Experience Design For Mobile and Tablet Apps
Experience Design Challenges for Mobile and Handheld Devices
The common truth is that every mobile app or mobile website in the world would not exist without mobile user experience design. Even the simplest application does have UX. At the same time, designing for mobile devices is a very sophisticated knowledge. Moreover, it has been dramatically improved over the last decade, transferred from one designer to another. Following the constantly changing design trends, it gives birth to mobile UX design best practices.
Defining a business strategy and analyzing competitors should definitely go first. For instance, knowing that a mobile app is a chat for kids, designers use enlarged typography and optimize each screen to the minimum possible amount of elements:
Two Platforms One UX
Here it doesn’t necessarily mean that design is similar across platforms. Quite on the contrary, even if it should be different, you may anyway think about creating one common mobile app user experience first. It can follow either iOS or Android guidelines only. After all, this practice saves time spent on UX by a designer. Besides, creating UI for the second platform based on that for the first one doesn’t take extra time later.
Inheritance Is the Key
This is one of the most solid pillars of user experience best practices modern UX knowledge stands on. It is recommended to keep the ratio of the same UX elements of an app across all of its screens and, of course, across different devices and screen resolutions if mobile design is responsive.
Examples of such UX elements:
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text fields;
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date pickers;
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segmented control elements;
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action buttons;
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etc.
Flexibility
According to mobile navigation best practices, each screen and element of an app have their own micro-mechanics. And each micro-mechanics usually has different implementation options. The number of possible options depends on a project, but definitely, there are weighty reasons to provide some.
Firstly, it gives room for choice and/or improvement.
Secondly, there is a chance to compare estimates for each option by involving developers. An additional value here is that they may not only prove concept options but also knock the bottom out of them.
Last but not least, in this way a design team delivers some extra expertise to the Product Owner which simply increases loyalty to them.
Black and White
Designing for mobile devices is about focusing on how elements are placed on the screen, on interactions and mechanics of an app. This is where it is more important to understand if it’s convenient for a user’s finger to tap the elements. Visual perception always comes at the UI stage.
So forget about colors for a while and make UX monochrome. Make the fingers happy first.
