OPPO ColorOS 13 brings a touch of nature to its smartphones

The design field covers a wide range of industries, from physical artifacts of product design to the virtual elements of user interface design. It’s sometimes too easy to take for granted the importance of a well-designed user experience, but even the most beautiful computer or smartphone becomes just an expensive paperweight if the software running on it is unusable. Smartphone user experiences or UX have come a long way ever since the first iPhone and Android phones launched, embracing different aesthetics and design languages over the years. From skeuomorphism to minimalism, UX has taken inspiration from many beautiful things in our world, and OPPO’s latest iteration of ColorOS tries to take a page from the greatest artist and designer in the world, Mother Nature.

Designer: OPPO

Smartphone UI designs have gone from trying to recreate physical objects in the digital realm to designing completely new metaphors that would be impossible to produce in the real world. The trend these days has swung towards minimalism, though the pendulum has started to move to a middle ground that adds a few embellishments to give a bit of life to what would normally be a literally flat design. This, in turn, has opened the doors to design languages that build on top of conventional minimalism, adding some character to a user interface.

ColorOS 13, for example, introduces what OPPO calls its “Aquamorphic Design” language, taking inspiration from how water flows in nature. In its calmer state, water is naturally fluid, smooth, and compliant, preferring the path of least resistance and flowing around obstacles rather, slowly eroding rocks rather than trying to smash them. Whether intentional or not, it’s a fitting metaphor for the serene design language that OPPO adopted for its award-winning Find X5 Pro flagship earlier this year.

In practice, this Aquamorphic Design manifests itself in colors, shapes, and animations that feel smoother and more natural. The default color scheme, for example, tries to take hues from dusk at sea level. Icons are larger but also have smooth rounded corners as if they were pebbles picked up from the banks of a gently flowing river. Transition animations between various parts of the phone are also smoother and more fluid, trying to imitate the natural cadence of water rather than something as simple as a timer. Many people take animations for granted, and some even despise them as a waste of CPU time or battery, but properly designed animations actually help our brains form associations when parts of the screen move around. After all, nothing in real life just pops up out of thin air, something that would be jarring to our minds, whether physical or digital.

OPPO ColorOS 13’s nod to nature doesn’t stop with its appearance. A new Always-on-Display feature called Homeland, for example, tries to raise awareness of how even a minute change in temperature caused by global warming could affect wildlife. The Blossom live wallpaper, on the other hand, ties the idea of growing a plant with your screen time. If you go over your set screen time, the plant stops growing and starts to wither.

On the technology side, ColorOS 13 promises not just smoother animations but also more efficient battery usage. In addition to a 30% reduction in power consumption with Always-on-Display mode, this version of OPPO’s Android user experience tries to save as much battery as it can, which means fewer charging times and longer battery life. These may sound like minor improvements, but they are still small steps forward that increase a phone’s longevity and sustainability in the long run.

The post OPPO ColorOS 13 brings a touch of nature to its smartphones first appeared on Yanko Design.

Apple and Star Trek inspired the neat, interactive, and clean design and UX/UI for this coffee machine!

I love coffee, I love Apple and I love Star Trek, and thereby I love the Elemental coffee machine because it combines ‘elements’ from them all! The sleek machine has a silhouette of an espresso group-head with an intuitive modern touch interface. The clean form is a nod to how easy it is to use and a freshly brewed pot of coffee is still the center of attention here.

Torres takes a very stripped-back, modernist approach, with nothing hidden in terms of the machine’s function. You can see everything you need to make a good cup of coffee which adds clarity to the simple form. The interface is completely touch-based and therefore the UI had to be intuitive while still communicating movement as well as a sense of urgency. The UI is a homage to the ‘okudagrams’, an loving name given to the interactive and usually re-organizable displays found on control panels and computer interfaces in 23rd and 24th-century starships. It started with Star Trek and then spread to every sci-fi thing ever. The idea of integrating it here was to alleviate the comparatively long time it takes for filter coffee to brew, it almost gives the illusion that more is happening than there actually is.”I wanted to avoid the basic – almost traditional at this point – style of touch UI so I went with more of a sci-fi theme inspired by TNG LCARS, but actually, you know – usable,” says Torres.

The conceptual coffee maker also incorporates a digital scale to the hopper lid and a simple twist will push the beans into the grinder. The latch would also have a switch to activate the grinder and the cover has to be shut in order to complete the circuit. There is a sneaky little MacPro reference in the internal compartments because it looked much neater than bare PCBs and offered more protection from any potential leaks. The intricate grooves on the dripper were an attempt to avoid having a sprinkler in order to distribute the water evenly to the coffee grounds. The heating element is also woven into this section to prevent hot water from needing to be pumped up the exposed pipe and potentially causing a safety hazard.

“There was limited capacity for physical prototyping, so CAD + simulation software was used to quickly iterate and solve problems with the design. Surprisingly, this actually worked fairly well, at least in this case. Blender mantaflow simulations were used on the CAD models were used to help drive the water channels and filter arrangement,” explained Torres. Now, all I can think of is getting a good cup of coffee and watching sci-fi movies.

Designer: Leo Torres

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This card-based UX wireframe maker turns digital ideation into physical fun

Featuring 80 double-sided cards, the UX Kits Wireframe card deck lets you build and experiment with interfaces and wireframes simply by arranging cards to form layouts, making them an instant and effective brainstorming tool. Each card works as a content block that can be arranged and rearranged to create layouts based on ideas (which can even be rearranged to test the responsiveness of your concepts). Once the layout seems final, simply flip the cards over and you’ve got yourself a template that you can actually work with. A great tool for quick ideation, validation, and even to demonstrate with clients!

Designer: UX Kits

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