When designers create applications for smartphones, they often hark back to principles inherited from desktop software. After all, they’re all computers, right? Android UX Design Chief Matias Duarte thinks it’s time to jettison that idea. The technology available in the average smartphone today is vastly more powerful than the desktop computer of 30 years ago, when those standards were first created. So it’s time to rethink the paradigms and invent new ones for today’s technology and devices. “I want people to stop thinking of an application as a bucket of buttons and think of it instead as a canvas,” he says.

That was one of Duarte’s guiding ideas as he went about leading the team that redesigned the Android UX for Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest Android operating system, which was released in December. Duarte says he took his inspiration from cutting-edge graphic design. “We’ve had 2,000 years of development in visual communication, and mobile computers typically don’t take advantage of that,” Duarte says. That was particularly important in light of one of Ice Cream Sandwich’s primary design goals: Turn Android phones into objects their users love passionately, instead of simply devices they find useful. “It just makes sense that the next step in connecting to people and, especially connecting to them emotionally, is to look at the best lessons of how people have been connecting emotionally for the last thousands of years.” Here’s how he did it.

Application interfaces have always felt like functional assemblies of buttons. Because, after all, they took their cues from machines. Want to make a machine do something? Push a button. But as you flip through Ice Cream Sandwich’s screens, you get a much different feeling. Each screen feels lightweight, as if it were a page in a magazine, rather than a set of knobs and switches. Even the phone dialer looks light and sleek. It’s clear how to use it, of course. It just doesn’t feel so … buttony.

All of that is intentional, Duarte says. Each screen is designed to heighten the emotional impact. Take the contact card, for example. Many smartphones allow you to include photos of the people in your contact list. And many of them store them as thumbnails in the contact card. Not so in Ice Cream Sandwich. Instead, the image takes prominence in the layout, consuming a third of the screen. “We’re really visual creatures,” Duarte says. “We want the person to be the point of emotional contact.” So the image gets emphasized, while the actual contact information recedes. It’s still there, of course, but the emphasis is on the visuals, not unlike, say, in a magazine.

Any UI toolkit has a series of elements that get re-used throughout an interface–checkboxes, dropdown menus, lists, and so forth. Typically, Duarte says, each one of gets “designed on a silver platter”–a lot of time is spent making each one beautiful in its own right, with beveled edges, perhaps, and a full 3-D feel. The problem with that, Duarte says, is that when you assemble the individual elements on a screen, each one becomes prominent on its own. (Go ahead, pull out your iPhone, and look at a contact card, for example. See how each element on that card seems to have equal weight?)

Duarte says that overwhelms the layout. He compares the overly designed elements to pieces of Victorian hand-carved ornamentation. “Each is very pretty, but when you try to make a wall or a house out of them, all the embellishments fight with the larger building.”

So for Ice Cream Sandwich, the UX team designed each building block to be as minimal as possible. Individual screens still use the elements, but it’s the overall layout that captures your attention, rather than the individual units.