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Designing Control UI of PSLab Android using Moqups

Mockups are an essential part of app development cycle. With numerous mock-up tools available for android apps (both offline and online), choosing the right mock-up tool becomes quite essential. The developers need a tool that supports the latest features like drag & drop elements, support collaboration upto some extent and allow easy sharing of mockups. So, Moqups was chosen as the mockups tool for the PSLab Android team.

Like other mock-up tools available in the market, using moqups is quite simple and it’s neat & simple user interface makes the job easier. This blog discusses some of the important aspects that need to be taken care of while designing mockups.

A typical online mock-up tool would look like this having a palette to drag & drop UI elements like Buttons, Text boxes, Check boxes etc. Additionally a palette to modify the features of each element ( here on the right ) and other options at the top related to prototyping, previewing etc.

    • The foremost challenge while designing any mock-up is to keep the design neat and simple such that even a layman doesn’t face problems while using it. A simple UI is always appealing and the current trend of UIs is creating flat & crisp UIs.

    • For example, the above mock-up design has numerous advantages for both a user and also as a programmer. There are seek bars as well as text boxes to input the values along with the feature of displaying the value that actually gets implemented and it’s much simpler to use. From the developer’s perspective, presence of seven identical views allows code reuse. A simple layout can be designed for one functionality and since all of them are identical, the layout can be reused in a Recyclerview.
    • The above design is a portion of the Control UI which displays the functionalities for  using PSLab as a function generator and as a voltage/current source.

    • The other section of the UI is of the Read portion. This has the functionalities to measure various parameters like voltage, resistance, capacitance, frequency and counting pulses. Here, drop-down boxes have been provided at places where channel selection is required. Since voltages are most commonly measured values in any experiment, voltages of all the channels have been displayed simultaneously.
    • Attempts should always be made to keep the smaller views as identical as possible since it becomes easier for the developer to implement it and also for the user to understand.

 

The Control UI has an Advanced Section which has features like Waveform Generators allows to generate sine/square waves of a given frequency & phase, Configuring Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)  and selecting the Digital output channel. Since, the use of such features are limited to higher level experiments, they have been separately placed in the Advanced section.

Even here drop-down boxes, text boxes & check boxes have been used to make UI look interactive.

The common dilemma faced while writing the XML file is regarding the view type to be chosen as Android provides a lot of them like LinearLayout, ConstraintLayout, ScrollView, RecyclerView, ListView etc. So, although there are several possible ways of designing a view. Certain things like using ListView or RecyclerView where there is repetition of elements is easier and when the elements are quite distinct from each other, it is better to stick to LinearLayout and ConstraintLayout.

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