as presented by Timothy Jordan at SXSW 2013
Here are a handful of UI best practices to use when designing for Glass. A few of these were presented at SXSW 2013 by Google’s Timothy Jordan. The rest are my own from years of next-gen UI design experience.
- keep it simple. no, *really* simple.
- the screen is TINY. so make your fonts BIG, and put only the most essential information on screen.
- smooth visual transitions. this is right in the users eye. no blinking lights. think crossfades and flowing animations.
- The font in all the Google demos is Roboto, of varying weights. Download it and get familiar with it. Roboto to Glass is as Chicago was to the original Mac.
- The interface metaphor is info-cards.
- Use a small natural language indicator in the lower right to indicate a relative timestamp for the card’s information. As in, “just now”, “now”, “3 minutes ago”, “yesterday”, “3 days ago” etc.
- Use cases: Glass is for information about the moment, and information ‘snacking’. It is not for the consumption of feature films, e-book novels, or AAA videogames. Unless its an audiblebook.
>> Click here to preview a Photoshop template embodying these principals