New UI Features In Android-O(Oatmeal cookie)

Yesterday, at the first day of its annual developer conference I/O, Google cited a staggering number: There are now 2 billion active monthly Android devices, with 1 million more devices coming online every two months.     C O .DESIG N NEWSLETTERSUBSCRIBE Cities Graphics Innovation By Design Interactive Product Spaces 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 2/61 That’s a hell of a lot of smartphones and tablets–and with Android on TVs, cars, watches, and laptops, it’s only going to grow. To power this growing ecosystem of devices, Google released a beta for developers of its latest operating system, Android O. In addition to some performance improvements, O will put some small, clever UI tweaks on billions of devices. Here are a few we saw today at I/O. [Image: Google] MOBILE MULTITASKING 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 3/61 Using two apps at once–say, Skyping while looking at your calendar–is usually a total pain on mobile. But a new O feature called “Picture in Picture” shrinks the video interface so you can look at another app simultaneously. Take watching a Youtube video. Currently, if you close Youtube to answer a text, you can’t see the video playing anymore. Picture in Picture moves the video to the bottom righthand corner where it continues to play, letting you multitask much more efficiently. You can watch Netflix while Googling a character, or maintain your video call with a friend as you schedule an event. [Image: Google] BETTER NOTIFICATIONS The new operating system also shifts how notifications happen within Android. O’s new design takes some cues from Apple, adding a small dot to app icons to indicate a new notification. Also somewhat similarly to iOS, a long-press on the icon will pull up a small window showing the notification without launching the app. The change doesn’t make new work for developers–the system pulls the color of the notification dot from the app icon automatically. [Image: Google] SMART COPY AND PASTE Another pain point in Android today? Highlighting text to copy and paste. While previously you had to long-press or double tap to begin a selection, and then drag the UI handles on either end of the word to increase or decrease the selection, Google has put its machine learning to the work improving that process in O. Google’s user testing revealed that the most highlighted text on mobile phones is phone numbers, followed by people’s names, businesses, and addresses. The new smart text selection feature in Android O uses AI to recognize which of these you’re trying to select. One tap will select the entire phone number, name, or address, and the UI then presents context-specific options: the phone app for a number, Gmail for an email, or Google Maps for an address. All this happens on the device in real time. AUTOFILL FOR APPS One of Google Chrome’s handier features on desktop is its autofill system, which will automatically input information like addresses, passwords, or credit cards. Now, autofill will be available across all apps on Android O, making logging into apps on a new phone easier than ever. 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 4/61 And it syncs as well–if you logged into Twitter on Chrome via autofill, logging into Twitter on Android will be autofilled as well. [Image: Google] SMART REPLY IN GMAIL Gmail’s Inbox app and the messaging app Allo already have a handy feature called Smart Reply, where Google’s machine learning provides three context-dependent replies to each email you receive. Now, it’s coming to Gmail proper for iOS and Android. While this UI change isn’t Android specific, it will definitely make any Gmail user’s life easier–regardless of what phone or operating system you use. With Google Lens, your smartphone camera won’t just see what you see, but will also understand what you see to help you take action. #io17 pic.twitter.com/viOmWFjqk1 — Google (@Google) May 17, 2017 AR FOR EVERYDAY DECISIONS One of the most exciting announcements on the first day of Google I/O was Google Lens, which uses machine learning to recognize images in the real world, on the go–making it almost like a visual search. Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated one particularly compelling application of the tool, which will live inside Google’s AI Assistant: Hold your phone up, scan the street in front of you, and Google Lens will recognize restaurants, popping up a menu in real time over the image that shows the restaurant’s phone number, menu, and reviews, just like what you’d get on Google Maps. It’s a hugely practical application of AR for everyday life. HOW IS ALL OF THIS POSSIBLE, ANYWAY? Many of these UI tweaks are powered by machine learning–which takes a huge amount of data to process. In order to make it all feasible on mobile and open up these types of capabilities to developers, Google announced a new version of its open-source machine learning library, TensorFlow. Called TensorFlow Lite, it’s a library designed specifically to be fast and small for mobile devices, enabling developers to use machine learning techniques in their apps. And coming later this year? A neural net API. 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 5/61 We’re seeing a new level of integration across all of Google’s services and products–from Android O and the Pixel phone to Google Home and Google Lens–and, more and more, machine learning is weaving them all together. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Katharine Schwab is a contributing writer at Co.Design based in New York who covers technology, design, and culture. Follow her on Twitter @kschwabable. More Co.Design Daily Newsletter YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS Receive special Fast Company offers See All Newsletters SIGN UP VIDEO Error setting up player: Invalid license key NOW PLAYING 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 6/61 07.07.17 NestFounder: “IWake UpIn Cold SweatsThinking,What DidWe BringTo TheWorld?” Tony Fadell, one of the minds behind the iPod and the iPhone, mulls design’s unintended consequences. [Photos: Constantin Renner/EyeEm/Getty Images, davide ragusa/Unsplash] BY KATHARINE SCHWAB 4 MINUTE READ A Peek Inside Adidas's Top-Secret Brooklyn Design Lab This DIY Programming Kit Is The Perfect Introduction To Beginner Coding Another Tech Company Is Trying To Reinvent Cooking (And May Have Gotten It Right This Time) NOW PLAYING     7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 7/61 Tony Fadell’s wife likes to remind him when their three children’s eyes are glued to their screens that it’s at least partly his fault. Hard to argue. Fadell, who founded the smart thermostat company Nest in 2010 and who was instrumental in the creation of both the iPod and later the iPhone as a senior vice president at Apple, has done more to shape digital technology than many of his peers. But in a recent conversation at the Design Museum in London, Fadell spoke with a mix of pride and regret about his role in mobile technology’s rise to omnipresence. [Photo: Celine Grouard for Fast Company] “I wake up in cold sweats every so often thinking, what did we bring to the world?” he says. “Did we really bring a nuclear bomb with information that can–like we see with fake news–blow up people’s brains and reprogram them? Or did we bring light to people who never had information, who can now be empowered?” Fadell was speaking as part of the Design Museum’s program around its current blockbuster exhibition, California, which examines the history and culture of digital technology in the Golden State, from early iPhone prototypes to the utopian festival and tech industry networking staple Burning Man to drawings of Apple Park. The conversation, called “Selling Freedom,” brought together Fadell; Bethany Koby, the cofounder and CEO of toy company Technology Will Save Us; David Edgerton, a historian of science and technology at King’s College London; and Judy Wajcman, a sociologist at the London School of Economics who studies the social impact of technology. They were charged with examining the consequences of having so much revolutionary technology coming from a single place. [Photo: Tim Gouw/Unsplash] The world Fadell describes is one in which screens are everywhere, distracting us and interrupting what’s important, while promoting a culture of self-aggrandizement. The problem? He says that addiction has been designed into our devices–and it’s harming the newest generation. “And I know when I take [technology] away from my kids what happens,” Fadell says. “They literally feel like you’re tearing a piece of their person away from them—they get emotional about it, very emotional. They go through withdrawal for two to three days.” 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 8/61 At its root, this is a design problem. Fadell believes that products like the iPhone, as much as they are communication devices, are more attuned to the needs of the individual rather than what’s best for the family and the larger community. Some of Silicon Valley’s history is rooted in the communal idealism of 1960s California, where technologists believed that a democratizing force called the internet was going to empower everyone through shared information. But Fadell says this philosophy has been perverted. The emphasis on community has been lost; instead, companies like Apple market their products by selling the notion of freedom, that technology is a liberating force for the individual. Fadell believes that’s partly because of who designed the seminal products and services of the digital age. [Photo: rawpixel.com/Unsplash] “A lot of the designers and coders who were in their 20s when we were creating these things didn’t have kids. Now they have kids,” he says. “And they see what’s going on, and they say, ‘Wait a second.’ And they start to rethink their design decisions.” And it’s not just that these early Silicon Valley wunderkinds didn’t have children themselves–there were no women or minorities or older people around either, as sociologist Judy Wacjman points out. “Silicon Valley is notorious in particular for not being family-friendly,” she says. “It’s notorious for being full of young male designers. It’s great that they’re thinking about this now 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 9/61 that they’re having kids, but I wonder if one could envision a different design community full of people of different sexes, full of people of different ages. Some of the design that you get is the reflection of the limited cultural understanding of the young guys who are doing the designing.” How are these designers rethinking their choices now that they do have families? One example is many tech companies’ stalwart position that they act as platforms and are not responsible for the content that users post–a stance that has recently come under fire as Facebook’s algorithms enabled fake news about the election to spread faster than real news. Fadell points to Google, which owns YouTube, in particular: “It was like, [let] any kind of content happen on YouTube. Then a lot of the executives started having kids, [and saying], maybe this isn’t such a good idea. They have YouTube Kids now.” (Google bought Nest, the company Fadell started after leaving Apple, in 2014 for $3.2 billion, and Fadell left the company under less than favorable circumstances last year.) “This self-absorbing culture is starting to blow,” he says. “Parents didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know this was a thing they needed to teach because we didn’t know for ourselves. We all kind of got absorbed in it.” According to Fadell, this is largely a matter of unintended consequences–but that doesn’t free designers and developers from responsibility. Fadell wants there to be a Hippocratic oath for designers, where they pledge to work ethically and “do no harm.” “I think we have to be very cognizant of the unintended consequences, but also acknowledge them and then design them out– make sure that we are ethically designing,” he says. “This is the slowest technology will ever progress ever again in your life. It’s only speeding up. So what are we going to do as designers to bring that element in all the time?” ABOUT THE AUTHOR Katharine Schwab is a contributing writer at Co.Design based in New York who covers technology, design, and culture. Follow her on Twitter @kschwabable. More Co.Design Daily Newsletter YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS Receive special Fast Company offers See All Newsletters SIGN UP 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 10/61 06.21.17 Design Didn’t Make Uber Good, But It Made Uber Great The company, whose CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned, masterminded the dark arts of manipulative UX. [Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images] BY MARK WILSON 4 MINUTE READ I’ll never forget my first Uber. As cheesy as that sounds, I’m sure the feeling is shared by many of us of a certain age. Finding myself stuck on the sleepy streets of San Francisco’s Nob Hill after midnight, not a cab in sight, I hit a button on my phone, a car drove up a few minutes later, and I realized city life as I knew it would never be the same. This is the power of design. Uber hid the complicated logistics of connecting cars on the move with customers who might appear anywhere on the map with the simplest of apps. I saw my car. And     7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 11/61 my car saw me. The mind-numbing calculations behind the scenes were invisible. It all felt, to borrow a word that’s been horribly over-used in the smartphone age, like magic. Yet it’s quickly become clear that Uber’s design legacy is more of a mastery of the dark arts. The departure of CEO Travis Kalanick this week caps a year during which countless insider reports revealed that the company is, in a way, more incredible than any of us imagined. However, it’s incredible specifically for its unprecedented customer and driver manipulation, along with its leveraging of data to sidestep authorities and whistleblowers. Perhaps none of this will actually change with Kalanick’s departure, but 20 years from now, we will look back at Uber with the same unsettling reverence that we do an intricate machine of war. More than any other company before, Uber weaponized UX to conquer the digital and physical worlds. Travis Kalanick [Photo: Wang K’aichicn/VCG/VCG/Getty Images] Uber started as a black car service for the Valley elite. The approach was standard from any branding playbook: Launch a company marketed to VIPs, then reveal to the middle class that they can have a piece of the high life, too. And who didn’t want a personal car service arriving at their door for less than the price of a smelly taxi? But behind the scenes, Uber leveraged the data of its riders and drivers to control both groups of users. Reports of a “God View” revealed that Uber execs could see the position and identity of any rider at any time. And it wasn’t just a means for execs to stalk Beyoncé, either. Uber’s rider data gave it extremely personal information on journalists. One executive floated the idea of spending $1 million to hire a team to look into just this information, including the “personal lives” and “families” of journalists, to arm the company with blackmail fodder against its critics. The company also deployed a project dubbed Greyball, which identified certain city officials and authorities, flagging their accounts–sometimes by looking at a customer’s credit card to see if it was linked to an organization like a police credit union–specifically to stop sting operations targeting Uber’s often less-than-legal operations. [Photo: Flickr user Carl] Greyball was used for more than tracking individuals. Uber realized that it could actually be deployed to geographic regions, changing the very functionality of Uber for specific segments of the population. For instance, using geofencing–which draws invisible boundaries on an app’s 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 12/61 map–Greyball could spot groups frequenting courthouses or police stations. The feature created fake “ghost cars” to confuse regulators who might be operating stings. Geofencing also helped Uber deceive Apple itself. Uber had been “fingerprinting” iPhones, leaving tracking files behind even after the Uber app had been deleted, despite Apple forbidding the practice. So it geofenced Apple’s campus–on the orders of Kalanick himself–to hide these practices from Apple engineers, presumably just deleting those hidden files on any supposed Apple employee’s iPhone. (For the invasive violation, The New York Times reports that Kalanick got a slap on the wrist from Tim Cook.) But Uber’s dark manipulation engine was especially inescapable for drivers. Above all else, Uber wants to keep cars on the road, and it developed a remarkable cadre of datapowered UX tools to do so. Just like Netflix loads that next episode of House of Cards, Uber automatically queues up a driver’s next trip before their last one is done, urging them to binge on work. Those who try to close the app are often pinged with a notification that they’re approaching an earning milestone–and drivers will be pinged in the morning with all sorts of enticing alerts to get them driving again. Perhaps the most unsettling twist is the gamification of rider goodwill– which may serve as a substitute for better driver compensation. When you compliment an Uber driver in the app, they will often receive badges like Above and Beyond. These happy pixels motivate people to work for something that literally disappears once they close the app. Uber was not the first company to use gamification or psychological manipulation to get a user to do things they wouldn’t normally want to do. And certainly, it was not the first company to mine user locations or leverage that data for more profit. But Uber was the first to layer all of these practices together in a strange new interactive symphony, which hit us deep in the stomach so that we’d sway to the beat. What happens now? Kalanick may be out as CEO, but Uber’s code and interface are still humming along. Many of the aforementioned policies are still intact. Indeed, reports of Uber’s dark patterns have been growing for years now, and while data is scarce, none of these practices seem to have brought the company to a halt like the events of the past few weeks. Instead, Uber’s board eventually turned on Kalanick after months of simmering #DeleteUber outrage that began Uber attempted to profit from the travel ban protests in January and reached its crescendo after damning reports of gender discrimination, harassment, and toxic bro culture. 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 13/61 So we shouldn’t assume that Uber’s dark patterns will suddenly change under new management. After all, they’re precisely what built the $50 billion company that Uber is today–with or without its CEO. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. More Co.Design Daily Newsletter YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS Receive special Fast Company offers See All Newsletters 06.19.17 MeetThe Guy Behind Design’s Most Cultishly Popular Newsletter Say hello to Sacha Greif, the humble designer-coder behind the design industry’s daily fix, Sidebar. SIGN UP 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 14/61 BY MARK WILSON 5 MINUTE READ With 35,000 subscribers and counting, Sidebar is one of the most important design publications on the planet. It’s just a daily email, linking five stories for you to read each day, but those stories are influential, and to many, serve as a barometer of where design stands today. Now Sidebar founder Sacha Greif is launching a redesigned site. Its updates are Spartan, but Sidebar has always been Spartan. Aside from the layout makeover, Greif added deks–publisher speak for summaries–below the headlines of each story. And the design will accommodate up to one job listing a day. It’s Sidebar’s sole revenue driver, aside from occasional sponsored links. Greif’s monetization efforts are fittingly casual, despite that newsletters have become the dark horse big business for publishers these days. The email newsletter began as a side project. Greif, a Frenchman who lives in Japan, prefers to follow his own passions rather than some prescribed career trajectory and would rather spend his day coding than maximizing his Influencer status in meetups and on social media. (And for the most part, those passions involve the programming framework Meteor, and one he’s in the process of launching now via the new Sidebar, Vulcan.) With Sidebar’s relaunch, we chatted with Greif about his thoughts on everything from the way we consume media, to how the major players of the Valley have finally reached a reckoning with their own audience. Co.Design: In 2012, nobody would have thought newsletters would be the force they are today. Why’d you start Sidebar? Sacha Greif: At the time, I had another project called Folio, which was a marketplace to put designers and clients in touch. I had a really hard time driving traffic to it. Whenever I wrote about code, I could post to Hacker News. But there wasn’t an equivalent for design. I thought I’d launch Hacker News for design. As for the original project Folio, I gave it away to someone else. So the side project ended up being more.     7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 15/61 Co.Design: Why do you think newsletters have found such a foothold in the age of social media, when things should be easier to find? Co.Design‘s newsletter, for instance, is vital to our daily traffic. SG: I think it’s the only truly reliable media that exists. With Twitter, you tweet something out, you might miss it. Facebook might change their algorithm. You never know who will see what. Instagram was fairly linear, now they’re using algorithms. As a consumer, if you want to be sure to know about something, email is pretty much the only way. People are siloed on Facebook, Twitter. They don’t venture out to home pages as much as they used to. I remember, I used to have my daily bookmarks. Every day, I would check out 10 to 15 sites as part of my daily routine. I don’t do that anymore. Co.Design: What was initial growth like? SG: It actually took off pretty fast in the beginning. Definitely, getting to 30,000 subscribers was a lot faster than going from 30,000 to 40,000, or however large it is now. In the beginning, it was a new concept, so I saturated my sphere of influence [laughs]. Also maybe I haven’t been as active as I should have been to promote the site. From working on Sidebar, I ended up working on a lot of other side projects. That’s how I operate. Co.Design: You don’t seem like a big self-promoter! And you obviously monetize Sidebar, but not nearly as aggressively as I’d think a lot of people would. SG: I think part of it is due to me being easily distracted. I really enjoy building things, but when it comes to marketing them, and doing all that more pushy advertising and monetization, I get bored pretty fast. I don’t really track analytics. I don’t do A/B testing. There’s a lot of things I know I should be doing but . . . I find the only way I can motivate myself to improve a project, or Sidebar, is to redesign it. I have a low motivation to go back to work on old code that by now seems all wrong. That’s why I’m launching a new version. I get a chance to give it a new coat of paint. Co.Design: 2012, the year you launched Sidebar, is coincidentally the same year I started at Co.Design. And I don’t know about you, but for me, the way I evaluate a design has changed entirely over those five years. It’s not just about, “Is this a convenient or beautiful product that 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 16/61 solves a real problem?” but about social consequences, dark patterns, the implications to our privacy–things like that. SG: I think there’s a lot more awareness of these issues now. Especially with the political climate. A simple example: It’s very popular to set up an email sequence when people sign up for your service, and pretend like you’re a real human. But it’s just an automated sequence. I think this sort of thing is going to go away as more and more people are uncomfortable with that ambiguity. It’s kind of like the fake news thing. The first wave, people got duped by it. But there’s a reaction where the people are going to question the validity of sources more, I hope. And the same thing will happen with dark patterns, or even just deceptive practices. A lot of focus will go to questions like, “Is your data really secure?” “Is the company you’re dealing with being truthful?” “Can you explore your data?” Co.Design: So the consumer is going to push back. They’re going to care more, not just get numb and care less? SG: Another example is YouTube. There’s so much controversy with ads on violent videos, or Pew Die Pie, and I think it just shows that YouTube and Google weren’t ready to deal with any of that. Same with Facebook. And they don’t have any policies that make sense in place. They’ll do nothing and then they’ll overreact. I think that’s exactly the kind of thing people are, up to now, only a tiny minority of people cared about these issues. Now YouTubers have huge audiences. I don’t think you can treat them the same way. I think it will be the same thing for every big service like this. Co.Design: What else is exciting you in design right now? What’s rocking your world? SG: I’m really excited about all the new design tools like Adobe XD, Figma. Sketch is doing pretty well, Framer. I grew up with Photoshop, and for 10 to 15 years, that was the only thing you had, and nobody ever questioned if you could do something better, and nobody ever wondered why were we using something called ‘Photoshop’ to design websites. Now, I’m glad we’re moving away from that and using tools tailored for web, designing UX, and so on. This interview has been edited and condensed. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mark Wilson is a senior writer at Fast Company. He started Philanthroper.com, a simple way to give back every day. More 7/20/2017 The Coolest New UI Features In Android O https://www.fastcodesign.com/90125997/the-6-coolest-interface-features-in-android-o 17/61 Co.Design Daily Newsletter YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS Receive special Fast Company offers See All Newsletters 06.07.17 WANTED Bet You NeverThought You’dTear UpWatching AnIkea Ad About A Bag The Frakta bag is all of us. [Still: Ikea] BY DIANA BUDDS 1 MINUTE READ Ikea’s bright-blue Frakta bag has become something of a dark-horse design icon. Who would’ve