Usability Week 2010

Mobile User Experience 2: Touchscreen Application Usability

  • San Francisco: Wednesday, October 6

Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial

What makes a good touch-driven application? A new, cool interface? Ease of use? Responding to users’ needs? Why do some applications become part of the everyday life of their users, while others are downloaded and never used?

This seminar addresses these questions. In discussing the secrets of a successful iPhone, iPad, or Android app, we use data from our own ethnographic and user-research studies, and from expert reviews. This seminar complements our seminar Mobile User Experience 1, which is focused on basic mobile usability principles that are valid on all platforms. In this seminar we will use examples from existing iPhone, iPad, and Android apps and will focus on the challenges that are specific to designing native apps for touchscreen devices.

What You’ll Learn

In this session, you’ll learn:

  • How touchscreen users think and what they expect from an application
  • Differences between iPhone, iPad, and Android users
  • What types of mobile applications people use repeatedly, and which are one-time wonders
  • Patterns of application usage
  • Design guidelines and best practices for making a touch-driven application useful and usable
  • How to avoid usability pitfalls in mobile user interfaces, including design mistakes made by some pretty famous apps

Course Outline

  • Types of applications : immersive, productivity, utility applications
  • Using the device hardware to your advantage:
    • How to design for the touch screen
    • Using the gestures and multi-touch in your application
    • Accelerometer
    • Sound and voice recognition
    • User’s location
  • Consistency with other applications designed for the same device and conventions
    • How to handle borderline cases
    • When can you depart from conventions
  • Design primitives
    • Menus and lists
    • Form fields
    • Buttons and controls
  • Design guidelines for common tasks
    • Startup screen
    • Logging in
    • Configuration and settings
    • Data input and form-filling guidelines;
    • Content: text, images, graphics, animation
    • Error messages and help
    • Saving state and “printing”
    • Editing
    • Search
    • Displaying ads
  • Alerts and notifications; online versus offline mode; push versus pull
  • Customization and Personalization
    • History
    • Preserving state
  • Moving from a computer application to a mobile application

Format

This full-day tutorial includes lectures, video highlights from user testing, and some exercises.

Handouts

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

Anybody who designs or considers designing iPhone/iPad or Android applications. A secondary audience would be people who target other high-end mobile devices and want their apps to equal the usability of the best iPhone or Android apps. This seminar is solely focused on the user experience and does not cover programming. Although we do discuss nonconventional app interfaces, this seminar is not intended for game developers.

See Also:

The companion seminar Mobile User Experience 1 covers basic mobile usability principles, applicable to all mobile devices.

Separate seminars that focus on application design in general

Instructor

photo of Raluca Budiu Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group, where she presents tutorials on academic research findings, mobile usability, and cognitive psychology for designers, and conducts research worldwide on usability for mobile websites and children’s websites. She coauthored the NN/g report on mobile usability. Previously, Budiu worked at Xerox PARC, doing HCI research. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations for incorporating user-generated content and social Web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20 articles and conference presentations on HCI, psychology, and cognitive science. She has a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University.