Designing Mobile Interfaces

Book excerpt: With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available today, your app has to capture users immediately. This book provides practical techniques to help you catch—and keep—their attention. You’ll learn core principles for designing effective user interfaces, along with a set of common patterns for interaction design on all types of mobile devices. Mobile design specialists Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman have collected and researched 76 best practices for everything from composing pages and displaying information to the use of screens, lights, and sensors. Each pattern includes a discussion of the design problem and solution, along with variations, interaction and presentation details, and antipatterns. Compose pages so that information is easy to locate and manipulate Provide labels and visual cues appropriate for your app’s users Use information control widgets to help users quickly access details Take advantage of gestures and other sensors Apply specialized methods to prevent errors and the loss of user-entered data Enable users to easily make selections, enter text, and manipulate controls Use screens, lights, haptics, and sounds to communicate your message and increase user satisfaction "Designing Mobile Interfaces is another stellar addition to O’Reilly’s essential interface books. Every mobile designer will want to have this thorough book on their shelf for reference." —Dan Saffer, Author of Designing Gestural Interfaces