On Wednesday, Katherine, Tomasz and I met with Joe Castorena from Google’s Android Play Partnerships team. I’ve split up the most relevant information into a few separate emails, to keep the discussion on each separate point focussed.

Joe mentioned something that Google offers its partners, called a UX review. He said that he could get the build passed to the Android engineering team at Google, and in short they’d critique every aspect of the user experience. The result would be a long document (on the order of 20 pages) where the Android team at Google would make recommendations about how we could improve the UX of the app. He said that this process is entirely voluntary, so we could take or leave the feedback as we see fit. He did suggest, however, that doing something like this is going to massively increase the way that we’re perceived by Google, and would increase the possibility of getting featured as a “Best App 2014” or “Best Designed App”. Basically, we’d be seen as a shining example of what Android could do.

Given that we can take and leave the feedback as we see fit, I think we should definitely do this. Once we have the feedback, we can figure out where the individual items of feedback sit in our priorities. I'm really excited to get some feedback from the people who literally wrote the book on Android design.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Dan

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Dan Garry
Associate Product Manager, Mobile Apps
Wikimedia Foundation