If you've picked up this book, then it's because you want to develop user interfaces that people will love to use.

Developing for the Android platform is a mix of exciting opportunities and headache-inducing challenges; and designing and building your app's UI is no different.

Some of the challenges that you'll face when building your UI are very precise and technical (such as creating a UI that'll correctly display across Android 5.0 and Android 5.1), whereas others are more personal, such as resisting the temptation to do crazy and unusual things with your UI, simply because you can.

That's where this book comes in.

Over the course of 10 chapters, you'll gain some design skills and the technical know-how that you'll need to seize all the opportunities and overcome all the challenges of developing UIs for the Android platform.

We're going to be covering the entire design and development process from using plans, sketches, and wireframes, to turning that initial spark of inspiration into a step-by-step blueprint of how we're going to build the perfect user interface, before finally putting this plan into action by building, testing and refining your UI. Along the way, we'll cover all the latest best practices, including Material Design principles and some of the new UI features coming up in Android N.

Since creating a UI that your users will like isn't quite good enough, we'll go one step further and use a range of tools and techniques to analyze and optimize every part of our user interface. By the end of this book, you'll know how to develop a UI that your users will love.

Let's start with the basics.