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/