How to Sell More Apps With Well Designed Screenshots. This article will discuss a critical component of App Store success: well-crafted screenshots.
Your prospective customers WILL "judge a book by its cover", so taking the time necessary to create screenshots that sell is well worth the effort. 5 Steps for Wireframing and Paper Prototyping Mobile Apps. This article builds on our previous article about the Mobile Design Process, digging deeper into paper prototyping and wireframing phases of app development.
At the end, I’ll have a list of various tools you can use to create your wireframes and prototypes. Interaction design for mobile is a common topic of conversation among User Experience (UX) professionals, but what about those of us who only work with UX occasionally? Many designers and developers are assigned projects that do not have the luxury of retaining a UX specialist, but are (of course) still expected to product elegant, intuitive interfaces. Killer Tips for iPhone and iPad Icon Design. Icons are a crucial part of every iOS application.
They convey the first impression of your app to prospective users and remain a central focal point to those who download the application. We all know how important it is to create a good first impression and build a strong brand with your design, and this tutorial will demonstrate 8 great ways to do just that! 1. Use Visual Metaphors This is a no-brainer in icon design, but if you go through the App Store, there are surprisingly few icons that do this well. If you took all of the words off of these icons, how many would say to you “tongue twister”? I’ve enlarged the only icon that really does the term “tongue twister” justice. Understanding Your App’s Target Audience. In Part 5 of this series, “The Mobile App Design Process”, I touched briefly on the the importance of identifying and exploring “who is” the target audience for your application.
In this article, we’ll go beyond identifying the “who is” and take a closer look at how your audience should affect everything about your app from concept to launch. The Audience Matters More Than the Idea It’s easy to get excited about app ideas. I hear great ideas every day, but in most cases they’re ideas that originate around a task or function, rather than a specific audience. The target audience is considered as an after thought, only important when formulating the marketing plan. Why Start With the Audience? The Pros and Cons of Apple Default vs. Custom Graphics. In the first article in this series,”Introduction to iPhone Design”, we briefly discussed why some iPhone apps use Apple templates while others are custom designed.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look and discuss why this is an important question from a design, development, and business perspective. What Are “Templated” Apps? In this series, I will use the word “templated” as a way to describe, in layman’s terms, the consistent look of the pre-built controls Apple provides for developers in their Interface Builder application. The Mobile Design Process. If you are a designer, the good news about the mobile app space is this: design is everything.
Whether you're building a utility or a game, appearance has a great impact on both popularity and usability. Cluttered or disorganized apps are difficult to understand and hard to use. This isn't to say that a "serious tool" should be embellished with an overdone GUI. A great app design is one that will balance appearance with function. In terms of function, there are certainly some areas of app development that are not the "designer's job" per se, but still have a great impact on the design conceptually and in application’s creative direction. What is the Application’s Primary Task? Once an idea for an app has been generally scoped out, it’s time to narrow down the application functionality to the core of what the app does.
How to Design for the Different Types of iPhone Apps. Welcome to the fourth installment in our series on iPhone Design 101!
If you’re new to this series, be sure to check out parts 1 - 3: Introduction to iPhone Design, iPhone/iPad Design Templates, and iPhone Design Features. These articles will get you up to speed on what we’ve already covered and give you a taste for the juicy bits that are to come in this awesome series! As a designer and/or developer you may be wondering “who cares about the ‘types’ of apps available, isn’t each app different?
Every app has a unique audience and task, so what’s the point in studying the different types?” One simple answer: understanding your application “type” makes the process of conceptualizing ideas, specifying technical specs, and executing design and development much FASTER. The App Store has 20 standard “categories” of apps (everything from games to social networking) and periodically breaks out specialty groups like “games for kids” or “holiday cooking” apps. Serious Tools Fun Tools Fun Games. Designing Apps That Use All Available iPhone Fuctionality. In the previous article in this series, we introduced some basic iOS design specifications and templates.
Now it’s time to explore what makes designing for touch screens and mobile devices so special! Unlike design for desktop websites and/or applications, the variety of ways you can interact with and get feedback from a mobile devices radically differs from its desktop counterpart. Mobile apps aren't just pretty pictures; you're developing a piece of software. Designing for mobile is a combination of interaction and usability, product development, and graphic design. Think about all the things a mobile touch screen device can react to: touch, shaking, tilting, vibrating, audio input and feedback, geolocation, and time tracking. iPhone and iPad Design Templates and How to Use Them. There is a lot of “process” that goes into designing for mobile devices, but sometimes you just wanna jump in and get your hands dirty!
This post is designed to give you the tools you’ll need and the basic design and technical requirements to get you up and running quickly. Standard Screen Sizes and Icon Sizes If you haven’t read the Apple Interface Guidelines for iPhone and iPad yet, you should. It’s a lot of information, but well worth the time spent to understand how Apple thinks about application design. These guides also spell out detailed specifications for screen size, icon size, and resolution. What’s the Resolution of the New Retina Display? The iPhone retina screen is a spectacular thing to see. You can see in comparing the two devices that the screen dimensions for iPhone 4 are unchanged from the previous model.
When reading about screen resolution it’s easy to quickly become confused. Photoshop Setup Specs: The Future of Screen Sizes. Introduction to iPhone Design. iPad Application Design. I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience.
Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here. Please note: this is about the user interface conventions and considerations which apply to creating software for the iPad platform (and touch-screen tablet devices in general). It is not a technical discussion of iPad-related APIs (which remain under NDA at time of writing in early March 2010). As I watched the iPad introduction keynote, there was one thing above all which struck me: That’s iWork (Keynote, Pages and Numbers) for iPad. iPhone App Icon Design: Best Practises. Designing your application icon is a most crucial part of your success on the iPhone platform. The App store with it’s more than 70.000 apps have become quite the crowded bazaar. As an interface designer i cannot but marvel at the emphasis this has put on the delicate art of icon design.