Week 14 Discussion Post
November 29, 2014
Based on what you learned about in lecture this week for app best practices, answer:
What are 3 best practices that go into designing a mobile app? (there are more, but just choose 3)
- Briefly explain the 3 practices you chose (support each with an outside citation not presented in lecture).
- Choose one of the best practices you wrote about and show an example of an app that matches the criteria of that practice.
From the readings and the lecture, my three best practices in mobile app design are:
- Design for fat fingers – making sure your buttons, links, labels, etc., anything that is part of the user interface is designed to accommodate large, “fat” fingers for proper tapping and usability. Having buttons/links too small can be very challenging for users.
- Design for multiple screen sizes and resolutions. I think this is even more important as manufacturers, such as Apple and Samsung, are increasing the size of phones within their product portfolio. The introduction last month of the iPhone 6 and 6+ with larger screens is further bolstering the phablet market. Additionally, some companies, mine included, build apps only for iPhones, but users can download and use on iPads.
- Asset Sheets – I think this is a great idea and comes in handy when transitioning projects from designers to developers. I’m currently working on a similar project where we provided exact screenshots, colors, fonts and the “button state” in absolute detail so the developers know exactly how to code from the comps. It’s been very handy to 1) provide clear direction to the dev team, and 2) serves as a “bible” that I can reference when coding isn’t delivered to spec.
While I can’t speak to the asset sheet for my example, I will use Google Analytics App for iPad which has been a great extension – and in many respects, better – version of the GA site.
Admittedly, it did take me a few attempts to learn how to change from one report to the next (I have access to more than 50 sites’ performance & reports), but the overall interface, graphics, data, and interactions are amazing. Google had the app originally for Android, no surprise, but I found the iPad version a few weeks ago and it’s become a staple of mine in meetings to quickly pull-up performance data and share it out to the team.
Post Tags:
App Design, Digital Design, Mobile App, VIC5325,