Designing and Developing for Google Glass

Chapter 6. Glassware Antipatterns: Avoiding Poor Design

As we discovered in Chapter 4, an unbiased overview of Glass reveals that while it’s a wonderful and powerful communications platform that’s rapidly expanding with Google and the developer community creating a ton of real-world uses, it quite frankly isn’t the solution to many existing problems—and wasn’t intended to be. A further issue is the ways that Glass can create new problems and be devalued by misapplying it in different scenarios.

As a Glassware architect (either on the design or development side) and even as an end user, you need to know what Glass was meant to do and do well, and not try to cram the Think for Glass philosophy into every situation under the sun. And programmers and designers that spend their days and nights crafting innovative Glassware need to be aware of and respect the implied boundaries and design recommendations, allowing users to get the most use out of the platform in terms of maximizing battery life, minimizing notification frenzies, and keeping the input required from hitting excessive levels. It’s a virtuous cycle: responsible program design emphasizes ease of use and efficient use of system resources, which breeds proper use, resulting in happy users, leading to a huge userbase, meaning favorable reviews, a positive reputation, and a profitable project.

The brutal truth is that at least for its initial incarnation, Glass isn’t very accommodating to purposes for which it was not intended. ...