Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By : Jason Morris
Book Image

Hands-On Android UI Development

By: Jason Morris

Overview of this book

A great user interface (UI) can spell the difference between success and failure for any new application. This book will show you not just how to code great UIs, but how to design them as well. It will take novice Android developers on a journey, showing them how to leverage the Android platform to produce stunning Android applications. Begin with the basics of creating Android applications and then move on to topics such as screen and layout design. Next, learn about techniques that will help improve performance for your application. Also, explore how to create reactive applications that are fast, animated, and guide the user toward their goals with minimal distraction. Understand Android architecture components and learn how to build your application to automatically respond to changes made by the user. Great platforms are not always enough, so this book also focuses on creating custom components, layout managers, and 2D graphics. Also, explore many tips and best practices to ease your UI development process. By the end, you'll be able to design and build not only amazing UIs, but also systems that provide the best possible user experience.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
13
Activity Lifecycle

Chapter 2. Designing Form Screens

Form screens are an essential part of user interface design in many ways because their history is a lesson in how not to do things. Most applications need to capture input from their users at some point, and you need input widgets for that, but you should always consider the minimum amount of information you need to ask the user for, rather than try to get all the information you may need in the future. This approach will keep the user focused on the task they are trying to carry out. Presenting them with a wall of input fields is overwhelming to most users and breaks their focus, which in turn can lead to them abandoning what they were trying to do with your application.

This chapter is focused on form screens, and will walk you through a bit of their history before diving into a method for actually designing form screens. This approach can and should be reused whenever you need to design a screen for an app. It's always important to take a step back from...