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I'm working on an app in which the main workflow consists of two stages or phases, each with its own screen. What I have right now is two activities, the first one of which has a "Continue" button that brings up the second activity. But it's poor design because it's not obvious what the user should do, and not very neat either.

How can I improve the design, make it more obvious for the user and unify it with other Android apps that have similar workflow? On that note, I couldn't think of a similar app to study (and borrow from).

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  • Can you provide more details on what your app is about?
    – Swapnil Borkar
    Jun 16, 2016 at 14:59
  • @SwapnilBorkar: the first stage is settings/configuration; the second one commits an action configured at stage 1 and displays various stuff (which it needs the whole screen for).
    – Violet Giraffe
    Jun 16, 2016 at 15:01
  • Continue should work. Could you add screenshots so that we can see why it shouldn't look neat?
    – Swapnil Borkar
    Jun 16, 2016 at 16:59

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You should probably use material design steppers because its simple and it would fit in with the rest of your android environment. Since they are designed by google the general idea is to look clean and neat while providing enough information that people can operate the steps. You can read about them here: https://material.google.com/components/steppers.html#

I think that https://material.google.com/components/steppers.html#steppers-usage would be most pertinent to your situation because it compares different types of steppers so you could choose the one most relevant to your situation.

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  • The problem with steppers is they seem to not be implemented so far. Apart from two libraries on Github, both of which have flaws.
    – Violet Giraffe
    Jun 17, 2016 at 14:15
  • @VioletGiraffe Ah bummer, what were the flaws? If I find one without those flaws I'll let you know.
    – CKH4
    Jun 17, 2016 at 14:52
  • The most glaring one - lack of support for the Toolbar view. In fact, the more commonly referred to library doesn't seem to support custom activity XML layouts at all (so nowhere to add the toolbar). Yes, I can probably still get the theme-default toolbar, but it's not what I want.
    – Violet Giraffe
    Jun 17, 2016 at 16:29
  • @VioletGiraffe you may be able to recycle an app intro library. There's a bunch of them here but I'll keep looking for a more solid solution. Also I don't know if you've seen this one but android-arsenal.com/details/1/3162.
    – CKH4
    Jun 17, 2016 at 19:44
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    @VioletGiraffe Bummer, I'll keep looking but as I'm not an android developer, I doubt I'll be of much use. You could probably find someone who knows better on android.stackexchange.com. Good luck on finding a solution for the problem. Edit... This would probably look better than just two different pages but I'm not sure if it would work for you: android-arsenal.com/details/1/3711
    – CKH4
    Jun 17, 2016 at 20:26

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