These considerable guidelines are not a relevant for user research and usability testing; they are intended as a “quick start” guide to get your designs moving in the right way. There are no absolute rules in usability design and your users should shape your design decisions as much as best practices do.
In their paper, Mobile App UX Principles, Google’s mobile team offers some considerable practice for mobile app usability.
What You Should Now Be Able to Do:
- Know what the basic mobile app patterns and default screens should look like and how to implement them in your designs.
- Understand the differences between smartphones and tablets and be able to reflect those differences in your UI and UX development.
- Know why the smartphone renders the user less able to comprehend and take steps in your designs to minimize confusion for the user.
- Understand what skeuomorphism is, why it was falling out of fashion and why it may be necessary all over again for mobile design conventions.
- Understand how to reduce the burden on the user, via design, of thinking too much by ensuring that your designs are engineered to be intuitive and usable.
- Know how to make features “discoverable” within mobile designs without overwhelming your user
- Understand the options that are available to UX designers in terms of augmented reality on the mobile platform
- Be able to use the best current UI patterns for your mobile designs so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.
- Know the difference between native and hybrid apps and responsive website design and be able to choose the best solutions for your design implementation.
Summary
Developing mobile UI is challenging but it’s not a challenge that you can’t overcome. When you have a full understanding of best practices in mobile UI and a range of existing design patterns to call on – the whole process becomes a lot easier and you can focus more effort on other parts of the user experience which require your attention.
