Visual Design for Mobile and Tablet 2: Usability Week 2012 Conference

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 takes a deeper dive into the visual details of creating both beautiful and usable interfaces for your users.

What You’ll Learn

As a companion to Visual Design for Mobile & Tablet 1 (and our seminars Mobile User Experience 1 & 2), this seminar focuses solely on the details and nuances of aesthetics and interaction and the roles they play in the success for a mobile experience.

Course Outline

This course dives deeper into design techniques for:

Launcher screens
My account/user profiles
Educational walk-throughs/instructions
Customizing nav/tab bars
Contextual navigation/footers
Overlays, gradients, transparency, drop shadows, textures/patterns
Popovers & modals
Animation and cartoon physics: how to make animations that
- strengthen usability instead of confusing or annoying users
- remain enjoyable after repeated viewing
- follow the rules of the virtual world and not the physical world
Notification design
Check-in screens
Activity feeds
Comments/comment detail
User ratings
Search & empty data sets/404 pages
Lists & table views
- How to display and manage larger amounts of data than you'd thought possible on a small screen
Maps
Responsive design
- How well can we adapt the same content for the transmedia environment, encompassing desktop, tablet, and phones
Advertising
- Balance between having ads be noticed and retaining the aesthetic integrity of the main design
- Approaches to advertising that leverage mobile use cases instead of fighting against them

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.

Course Materials

Copies of the presentation slides

Who Should Attend

This seminar is intended for anyone with experience working on or managing 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 is the advanced companion to Visual Design for Mobile & Tablet 1 and it's a prerequisite for this second course to have either attended the first course or have equivalent practical experience.

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.