iPhone Apps Design
- New York: Friday, March 26
- Chicago: Thursday, April 22
- London: Wednesday, May 19
- San Francisco: Thursday, June 17
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial
What makes a good iPhone application? A new, cool interface? Ease of use? Responding to
users’ needs? Why do some applications become part of the everyday lives of their users,
while others are downloaded and never used?
This seminar addresses these questions. In discussing the secrets of a successful iPhone app,
we use data from our own ethnographic and user-research studies, as well as knowledge gained from
expert reviews. This seminar uses examples from existing iPhone apps and focuses on the challenges
specific to designing native apps for the iPhone. It complements our seminar on
Designing Mobile Websites, which is focused on browser-based design.
What You’ll Learn
In this session, you’ll learn:
- How iPhone users think and what they expect from an application
- Which types of iPhone applications people use repeatedly and which are one-time wonders
- Patterns of application usage
- Design guidelines and best practices for making your application useful and usable
- How to avoid usability pitfalls in iPhone user interfaces, including design mistakes made by some pretty famous apps
Course Outline
- Types of iPhone software: immersive, productivity, and utility applications
- When to use mobile websites, phone-native apps, or both
- Using the iPhone hardware to your advantage:
- How to design for the touch screen
- Gestures and multi-touch
- Accelerometer
- Sound and voice recognition
- Location information
- iPhone application conventions: when consistency matters
- How to handle borderline cases
- When to depart from conventions
- Design primitives
- Menus and lists: table options, pickers, and switch controls
- Form fields
- Views: toolbar, status bar, tab bar, and navigation bar
- Buttons and controls
- Design guidelines for common tasks and features
- Startup screen
- Logging in
- Configuration and settings
- Data input and forms
- Content: text, images, graphics, and animation
- Error messages and help
- Saving state and “printing”
- Editing
- Search
- Displaying ads
- Alerts and notifications: online vs. offline mode, and push vs. pull
- Customization and personalization
- Moving from a desktop application to an iPhone application
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, video highlights from usability testing, and exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
Anyone who designs or wants to design iPhone applications, as well as
those who design software for other high-end mobile devices and want their apps to be as easy
to use as the best iPhone apps. The guidelines are relevant for e-commerce apps (m-commerce),
financial and transactional apps, productivity and utility apps, branding/promotional apps,
content and informational apps, enterprise apps and intranet apps, and many other application
genres. While we have not tested users playing games, several of the guidelines are still
relevant for the interaction design aspects of games (as opposed to gameplay aspects, which are
not covered).
This seminar is solely focused on the user experience and does not cover programming.
See Also:
This seminar is about the usability of native applications that run directly
on the iPhone, not about websites accessed through a browser. A companion seminar,
Designing Mobile Websites, focuses on the usability of websites when
accessed from mobile devices as well as the design of mobile-specific websites.
Workflow and usability issues for applications in general (whether mobile or desktop) are
covered in the seminars Application Usability 1: Page-Level
Building Blocks for Feature Design and Application
Usability 2: Dialogue and Workflow Design.
Instructor
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.
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