Mobile User Experience 2: Touchscreen Application Usability
- New York: Tuesday, February 28
- Las Vegas: Friday, March 16
- Edinburgh: Tuesday, March 20
- San Francisco: Tuesday, April 3
- Amsterdam: Tuesday, April 24
- Washington D.C.: Tuesday, May 15
Amy Schade
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Training Course
What makes a good 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. Although we do discuss nonconventional app
interfaces, this seminar is not intended for game developers.
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 your 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
- 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.
What is NOT Covered
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.
Instructors
Amy Schade is a Director based in Nielsen Norman
Group’s East Coast office. Schade works with clients internationally in telecommunications,
e-commerce, government, travel, automotive, publishing, banking, non-profit and education,
including extensive work on corporate intranets. She has conducted user research and performed
reviews on a wide variety of websites in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia.
She presents tutorials on user testing, intranet usability, writing for the Web, email newsletter
usability and mobile usability.
She authored the NN/g reports on
intranet usability,
intranet information architecture,
email newsletters, and
site map usability,
as well as the 2010 and 2011 Intranet Design Annuals,
and conducted many user test sessions for reports on
accessibility and
usability for senior citizens.
Before joining NN/g, Schade was an information architect at Arc eConsultancy, where she created
and revised architectures for sites ranging from a family-related content site to a
transaction-based sponsorship marketplace. Schade has also held various positions in web production
and advertising. She has a Master's degree from New York University’s Interactive
Telecommunications Program and a B.A. in Communications from the University of Pennsylvania.
Presenting in New York, Edinburgh, and Washington D.C..
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. At NN/g she consults
for clients from a variety of industries and presents tutorials on mobile usability, usability of touch devices,
cognitive psychology for designers, and principles of human computer interaction. She coauthored the NN/g
reports on mobile usability, iPad usability, and the usability of children’s websites. Budiu previously worked
at Xerox PARC, doing research in human-computer interaction. 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 human-computer interaction, psychology, and
cognitive science. She holds a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University.
Presenting in Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Amsterdam.
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