Essential Mobile Interaction Design: Perfecting Interface Design in Mobile Apps (Usability)

Essential Mobile Interaction Design: Perfecting Interface Design in Mobile Apps (Usability)

Cameron Banga

Language: English

Pages: 304

ISBN: 0321961579

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Design User-Friendly, Intuitive Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Any Platform

 

 Mobile apps should feel natural and intuitive, and users should understand them quickly and easily. This means that effective interaction and interface design is crucial. However, few mobile app developers (or even designers) have had adequate training in these areas. Essential Mobile Interaction Design fills this gap, bringing together proven principles and techniques you can use in your next app–for any platform, target device, or user.

 

This tutorial requires virtually no design or programming knowledge. Even if you’ve never designed a mobile app before, this guide teaches you the key skills that lead to the best results. Cameron Banga and Josh Weinhold help you master the mindset, processes, and vocabulary of mobile interaction design, so you can start making better choices right away. They guide you through the entire design process, demystifying issues that arise at every stage.

 

The authors share hard-won lessons from years of experience developing more than one hundred mobile apps for clients and customers of every type. They cover important issues that platform-specific guides often overlook, including internationalization, accessibility, hybrid apps, sandboxing, and what to do after release.

This guide shows you how to

 

  • Think through your designs, instead of just throwing together UI elements
  • Allow an intuitive design flow to emerge from your app
  • Sketch and wireframe apps more effectively
  • Reflect key differences among smartphones, tablets, and desktops
  • Design for visual appeal without compromising usability
  • Work effectively with programmers
  • Make sure your apps are accessible to everyone
  • Get usable feedback, and understand what it’s telling you
  • Learn valuable lessons from today’s most successful apps
  • Refresh your designs in new apps and future versions
  • Discover new tools for designing more successfully

 

Packed with iOS and Androidexamples, Essential Mobile Interaction Design offers dozens of tips and solutions that will be equally useful on today’s platforms and on whatever comes next. Extensive resources are available at cameronbanga.com/EMIDbook.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

better suited to your task at hand don’t be afraid of going your own route. Likewise, the tools available to designers grow and evolve at a lightning-quick pace, and new products are constantly hitting the market that make design faster, easier, and more efficient. It’s always worth giving new products a try, as any learning curve involved may pay off significantly down the road. The first tool needed in a designer’s supply kit is one that’s essential to everyone from elementary school students

though the segmented control is usually only applied in order to switch between two or three different types of views. The tab controller, meanwhile, may be used for up to five or six different views of content. Sometimes, navigation controllers will be used on top of tab controllers to provide multiple levels of hierarchy for content. This control is most often seen on native and hybrid applications for iPhone and Android and is rarely used in Web applications. That’s because when a tab or

formed from a water drop is clear no matter the size. (Courtesy of Ronald Yap, M.D., M.B.A.) 109 110 CHAPTER 6 DESIGNING FOR VISUAL APPEAL tip Are you unfamiliar with the terms raster or vector? These two concepts are explained at length later in this chapter, in the “Building Art That Scales” section. Once you’ve designed a large raster image or a vector icon, it’s time to begin adapting the image to various sizes. Depending on the platform, the icon will likely need to exist in a variety

used to draft a long document or the spreadsheet you call upon to sketch out a budget. How many of those menu options and 159 160 CHAPTER 8 MAKING APPS USABLE BY ALL toolbar buttons have you explored? Surely there are plenty of features and settings you remain completely unaware of. Every time you open that program, you likely refer back to the same standard set of common, popular features. Keep this principle in mind constantly as you design, and interact with your user base and test users

potentially be placed in different views (specifically the search bar and the hour-and-minute time selector). In the mobile world, the two largest players today—Apple and Google—have long been regarded for their commitment to simplicity and understanding of the way complex processes impact user experiences. This philosophy didn’t just start with iOS and Android devices, however; it took hold long before these companies began working on mobile operating systems. Figure 9.1 This app design is a

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