Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet 1
- New York: Thursday, March 1
- Edinburgh: Wednesday, March 21
- San Francisco: Wednesday, April 4
- Amsterdam: Thursday, April 26
- Washington D.C.: Thursday, May 17
Kara McCain
Full-Day Training Course
The visual design for a mobile device — be it a phone or tablet — can alter a person’s perception of the usefulness and usability of your app or website. There are unique challenges to designing for mobile and this course focuses on the nuances creating both beautiful and usable interfaces for your users.
What You’ll Learn
As a companion to our seminars Mobile User Experience 1 & 2, this seminar focuses solely on the important roles aesthetics and interaction play in the success for a mobile experience.
Course Outline
This course focuses on three main categories:
The visual anatomy of mobile design
- Icons–design and usage
- Icons within apps and sites
- The icon that represents an app on the phone/tablet's main screens
- Images
- Forms
- Transitions
- UI feedback, alerts & notifications, and Heads Up Displays (HUD)
- User mental models and designing physicality/realism
- Designing for gestures/discoverability
UI Patterns and Components
- Links & labels
- Buttons
- Sorts & filters
- The navigation bar
- Tabs
- Sliders
- Toggles
- Carousels
Cross-Device Design
- Achieving a recognizable style across big and small screens: unifying websites, apps, etc., even if they can't all have the same features
- Device orientation: landscape vs. portrait
What is NOT Covered
This is not a programming/development course. We do not cover coding for iOS, Android, HTML5, CSS, etc. This seminar focuses purely on the user experience (what is shown to users), not about the engineering required to implement a design.
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, exercises, videos and plenty of inspiring screenshots that we deconstruct to show why they work–or where they fail.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
This seminar is intended for anyone beginning to work on or manage the user experience of a mobile application or website, including visual designers, interaction designers, information architects and usability specialists. Even if you’re not personally creating the design, it’s highly useful to know the process required to design a successful mobile experience. This seminar does not have any prerequisites, other than a general knowledge of mobile devices.
See Also:
A companion seminar, Visual Design for Mobile & Tablet 2 focuses on issues specific to designing applications for touchscreen devices.
Instructor
Kara McCain is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group. For more than 14 years,
she has been creating innovative brand and user experiences in the search, social media, luxury, hotel, travel,
jewelry, telecommunications, professional sports, e-commerce, government, and food-service industries. Her
expertise has allowed her to develop and implement highly successful Web and print design strategies for
Fortune 500 companies. Before joining Nielsen Norman Group, McCain was a senior visual and interaction designer
for Yahoo!'s Search and Social Media division, working on Yahoo! Answers, Local search, and defining the way
people integrate social media into search. Prior to Yahoo!, she also led the Web design effort for clients such
as Verizon, Pizza Hut, The Ritz-Carlton hotels, the Dallas Stars, Radio City Entertainment and the Zale Diamond
Corporation.
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