Mobile News - Android Wear debuts with the LG G Watch and Moto 360

ANDROID WEAR

1. Android wear

Google has revealed Android Wear, the first operating system made exclusively for smartwatches. The OS was first hinted at last week at Google’s SXSW showcase. Now Google has released the software development kit. Along with the release, Google revealed that Android Wear will have multi-screen functionality, full Google Now integration, and health & fitness monitoring. Similar to current smartwatches, Android Wear devices will tell you when to get active and give you daily, weekly, and monthly fitness summaries.

Android Wear: Information that moves with you 

Today we’re announcing Android Wear, a project that extends Android to wearables. And we’re starting with the most familiar wearable—watches. Going well beyond the mere act of just telling you the time, a range of new devices along with an expansive catalogue of apps will give you:

• Useful information when you need it most. Android Wear shows you info and suggestions you need, right when you need them. The wide variety of Android applications means you’ll receive the latest posts and updates from your favorite social apps, chats from your preferred messaging apps, notifications from shopping, news and photography apps, and more. 
• Straight answers to spoken questions. Just say “Ok Google” to ask questions, like how many calories are in an avocado, what time your flight leaves, and the score of the game. Or say “Ok Google” to get stuff done, like calling a taxi, sending a text, making a restaurant reservation or setting an alarm. 
• The ability to better monitor your health and fitness. Hit your exercise goals with reminders and fitness summaries from Android Wear. Your favorite fitness apps can give you real-time speed, distance and time information on your wrist for your run, cycle or walk. 
• Your key to a multiscreen world. Android Wear lets you access and control other devices from your wrist. Just say “Ok Google” to fire up a music playlist on your phone, or cast your favorite movie to your TV. There’s a lot of possibilities here so we’re eager to see what developers build. 

2. Comparison with PEBBLE

3. LG G & Moto 360

LG says it expects to offer the G Watch in the second quarter of this year while the Moto 360 is expected this summer. Looking at the two you can see one huge difference: The G Watch is rectangular while the Moto 360 is round: Unique for a smartwatch but obviously very common in the watch-wearing world.

While LG hasn’t shared many details, Motorola held a live video interview this week with Motorola’s head of Consumer Experience Design, Jim Wicks. He didn’t provide a close up look at the Moto 360, but was interacting with one on his wrist. He also shared a few details about the watch that weren’t initially provided. For example, the round face is roughly 46 millimeters in diameter and the face will auto-rotate so you can wear it on either wrist.

4. Google Glass

http://www.cnet.com/news/google-wearables-2-0-how-android-wear-breaks-from-google-glass/

Design Critique - Notifications bar

Description
Notifications bar is a feature of a mobile phone interface that informs or notifies users of some impending action or change. It can be anything from an update for an app, a new email, a text message, the weather and much more. It allows the user a trampoline to directly access the necessary app when action is required.

Android feature : Top 3 chronologically ordered notifications are visible on the notifications bar from any screen

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Consistency

The primary design principle met is consistency. Any update or notification from any application on the smartphone will be seen in one common place – the notification bar. The user does not need to specifically open each individual application to check if there are any notifications.

Fig 1 Notifications for different apps are visible in the same screen and grouped by application

Visibility

The notifications bar allows the user to view what the notification is about – for example, the title and sender of an email. This allows the user to decide whether to ignore the notification or to open the application. Once the notification bar is pulled down, the notifications are grouped by application. This neat organized look to the notifications bar is a very appealing feature. Another point that adds to visibility is that the user can pull down the notification bar, view the notifications and roll it back up again to continue with whatever previous application was open. Unless the user taps on a particular notification, simply viewing the notifications does not in any way hinder the user's present application.

Fig 2 Notifications for different apps contain brief messages available from the notifications bar

Feedback

Tiny icons on the status bar are a very good feedback feature. During the use of most fullscreen applications, when a new email or message arrives, the status bar which was previously hidden becomes visible for a short period of time. It contains the icon of the notification along with a short message (as seen in the Fig. 3(a) Message from … and status bar with top 3 other previous notifications in Fig. 3(b)). This is an extremely well designed feature as it allows the user to continue the fullscreen application, say a game, while also scanning the latest update and making a decision whether or not to react to it. 

Fig 3(a) Notification while using gallery Fig 3(b) Top 3 notifications on status bar

I feel that informative feedback is also well thought of in this design. When one touches the status bar, a strip to aid in pulling the notifications page appears. This is intuitive enough to allow people to access their notifications. Touching or tapping on the notification preview/description takes you to the corresponding application while sliding the whole text left or right, removes the notification from the list. A user is able to grab and move the notification to the side to clear it and back to the center if they decide against clearing it. There is a 'clear all' button that is useful if a user wants to ignore all notifications.

Affordances

The notifications bar definitely fulfills all affordances of the feature. It is a summary or notification list that a user can access by tapping on the status bar, and pulling down on a tab. Once the list is pulled out, you can see very well organized and grouped notifications about different applications on your phone. This can be anything from weather or email or text messages. And these change dynamically when a notification comes in. This is why it's easy to understand and perceive the notification list for what it is.

Conceptual Model

In terms of conceptual model, the notifications bar also includes a shortcut to the phone settings. This enables the user to change or modify any setting quickly based on a notification. Some notification bar designs enabling frequent users to use shortcuts. This is available on the samsung smartphone as shown in Fig 4. HTC phone users requires third party application for the same feature. This slightly inconvenient for the HTC phone users.

Fig 4 Quick settings for WiFi, GPS, Sound etc on the notifications screen (usually followed by notifications)

Limitations

The main limitation of this feature that I have encountered is the lack of an undo button for the clear-all button. However, since these notifications are of apps that use the internet a lot, turning on and off the WiFi or mobile internet data often gets back the list of notifications. For an individual notification swiped out of the screen, if the user remembers the application, it is possible to go the application and understand what the notification was about.

Design Critique - Expense Manager Android App

Design Critique - Expense Manager

Markus Hintersteiner

Finance

Needs:

Android 2.3 additionally upwards

Overview:

This app easily helps users manage their expenses on your own mobile phone and can keep track of their finances in a handy way. The basic idea is that each expense is directly assigned to a category to be able to attain detailed statistics as well as helpful insights. Overall, this app enables to monitor/report your complete spending effortlessly based on one month/week/year, and reach your saving goals.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=at.markushi.expensemanager

From the design principles

1. High Visibility:

This app keeps the balance of intuitiveness and good-looking; each icon is neat and without redundancy to affect your decision. First, when you begin to use this app, a good instruction tells you where to get started. In Figure 1(a), “Tap to record an expense”. Second, from the swipeable left-side menu, the layout provides an easy access to the five different sections/ functionalities. The icons size is pretty good and each concise icon with “blue color background” informs a user about the current status in Figure 1(b). Also, Overview has an “Arrow” to remind you next step. In Figure 1(b), after you enter “+”, another small window pops up to notify. Second, users can easily understand the meaning of these icons. For example, “Overview” icon in Figure 1(c) allows you to understand the overview of your weekly/monthly/yearly expenses. Fourth, “Expense Manager” uses vivid colors to represent different categories in Figure 1(c). 

Suggestions: If each category can add a picture to represent, the interface will be nicer. Also, each cost only selects from 5 different categories, and users are still unable to create new categories and also cannot create sub-categories.

2. Provide Moderate Feedback:

After you set lock pattern at startup, if a user enters a wrong answer, Expense Manager provides an instant and clear feedback “Sorry, try again”, as shown in Figure 2 (a). Second, if you request an action, simple responses message without tedious and redundant sentences display on the monitor to tell users what they received and how users work on it. In Figure 2 (b), we try to add one transaction, so just press “+” button, and a calculator pop out to ask you to key-in your cost, and press OK, the calculator will disappear and then shows a simple interface to let user type the related spending information in Figure 2 (c). However, Expenses Manager did not provide feedback for ‘delete’ action, but this action is really important, and should provide good feedback for users to think twice. In this app, once you accidentally press “trash can” button to delete an entry, this record will disappear and no any chance to go back. 

3. Moderate Mapping:

In Figure 1(c), the small pictures of overview and budge and distribution buttons are difficult for users to know their function, so this is why the developers still add texts to aid users understand. Second, “Distribution”, the interface uses pie charts to show the percentage of each category of expenses statistics, as shown in Figure 3(a). Also, “statistics”, as shown in Figure 3(b), reports each monthly performance and also can clearly know which month you sent the most or the least and which months you have exceed the budgets so that users can control their expenditures next month. It’s very straightforward feature. Fourth, “Budget”, the interface is clear, and uses light color to show how much money you can spend, and no explanation but users have similar life experiences to understand this function, as shown in Figure 3 (c).

Suggestion: Some people concern the remaining money instead of spending money. If the app can add one more feature to switch them or the remaining money can be transferred to next usage, it will be better. Also, the remaining cost bar should be changed to different colors (now, light grey) or can set a threshold to alert users. If the expenditure has exceeded the limitation, the app can set a warning to users “You spend too much money!” or change to red color.

4. Good Consistency:

The interface design is internally consistent. In Figure 1(c), Figure 3(c) and Figure 4, no matter which functions you use, the design layout of all categories items is the same. Also, if you would to backup/restore your data, the design is the same as uploading data behavior on the desktop, so the users can get the hang of it very soon.

5. No ‘Undo’:

If a user taps ‘OK’ or ‘SAVE’ button by accident, the transaction will be record, but no any ‘back’ button can be used to recover the task.

6. Prevent Errors:

Expenses Manager Offers a history and a user can track history or recover previous versions or change/modify the spending cost and information based on the dates.

7. Provide Shortcuts:

Provide home screen widget for easier and faster usage.

Other Suggestions:

Also, this app really needs some types of synchronization of information between devices; maybe create an account, such as Google plus sign in.

And… not free!

Mobile News - Seene, a 3D Imaging App

Seene is an iPhone App that lets you capture, share, and browse 3D photographs.  It was just named the UK's most innovative mobile App company on display at Mobile World Congress.

The App, which doesn't rely on specialised camera equipment but rather sensors to capture 2D photographs with extra depth data, lets you capture and manipulate an object or subject in real-time...and in 3D. Specifically, it captures a photo with the iPhone's accelerometer, and then renders a 3D structure. You can rotate your iPhone to view the structure at different angles and alter the perspective of the image.

Seene basically plots points on your subject, and then uses parallax to determine the subject's location in space when you move your iPhone around. It finally calculates the depth of the object based on how it is warped when you move your iPhone around. The team behind Seene eventually wants the app to capture a full 3D photograph for 360-degree viewing. It's also developing a Seene app for Android, according to BBC.

The app supports sharing via Facebook, Twitter, its own public gallery and an embedded web link. An account is required to share and save your seene, which is exported in a proprietary file format.  Because of the format, seenes can only be viewed on the app’s website or within the program.

<Demo> : http://seene.co/ 

<Gallery> : http://seene.co/search/popular/

<Info> : http://blog.laptopmag.com/seene-hands-on

Mobile News - Facebook Buys WhatsApp & New Car UI

Facebook Buying WhatsApp for $19 Billion

(http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/02/is-facebook-paying-too-much-for-whatsapp/)

What’s interesting: with the same money, Facebook can buy Sony, Gap or 4 aircraft carriers

What is Facebook exactly buying:  Young users: WhatsApp - 450M monthly active users in 5 years, 3x more than Facebook & nearly 10x more than Twitter or Skype  A new business model: WhatsApp - subscription-based revenue model $0.99/year   Enhancements to the existing business model: WhatsApp - daily message volume of entire global telecom industry; Facebook - medium for big announcement can be better captured by metadata from messaging apps   Internationalization: WhatsApp - popularity in India & South America; Facebook - ned to join the global turn to mobile

How Things Change

(http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/19/how-things-change/)

So he and Jan Koum, a colleague from Yahoo, set out to do their own thing.

Today, they sold that thing to Facebook for 19 billion dollars.

Life is crazy.

Dear Car Makers: Please Hire People Like This

(http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/dear-car-makers-please-hire-people-like-this/)

Why should we care about it from the perspective of mobile interaction design?

Modern Cars: most expensive, massive, largest power supply, slow OS, poor UI -> dangerous

-current UI: build buttons on touch screen -> no muscle memory compared to previous physical button design

-voice control is expected to be more interactive in cars

A New Car UI: How touch screen controls in cars should work (Matthaeus Krenn)

(http://www.wired.com/design/2014/02/watch-ingenious-touchscreen-ui-inside-every-car/)

-not perfect, still requiring users to learn/memorize interface controls

-new trend in UI design for touch screens: a move away from skeuomorphic interfaces