Improving pocket paint usability via material design compliance and internationalization & localization support on application level

Abstract

This paper discusses the implementation of Google's Material Design guidelines, internationalization, and localization for mobile applications in the case of Pocket Paint, an Android painting application. The intended goal of this redesign is to broaden the user base by improving overall usability and supporting right-to-left written languages such as Arabic. The main challenges of the redesign are the intricacies to thoroughly support both right-to-left and left-to-right scripts, e.g., the positioning, translation, mirroring of text and graphical elements, the 'when' and 'when not' to mirror. Related to the Material Design guideline compliance we carried out a user experience test with six users (age 13) of our target group. All participants rated the redesigned application being simpler, more appealing and concise in comparison to the previous version.