Full day training course offered at Usability Week London

Mobile Apps for Touchscreens

App-specific usability guidelines for phones and tablets

Different platforms require different user interface design. What works for mouse-driven desktop design is not the same as for gesture-driven touchscreen design. Additionally, apps allows us to streamline functionality in more phone-specific design. In this course, you will learn the UI elements for creating successful apps on devices such as iPhone, iPad, Android, and Kindle.

This course focuses on the user experience, not on development or programing.

Benefits

  • Learn best practices for designing touch-specific apps
  • Understand considerations and solutions for various screen sizes
  • Explore implications of different platforms on the design

Topics covered

  • Behavioral differences: Tablets vs. phones
    • Usage patterns
    • Design standards
  • Device differences: Android vs. iPhone vs. Windows Phone 7
    • Functional differences
    • Design implications
  • App functionality
  • Content vs. chrome
  • Navigation and search
    • Navigatiom patterns
    • Hidden navigation
    • Scrolling vs. pagination
    • Deck of cards
  • App Workflows
    • Button placement
    • Step design
  • Input on the touch screen
    • Touch target: Size and affordances
    • Errors: Accidental touches and the back button
  • Gestures and multi-touch
    • Gesture affordances and familiarity
    • Progressive disclosure and gesture overload
  • Orientation: Landscape vs. portrait views
  • Initial experience
  • Dialogs
    • Toasts and alerts
    • Modal dialogs, split views, popovers
  • Locations
    • Use of location
    • Locator tools
  • Notifications
  • Instructions and help
    • Contextual
    • Progressive disclosure

Format

The basis of the course is a lecture format with a couple of group exercises to reinforce the learned principles and guidelines.

The course also includes:

  • Findings from our own usability studies
  • Videos from usability testing of people's behavior in response to an app design
  • Screenshots of app designs that work and don’t work
  • Opportunities to ask questions and get answer

Bonus Material

Nielsen Norman Group Mobile Website & Application Usability report (free).

Companion Course

Mobile Websites and Apps is a companion course to Mobile Apps for Touchscreens . Each course can be taken independently. Mobile Websites and Apps covers:

  • Best practices for creating user-friendly mobile interfaces
  • Mobile strategy. What is better: Apps, web app, mobile website, or responsive design?
  • How to conduct mobile usability studies

Instructor

Amy Schade

Amy Schade works with clients large and small in a variety of industries such as telecommunications, e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, music, publishing, banking, non-profit and education, including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted worldwide user research, including longitudinal studies, remote studies and eyetracking research, running studies in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia. Read more about Amy