Android's design chief asks why we're still designing smartphone applications as if they were desktop software.

When designers create applications for smartphones, they often hark back to principles inherited from desktop software. After all, they’re all computers, right? Android UX Design Chief Matias Duarte thinks it’s time to jettison that idea. The technology available in the average smartphone today is vastly more powerful than the desktop computer of 30 years ago, when those standards were first created. So it’s time to rethink the paradigms and invent new ones for today’s technology and devices. "I want people to stop thinking of an application as a bucket of buttons and think of it instead as a canvas," he says.

That was one of Duarte’s guiding ideas as he went about leading the team that redesigned the Android UX for Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest Android operating system, which was released in December. Duarte says he took his inspiration from cutting-edge graphic design. "We’ve had 2,000 years of development in visual communication, and mobile computers typically don’t take advantage of that," Duarte says. That was particularly important in light of one of Ice Cream Sandwich’s primary design goals: Turn Android phones into objects their users love passionately, instead of simply devices they find useful. "It just makes sense that the next step in connecting to people and, especially connecting to them emotionally, is to look at the best lessons of how people have been connecting emotionally for the last thousands of years." Here’s how he did it.

Lose the Feel of Buttons and Be More Like a Magazine

Application interfaces have always felt like functional assemblies of buttons. Because, after all, they took their cues from machines. Want to make a machine do something? Push a button. But as you flip through Ice Cream Sandwich’s screens, you get a much different feeling. Each screen feels lightweight, as if it were a page in a magazine, rather than a set of knobs and switches. Even the phone dialer looks light and sleek. It’s clear how to use it, of course. It just doesn’t feel so … buttony.

All of that is intentional, Duarte says. Each screen is designed to heighten the emotional impact. Take the contact card, for example. Many smartphones allow you to include photos of the people in your contact list. And many of them store them as thumbnails in the contact card. Not so in Ice Cream Sandwich. Instead, the image takes prominence in the layout, consuming a third of the screen. "We’re really visual creatures," Duarte says. "We want the person to be the point of emotional contact." So the image gets emphasized, while the actual contact information recedes. It’s still there, of course, but the emphasis is on the visuals, not unlike, say, in a magazine.

Building Blocks That Are Light as a Feather

Any UI toolkit has a series of elements that get re-used throughout an interface--checkboxes, dropdown menus, lists, and so forth. Typically, Duarte says, each one of gets "designed on a silver platter"--a lot of time is spent making each one beautiful in its own right, with beveled edges, perhaps, and a full 3-D feel. The problem with that, Duarte says, is that when you assemble the individual elements on a screen, each one becomes prominent on its own. (Go ahead, pull out your iPhone, and look at a contact card, for example. See how each element on that card seems to have equal weight?)

Duarte says that overwhelms the layout. He compares the overly designed elements to pieces of Victorian hand-carved ornamentation. "Each is very pretty, but when you try to make a wall or a house out of them, all the embellishments fight with the larger building."

So for Ice Cream Sandwich, the UX team designed each building block to be as minimal as possible. Individual screens still use the elements, but it’s the overall layout that captures your attention, rather than the individual units.

Who Needs a Menu Button Anymore?

"The menu button was a source of frustration for users," Duarte says. "You never knew if there was going to be any functionality hiding behind that button or not." While doing baseline user research, the Android team discovered that many users felt dumb using the system because they couldn’t figure out how to access all its features. "We went through and eliminated all the hidden affordances [controls], places in the system where it wasn’t clear what you had to do, or where somebody would have to teach you, or where you’d have to just try it [to figure out what it did]," Duarte says. To reduce the learning curve, all essential actions in each application are right up on the surface screen. "That makes everything much more discoverable and much faster."

The Words You Say Should Feel Different

The Android operating system used to use Droid Sans which was a basic workman sans serif with notes of "computer" about it. Duarte felt strongly that the font needed to be upgraded and optimized for high-resolution screens--so much so that he assigned a team to start designing a new font without being sure they would be able to complete it in time to ship with the new operating system. They did, and the result is Roboto, a crisp and friendly sans serif that is both pleasing to the eye and exudes a sense of style. "It just feels right," Duarte says.

The Text You Have Should Share a Voice

Every magazine has its own personality, and every article within it adheres to a tone of voice that reflects that personality. "That didn’t really exist for Android," Duarte says. There were no writing guidelines, so the text on the interface ended up being overly technical and unintentionally overbearing. "In an attempt to be clear, it fell into the habit of being aggressive," Duarte says.

To fix that, the UX team created a "writing" style guide which lays out the tone for all text. "It should be something that is instantly helpful and supportive," Duarte says. "Not cutesy, not apologetic, not omniscient or overbearing, but simply the perpetual supportive character."

Duarte says he didn’t get any pushback from Google’s top leaders as he went about ripping apart a design that, based on sales, had been working just fine up until then. Android head Andy Rubin, Google CEO Larry Page, and co-founder Sergei Brin were all behind him, he says.

"They really want to push Android to the next level, to take it into totally new directions, to make it something that is phenomenally successful, critically regarded by designers and consumers alike," Duarte says. "And also to really use this as a platform to break new ground."

"The mobile industry is changing faster than we could have imagined, and that comes after two or three decades of complete stagnation on the desktop. The interface paradigms there have been static. Mobile is an opportunity to take us to completely new types of ways of interacting with other people and having computers make our lives better."

E.B. Boyd

E.B. Boyd covers Silicon Valley for FastCompany.com Read more

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A Doctor in Your Pocket

What does the future of medicine hold? Tiny health monitors, tailored therapies—and the end of illness

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By DAVID B. AGUS

Take a moment to imagine what it would be like to live robustly to the ripe old age of 100 or more. You wouldn't die of any particular illness, and you wouldn't gradually waste away under the spell of some awful, enfeebling disease that began years or decades earlier.

It may sound far-fetched, but it is possible to live a long, disease-free life. Most of the conditions that kill us, including cancer and heart disease, could be prevented or delayed by a new way of looking at and treating health. The end of illness is near.

Today, we mostly wait for the body to break before we treat it. When I picture what it will be like for my two children to stay in good health as independent adults in 10 or 20 years, I see a big shift from our current model.

Alex Nabaum

I see them being able to monitor and adjust their health in real time with the help of smartphones, wearable gadgets—perhaps like small, invisible stickers—to track the inner workings of their cells, and virtual replicas of their bodies that they will play much like videogames, allowing them to know exactly what they can do to optimize every aspect of their health. What happens when I take drug x at dosage y? How can I change the expression of my genes to stop cancer? Would eating more salmon and dark chocolate boost my metabolism and burn fat? Can red wine really lower my risk of heart attack?

From a drop of their blood, they will be able to upload information onto a personal biochip that can help to create an individualized plan of action, including both preventive measures and therapies for identified ailments or signs of "unhealthiness." (Other body fluids—like tears and saliva—might be routinely tested, too.) They would be on the lookout for problems like imbalances in blood-sugar control, a risk factor for diabetes, and uncontrolled cell growth, which could signal cancer. Their doctors won't just examine them once a year; they will continually monitor the next generation of patients, offering advice along the way.

What is equally exciting is that this patient data will be added to a universal database that can be aggregated by powerful search engines like Google and constantly fed into new trials and experiments—speeding up our understanding of which drugs work best for which people. The database might show, for example, that people with a particular genetic profile respond to one type of cancer treatment but not another. As more people anonymously add their health data, this database would become more and more effective as a tool for preventive medicine.

Today, most people who are concerned about their health follow sweeping, general guidelines. If you want to lose weight, you are likely to pick a diet that advises eating more fibrous vegetables and cutting back on processed sugar. If you want to reduce your risk for cancer, you avoid tobacco smoke, exercise regularly and take early detection seriously.

Ari Meisel suffered from the symptoms of Crohn's Disease for years before he decided to overhaul his health-care regimen. He's part of a movement of citizen scientists who are turning their bodies - and their lives - into personal laboratories. WSJ's Christina Tsuei reports.

The problem with health care today is that we don't know enough about the body to practice preventive medicine actively. With limited knowledge, diagnostic medicine makes sense. If we don't know what we're trying to prevent or how best to do it, we have to wait for an obvious symptom to emerge in order to take action. At that point, we're usually treating a disease that has had ample opportunity to progress.

We can do better. To start, we need to appreciate the body for what it is: a very complex network, much of which we don't yet fully understand. When you look at the body from this systemic point of view, you begin to see that a lot of what we know about health is gravely misunderstood.

In 2009, my colleague Danny Hillis—a former Disney engineer who pioneered the development of so-called parallel supercomputers—and I set up a way to measure 100,000 different types of proteins from a single drop of blood. The goal is to evaluate and make sense of the body's intricate inner workings in a way that's much more dynamic and insightful than what DNA alone can provide. Proteins change in your body every minute, depending on what's going on internally. Our ultimate plan is to develop tests, based on protein levels, for illnesses like cancer. Such tests could take the place of invasive techniques like biopsies.

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The new Telcare meter marks a significant step toward bringing consumer medical devices closer to the world of modern technology. Walt Mossberg reports.

With each passing year, the technology necessary for this revolution in medicine is growing less expensive. Last week, Life Technologies of Carlsbad, Calif., announced that it will be able to map an individual's entire genetic sequence in one day, for $1,000. Similar tests today cost many thousands of dollars. The ability to follow day-to-day changes in your body's proteins and metabolites is not far behind.

So how do we get to this future?

It has to start with data collection. In 2004, Dell launched a company program called Well at Dell to encourage healthy lifestyles. Employees receive alerts and information customized to their health issues, incorporating their latest test results and treatments and allowing them to make more informed decisions. A newly diagnosed diabetic, for example, might get information about how to monitor blood sugar and watch out for the circulatory problems that often accompany the disease.

Not surprisingly, these corporate health-management tools have come under fire, with most critics worrying about privacy. But we can't expect the health-care industry to continue to innovate and grow if we continue to hoard health information.

The federal agency that administers Medicare pays over half of the medical bills in the U.S., but it doesn't retrieve, organize or mine that data. Imagine how much better the Medicare system could be if all this data were analyzed to improve public health. Or imagine databases from many different sources, private and public, coming together in a centralized network that would look for patterns and try to translate them into new ideas for anticipating and preventing health problems.

Personalized medicine isn't as far away as you might think. Consider what's already happening in genetic profiling for individuals, which is available today for several hundred dollars. I co-founded a genetic screening company and am a big proponent of the technology. It allows us to take a broad look at DNA variations and to assess your risk for certain ailments and what medications, at what dosages, might work best, based on your metabolism. Just because you have one or two markers of genetic risk does not mean that you will definitely develop a particular condition, but the outcome can be affected by changes in lifestyle, or in some cases, by taking medication.

As these and other technologies advance, it will become progressively easier to monitor and maintain our overall health. Then it will be up to us. The promise of personalized medicine depends, finally, not on the tools that become available but on our determination to be informed and willing patients.

More than a decade ago, in “Unleashing the Killer App,” Larry Downes wrote that while transitioning to the Internet was revolutionary for retailers, it was merely evolutionary for customers.  “Ensure continuity for the customer,” I said as one of my twelve rules for building killer apps, “not yourself.”

Google, which recently shared some big numbers from its mobile advertising business, has some advice for marketers hoping to join in its success: make your mobile presence presentable, now.

“Businesses need to be ready for mobile as soon as they can, particularly this holiday season,” said Surojit Chatterjee, Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads. “You need to have a mobile site irrespective of whether you think people will actually make purchases from it. How good your site looks on mobile determines how people think about your business.”

Even though mobile advertising is still in early days, he said, mobile search volume is growing at a rapid clip. Over the past two years, Google has seen mobile search queries grow fivefold—a growth rate he compared to the early days of desktop search.

According to research firm Forrester, while 13 percent of the U.S. population searched with a mobile device in 2010 (90 percent with Google), mobile searchers will account for 28 percent of the U.S. population by 2015.

Early experiences now can have lasting consequences, Chatterjee said. Citing analysis from Gomez, another research firm, he said that 60 percent of users indicated they would be unlikely to return to a mobile site if they had trouble accessing it once and 40 percent said they would actually visit a competitor’s site. Beyond that, 63 percent said they would be less likely to buy from the same company through other channels (online or in the store).

“Users are looking at the mobile site to make conclusions about the business as a whole,” Chatterjee said.

Given the increasing number of smartphone users, he said as the holidays approach it will be ever more likely that consumers will try to reach marketers on the go.

This holiday season, Google expects that 44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.

While Google has a clear lead in search now (on mobile and desktop), some industry watchers have wondered whether the search giant can maintain its top position as more consumers transition to mobile devices.

Its earnings report earlier this month, however, gave Wall Street a reason to have some confidence in CEO Larry Page’s belief that mobile search could be as big for Google (if not bigger) than desktop search.

In a rare move, the company broke out revenue from mobile advertising and said it was on track to bank more than $2.5 billion in that category in the coming year, and grew twofold in the last year.

Chatterjee said its success comes from building specifically for the new medium and catering to user behavior on the platform. For example, leveraging research that users tend to act more quickly after a mobile search, Google recently launched new ad formats that let users download apps from a mobile ad or reach a specific destination with a mobile app they already have on their phone. 

A user searching for a pair of boots from her mobile phone, for example, can now go directly from an ad to a shopping app on her phone, so that she can more easily complete a purchase.

Other mobile features capitalize on the interest in local information—according to Google, 40 percent of mobile searches on Google are related to location. Two years ago, the company released a click-to-call feature that lets smartphone users call a business directly from an ad. This month, Google announced that proximity to a business would be a factor in mobile search ads ranking.  

“We are building specifically for the medium,” Chatterjee said. “We are really, as an industry, speaking to the mobile user and taking into the account the signals we have on mobile phones, the constraints on mobile phones and the user behavior trends on mobile phones.”

Google, which recently shared some big numbers from its mobile advertising business, has some advice for marketers hoping to join in its success: make your mobile presence presentable, now.

“Businesses need to be ready for mobile as soon as they can, particularly this holiday season,” said Surojit Chatterjee, Google’s lead product manager for mobile search ads. “You need to have a mobile site irrespective of whether you think people will actually make purchases from it. How good your site looks on mobile determines how people think about your business.”

Even though mobile advertising is still in early days, he said,

mobile search volume is growing at a rapid clip. Over the past two years, Google has seen mobile search queries grow fivefold—a growth rate he compared to the early days of desktop search.

According to research firm Forrester, while 13 percent of the U.S. population searched with a mobile device in 2010 (90 percent with Google), mobile searchers will account for 28 percent of the U.S. population by 2015.

Early experiences now can have lasting consequences, Chatterjee said. Citing analysis from Gomez, another research firm, he said that 60 percent of users indicated they would be unlikely to return to a mobile site if they had trouble accessing it once and 40 percent said they would actually visit a competitor’s site. Beyond that, 63 percent said they would be less likely to buy from the same company through other channels (online or in the store).

“Users are looking at the mobile site to make conclusions about the business as a whole,” Chatterjee said.

Given the increasing number of smartphone users, he said as the holidays approach it will be ever more likely that consumers will try to reach marketers on the go.

This holiday season, Google expects that 44 percent of total searches for last minute gifts and store locator terms will be from mobile devices.

While Google has a clear lead in search now (on mobile and desktop), some industry watchers have wondered whether the search giant can maintain its top position as more consumers transition to mobile devices.

Its earnings report earlier this month, however, gave Wall Street a reason to have some confidence in CEO Larry Page’s belief that mobile search could be as big for Google (if not bigger) than desktop search.

In a rare move, the company broke out revenue from mobile advertising and said it was on track to bank more than $2.5 billion in that category in the coming year, and grew twofold in the last year.

Chatterjee said its success comes from building specifically for the new medium and catering to user behavior on the platform. For example, leveraging research that users tend to act more quickly after a mobile search, Google recently launched new ad formats that let users download apps from a mobile ad or reach a specific destination with a mobile app they already have on their phone. 

A user searching for a pair of boots from her mobile phone, for example, can now go directly from an ad to a shopping app on her phone, so that she can more easily complete a purchase.

Other mobile features capitalize on the interest in local information—according to Google, 40 percent of mobile searches on Google are related to location. Two years ago, the company released a click-to-call feature that lets smartphone users call a business directly from an ad. This month, Google announced that proximity to a business would be a factor in mobile search ads ranking.  

“We are building specifically for the medium,” Chatterjee said. “We are really, as an industry, speaking to the mobile user and taking into the account the signals we have on mobile phones, the constraints on mobile phones and the user behavior trends on mobile phones.”

Universal Pictures is handing out Facebook credits -- up to 1 million -- in a social game promoting its upcoming release "Tower Heist."

Credits have been the sole permissible payment option in social games since July, freeing users from typing in credit-card numbers but requiring developers to share 30% of their transaction revenue with Facebook. Universal hasn't had to worry about the revenue share -- Facebook collects its cut when people spend credits, not when they receive them -- but it is shelling out at least $100,000 to fund the giveaway.

The "Heist it Back" game echoes the plot of "Tower Heist," an action-comedy in which the characters seek revenge on a swindling Wall Street executive. Facebook users win two, five or 10 credits at a time by clicking "Heist" buttons on characters' pages and elsewhere.

"We wanted to create something live within the Facebook ecosystem, driving the story and driving the promotion to integrate around the brand and encourage social sharing," said Doug Neil, senior VP of digital marketing for Universal.

"Heist it Back" may also help market Facebook credits to consumers who haven't used them before. The game includes a section explaining what credits are, how users can view their credit counts and what kinds of things they can do with them, from spending them in Farmville to watching "Scarface" on Facebook.

Using something of value -- credits -- will boost engagement with the promotion, according to Hill Salomon, creative director at The Branding Farm, which built "Heist it Back" with iFeelGoods, a developer specializing in Facebook credits.

"There are some challenges, but we have confidence that credits have a good future," said Mr. Salomon.

Universal is also distributing cards at screenings using QR codes to send attendees to play the game.

Do not therefore consider this life as an object of any moment. Look back on the immense gulf of time already past; and forwards, to that infinite duration yet to come, and you will find how trifling the difference is between a life of three days and of three ages.

Let us then employ properly this moment of time allotted us by fate, and leave the world contentedly; like a ripe olive dropping from its stalk, speaking well of the soil that produced it, and of the tree that bore it.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations