Building with Material
Material Design creates a system of paper-like surfaces that live in your Android device. This powerful metaphor allows us to stack, shape, deform, transition, and animate these surfaces to create a cohesive user experience. App users can get simple cues from the underlying material about what targets they need to interact with and how the app hierarchy is organized.
We've redesigned our Grid Layout to use a new card based paradigm and moved to Lollipop's new more efficient RecyclerView as the basis for our grid. With a new Layout Manager we were able to create a magazine column look and feel with cards of various sizes and styles.
Big Graphics and Bold Designs
BuzzFeed content can be highly visual and deeply detailed, and we wanted to reflect that graphic focus in the presentation of the new edition of the BuzzFeed app. Articles now feature detailed full-bleed header images, while content feeds can vary in size to indicate their importance. Colors now fade in and out with user interaction and have bright, lively gradients and accents.
Making Things Move
Navigating complex, richly detailed app interfaces can be disorientating, which is why the BuzzFeed Lollipop edition app has been designed with a wide-ranging set of feedback and transition animations. Every interaction has weight and meaning. Ripple effects and shared element transitions are used heavily so objects respond to touch, and screens animate in, piece-by-piece, building the new content into the page. These visual cues allow users to better feel the changes taking place whenever they navigate, share, or respond to an article, thus ensuring they don't get lost.
Designed for Our Users
BuzzFeed app users love to share articles with their friends. The new Android app design takes this to heart, by promoting the article sharing function to a floating action button (FAB). Having one primary action per screen simplifies the app function and focuses the user on the most common task at hand. The other article specific actions have been moved into the app bar, where they change based on the context of the screen that the user is currently viewing.
