A couple of weeks ago I wrote An Exploration in Material Design after attending a workshop at Google HQ where I explored what feedly would look like if we followed the new style guide.

On February 10th I went back to Google with my teammates Edwin and Sean to attend another workshop and get more tips from the Material Design team. Rachel Been, Art Director at Google, was our mentor and shared with us a few core principles they use in Material Design..

After two days of work in Google’s Garage we managed to create a working prototype. Add to that a few weeks of polishing and we are now able to release our first implementation of Material Design.

Get the new feedly for Android on the Play Store to experience all these new changes.

Emotional experience

During these two days we focused on rethinking the visual design of our discovery experience. This experience is our users’ introduction to feedly — that is to start building their self-curated newsfeed by finding a few sources to add to their feedly.

Rachel’s main guidance was to make the experience more emotional and more immersive. She championed a few things:

Visuals over text

How can each element be better represented by imagery instead of just text labels?

How can each element be better represented by imagery instead of just text labels? Curated over algorithmic

Can we feature search results based on a human opinion rather than having an algorithm decide what is best?

Can we feature search results based on a human opinion rather than having an algorithm decide what is best? Featured over flat list Create a hierarchy in search results with featured elements instead of showing a flat list of results and letting users go through the hassle of figuring out which are the best results.

Create a hierarchy in search results with featured elements instead of showing a flat list of results and letting users go through the hassle of figuring out which are the best results. Article photography over stock image

Dynamically use visuals from articles rather than using static stock photography. This applies in particular to our topic cards.

Dynamically use visuals from articles rather than using static stock photography. This applies in particular to our topic cards. Suggestions over basic search

How can we suggest content relevant to users in the core experience instead of asking users to specifically search for content.

We wrote these principles on the board and started prototyping. The goal was not necessarily to implement each principle but rather to get inspired by them.