DC112 Critique: The UX of Android Lollipop

Time for a mobile episode! Aravindh Baskaran, UX researcher and
designer, joins Tim Keirnan to look at the user experience of
Android Lollipop. What did we like about it and what do we think
could be better? With Android Marshmallow on the way, it's time
to reflect on Lollipop's effectiveness.

Android is used, in one form or another, by more customers around
the world than any other mobile OS (stats we found on this were
so inconsistent that we gave up looking, but Android was clearly
in the lead in all mobile OS usage stats). We used Aravindh's
Nexus 5 phone for this episode because Tim's Nexus 4 now
has Ubuntu Touch on it. The blog post image is Lollipop's
list design that you'll hear us discuss when we refer to Google's
"Material Design".

Note when critiquing Android UIs: Aravindh and Tim are critiquing
pure Android as designed by Google and used on their Nexus
devices and (for the most part) on Motorola's smart phones. Other
manufacturers can and do take advantage of Android's open source
nature to create their own Android UI that can be grossly
inferior to pure Android or innovative, depending on one's point
of view. So the UX of Android is not one thing as with iOS and
Windows Phone, but a fragmented mix of competing interpretations
of Google's Android reference design.

Email from Jan Jursa and Costan Boiangiu concludes this episode.
Head over to Jan's wonderful Information Architecture Television
and take advantage of all the great material there:
http://iatelevision.blogspot.com/