UI design guidelines of Android - where to be found?

Question

Dear Android community,

I'd like to develop apps for Android after 2 years of developing iPhone apps. First of all, I'm not a programmer. I'm a UI designer and usability engineer with basic knowledge of app programming. I have a colleague doing the part of the programmer. So my first look into the documents on developer.android.com titled "UI design" resultet in surprise. No real design guidelines, just clutter about coding, no concrete hints how apps have to look like what you are expecting when you read "UI Design". OK - Android is a very open system for many different hardware types - maybe a little bit hard to give advices that fit for all systems - but not impossible. Let's look at e.g. Symbian - it's relatively open too and they have this: forum.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/8299c7a4-d3d8-4c4c-b62e-97a4c831e6a3/User_Experience_Evaluation_Model_v1_1_en.pdf.html
Great help, good basics!

Apple has this: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/MobileHIG/Introduction/Introduction.html Examplary done!

Now I am searching for the equivalent document for Android UI Devs (again, not the programming part). This one looks great: developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html but it does not cover all scenarios and sooner or later gets lost in advices for coding.

I'm looking forward to your help. Many thanks and best regards.

Answer 1

I think those at http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/ui_guidelines/index.html are the only ones at the moment, quote: The Android UI team has begun developing guidelines for the interaction and visual design of Android applications. Look here for articles that describe these guidelines as we release them.. So it sounds like there will be more in the future but they haven't finished them yet.

You can also find some information here: http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/index.html

In general, I don't think Google has a different mindset than Apple when it comes to design so I doubt there will ever be as much official material.

There's a document called androidhig.pdf that seems to be someone that has just created a set ot reasonable guidelines themselves by adapting the IPhone ones, I can't find any download link for that document now, but if you google for the file name you can do quickview on at least one of the links to see the contents of the file.

Answer 2

As @ho1 notes, HIG is very much a work in progress. In addition to those suggestions, I'd recommend a recent blog post on UI design patterns, which I found enlightening.

EDITED ADDENDUM: UI design patterns were also described at the I/O conference, available as video.

Answer 3

This question have already been asked on SO. There is no official bullet proof doc, but this link has some answers you may want to read.