long way in the last few years. The platform and the apps have become gradually more refined. Functionality is not enough at this point. There are almost half a million other apps out there, and users want polish.

Resources

• Android Design
  The official Android design guidelines.
• Android UI Utils
  Asset generators, device frames (for screenshots) and the design preview tool.
• Android UI Design Patterns
  A blog covering Android UI patterns, best practices, anti-patterns and more.
• Android Patterns
  A crowd-sourced Android UI pattern directory.
• Android Niceties
  Design inspiration from some of the prettiest and most interesting apps.
• Holo Everywhere
  Design inspiration highlighting use of the Holo theme.
• Android App Patterns
  Nicely categorized UI pattern examples and design inspiration.
• Improving App Quality
  A blog post packed with tips on pleasing your users.
• Deep Dive Into Responsive Mobile Design
  A four part epic on responsive design, with Android’s Google Play Store as a case study.
• Android Icons
  A nice pack of action bar icons styled for Ice Cream Sandwich.

(jc)

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© Jamie McDonald for Smashing Magazine, 2012.

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