Thank you so much for joining us.

We're really excited to be here.

I'm Rachel Garb, and I lead interaction design for

Android's apps at Google.

HELENA ROEBER: Hi.

I'm Helena Roeber, and I led Android's UX research team

from its beginning through 2012.

RACHEL GARB: Let's just jump right in, because we have a

lot to cover.

Let's start with a vision.

"Enchant me.

Simplify my life.

Make me amazing." If it seems a little touchy-feely, well,

that's intentional.

You see, it's about people.

Now of course, this is not a revelation--

certainly not to the people in this room.

Those of us in the business of creating technology for

people, we're well-accustomed to thinking through use cases

and analyzing user metrics.

But there's another aspect to people that may not come up as

much, and that's emotion.

We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience.

And according to Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel

Kahneman, we experience about 20,000 of these moments in a

waking day.

Now, we don't remember all of them, but the ones we do are

almost always either positive or negative.

Now Kahneman and other scientists are studying the

effects of these emotions, and here's what they're finding.

Negative emotions, like anger and fear and hate and shame,

can be harmful to your health and may even

shorten your lifespan.

Now positive emotions, on the other hand, like hope and joy

and love, they're an essential daily

requirement for survival.

They improve our physical and mental health, and they

protect us from depression and illness.

So as designers, every decision we make affects

people emotionally.

Now our team sees this as a huge opportunity, but also a

responsibility we take very seriously.

So about two years ago, we developed this design vision.

Now, you'll notice it's phrased in the first person.

That's intentional.

We want this to read not as our vision, but as the vision

that our users have for us.

Now how do we know this vision is valid?

Well, from all the user research we've done to date,

which Helena will talk about in a little bit, it really

boils down to these three sentences.

So it's a tall order.

What exactly does it mean to enchant me, simplify my life,

and make me amazing?

Answers can be found in Android's design principles.

They're based on the same research that informed our

vision, and they've been guiding us to create

beautiful, usable, and innovative designs.

Now, we're certain they can do the same for you, and that's

why we're here today.

So we're going to introduce you to these design principles

and talk about why we believe in them.

We'll show many examples, including from some

groundbreaking projects, and we'll talk about how you can

use them with your teams.

HELENA ROEBER: I will now quickly go through the

principles.

And don't worry if I'm going a little bit too fast.

We will later spend a lot of time on in-depth examples that

explain each of them.

The principles are grouped into the three pillars of

Android's vision.

"Enchant me" is about filling people with joy, showing them

beautiful visuals and graceful motions, letting them

customize their space, and letting them directly touch

objects and interact with them.

And here are the four design principles for "Enchant me."

RACHEL GARB: Delight me in surprising ways.

HELENA ROEBER: Real objects are more fun

than buttons and menus.

RACHEL GARB: Let me make it mine.

HELENA ROEBER: Get to know me.

The second pillar of Android's vision, "Simplify My Life," is

about making things easy for people, making their world

simple to navigate, explaining it in clear words and

sometimes even with pictures, and bringing attention to what

is essential.

And here are the eight principles for "Simplify My

Life."

RACHEL GARB: Keep it brief.

HELENA ROEBER: Pictures are faster than words.

RACHEL GARB: Decide for me, but let me have the final say.

HELENA ROEBER: Only show what I need when I need it.

RACHEL GARB: I should always know where I am.

HELENA ROEBER: Never lose my stuff.

RACHEL GARB: If it looks the same, it should act the same.

HELENA ROEBER: Only interrupt me if it's important.

And finally, the last pillar, "Make Me Amazing," is about

making people feel capable, strong, and smart, giving them

things that they would love to show off to their friends, and

making them feel like they're in charge of this powerful and

magical force.

And here are the five principles for "Make Me

Amazing."

RACHEL GARB: Give me tricks that work everywhere.

HELENA ROEBER: It's not my fault.

RACHEL GARB: Sprinkle encouragement.

HELENA ROEBER: Do the heavy lifting for me.

RACHEL GARB: Make important things fast.

HELENA ROEBER: Next, I'll talk a little bit about the origins

of the design principles, how we realized we needed them,

how we developed them, and the difference that they made once

we started to apply them.

During an extensive UX research project called the

Android Baseline Study, consisting of diaries, in-home

interviews, and observations, we saw the profound effect

that technology design had on people's lives.

This photo here is one of our engineers at one of the

in-home visits.

We saw when, how, and why people were using computers,

tablets, and mobile devices.

And we saw that technology had become so pervasive that

people had started to schedule deliberate offline times and

enforce them so they could spend quality time with their

family and friends.

We saw joy in people's faces when they used technology and

something happened that they considered magical or

something that brought them closer to their friends or

maybe something that just gave them a welcome break

during their day.

But we also saw, unfortunately, the flip side.

It turns out we tend to blame ourselves whenever something

goes wrong in technology, and we realized that all those

non-ideal implementations, they eroded people's

confidence in their own abilities and often just

caused sheer frustration.

I'm sure you have all experienced the same.

I certainly have experienced it myself.

So this was a call to Android to touch people's hearts, to

do more of the good stuff and to fix some of the annoyances

in the product.

So the entire Android UX team got together and started to

unpack what wasn't working and why, and we came

up with a long list.

And to be honest, because the team had such high aspirations

for their work, it was a little bit of a bummer.

So Rachel and I, we looked at each other, and we thought,

what if we turn this long list of shortcomings that bum us

out every time we look at it into something that actually

inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs?

So we took the long, negative list of shortcomings, and we

organized it.

We painstakingly wordsmithed and crafted it to be short,

memorable, and in the voice of the user.

Let me give you an example.

One of the insights from this baseline study was users are

overwhelmed by options and limitless flexibility.

So our first try at rewording this was "Don't overwhelm me

on the first date." So you can see, we actually have a lot of

fun with this.

But in true iterative design fashion, this was

not the last version.

So we gave it one more try, and we came up with "Only show

me what I need to see." And this was pretty close, but it

didn't have that time element that is actually really

important to progressive disclosure.

So we gave it one more try, "Only show what I need when I

need it," and this was a winner.

This is one of our design principles that we have today.

We started to use the design principles during Android's

Ice Cream Sandwich release, which is the biggest

qualitative jump in Android's user experience to date.

Two years later, they are still serving the team well.

What they do is they remind the team what good design is

all about, and they give the team a common language to talk

about design in terms of people.

And finally, they help the team to tap into people's

emotions and to specifically design for those emotions.

Many of the principles are aimed at avoiding negative

emotions in people.

For example, "Only interrupt me if it's important" prevents

users from feeling annoyed or angry.

Others are geared at triggering positive emotions.

"Let me make it mine" makes people feel more at home.

So the design principles give us designers control over the

emotions that our products trigger in people

when they use them.

And this is important, because from all our research, we know

that our mobile devices have become almost as close to us

as our best buddies, our partners or colleagues.

They wake us up in the morning.

They entertain us and make us productive during the day, and

they even tuck us into bed.

So it makes sense to take a closer look at research that

examines relationships and emotions.

Psychology professor John Gottman at the University of

Washington has done extensive research on marriage.

And he did this one study where he was able to predict

whether a couple would stay together or not after

observing them for only 15 minutes shortly after they got

their marriage license, and he was right with 94% accuracy.

So that's pretty cool.

So how did he do it?

So his predictions were based on a simple formula.

And his predictions, actually he checked back 10 years later

to see whether he was right.

So his predictions, they were based on a simple formula--

the ratio of positive to negative emotions.

He predicted that a marriage is heading toward a good

outcome when that ratio is close to 5 to 1.

And he predicted that a marriage is heading toward

divorce when that ratio is closer to 1 to 1.

Other people, like the psychologist Marcial Losada,

has done similar research in the workplace as director of

the Center for Advanced Research

in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

And he found that work groups that have a positive to

negative ratio of 3 to 1 are significantly more productive

than work groups that don't reach that ratio.

Another psychology professor, Barbara Frederickson, she runs

a lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

called the PEPlab, which stands for Positive Emotions

and Psychophysiology.

She found that we need three positive emotions to lift us

up for every negative emotion that drags us down.

Does this apply to design?

Absolutely.

Think about how common it has become for people to spend

more time with their technology, their mobile

devices, and computers than with their partners.

And the message for designers is clear.

All those little annoyances in your product, they're

unfortunately not so little.

They have the power to erase all the magic

that you have created.

RACHEL GARB: Here's a way to visualize this.

Imagine we have two jars side by side.

One is a positive jar, and one is a negative jar.

If we trigger a positive emotion because we are

excelling at a design principle, we put one marble

in the positive jar.