Navigating Android
Date: 2018-2019
Role: Head of UX and Design Director, Motorola Mobility
Work Partners: PM, ENG, Research
Context
When the 2016 Moto G was released to internal dogfooders, it featured a button that users thought looked like a home button but didn’t act like one. The design team capitalized on the opportunity to introduce a gesture method of handling Android navigation (Home, Back, and Recents) on the fingerprint sensor that simplified how users could interact with the device. The solution was such a success that the team pivoted from the physical solution to a digital one in order to implement the simplified gesture navigation across the whole portfolio in 2017 & 2018. Android released its own gesture-based navigation in the Pie release, which was panned in comparison to our solution, however, we anticipated that the Android team would continue evolving their design in Android 10.
Strategy & solutions
I suspected we might need to deprecate the innovative and widely popular feature based on trade-off analysis, however, I waited until the design team had been able to conduct research on both designs and develop a recommendation of what we should do next.
The lead designer and lead researcher knew that users had become accustomed to Motorola’s gesture navigation model because there was an easy transfer of the mental model of Home, Back and Recents to our design, however, they soon realized that the similarity of the two models’ visual cues was going to be a challenge for users to distinguish between them, and it could be problematic to have both designs on the same device.
I included the lead designer in discussions with the Android team developing the new gesture navigation model, with the explicit intention of developing her communication skills and allowing her to articulate her position and advocate for insights the team felt were important to incorporate into Android’s solution.
Outcome
Ultimately this was a moment of balancing an opportunity for innovation with business needs. I championed the inclusion of both designs in our Android 10 devices and was able to get support from product management. However, when I discussed the planned integration with our lead architecture engineer he raised longer-term implications of bringing the design into new products. I then asked the designer and researcher whether they wanted me to continue to champion the design. After deeper analysis of the user data, they recommended deprecating the feature on new product introductions (NPI) and we identified key insights that had helped users onboard gesture navigation and added those parts of the design to Android’s base.
