Material Design for Android app

Customer need

The SimplePractice Android app needed an overhaul to create an Android specific experience for our customers. The engineers in the mobile team had been working for 5 years without a dedicated designer, and created an experience based on best practices while mostly referencing iOS patterns. Considering the resources available, the app worked well. But as SimplePractice’s web experience was constantly improving and features were being implemented, the mobile experience needed more design patterns to cater to those needs.

I designed the Android app based on material design system but also used existing patterns in the app to alleviate the burden of forcing our customers to learn a new app.

The following are the core screens which contain all the components used throughout the app.

Scheduling and managing appointments

The calendar is the most used screen by customers. I wanted to ensure the most important information was clearly displayed as clinicians may only have a few minutes between sessions to check their schedule.

Two FAB buttons were used which breaks the material design recommendations (should be one), but the use case to allow customers to quickly decline or accept appointments was a justified reason to implement it.

Clients and their contacts

As clinicians may have hundreds of clients, a filtering system was included for quicker access to specific clients or contacts.

Client detail

The client detail screen is slightly more unique as clients are the centre of a clinician’s practice. To provide the importance of a client and remind which client is being viewed, the header area is enlarged to give that focus.

Notes to track progress

Including notes is vital to a clinician’s role to track their client’s progress. Optimising the way forms are viewed, and the ease of use of text fields and selectors provides a lot of value for our customers.

Reminders

Reminders are another key screen for a clinician to keep their practice on track.