Mobile Design and Development


Book Description

Mobile devices outnumber desktop and laptop computers three to one worldwide, yet little information is available for designing and developing mobile applications. Mobile Design and Development fills that void with practical guidelines, standards, techniques, and best practices for building mobile products from start to finish. With this book, you'll learn basic design and development principles for all mobile devices and platforms. You'll also explore the more advanced capabilities of the mobile web, including markup, advanced styling techniques, and mobile Ajax. If you're a web designer, web developer, information architect, product manager, usability professional, content publisher, or an entrepreneur new to the mobile web, Mobile Design and Development provides you with the knowledge you need to work with this rapidly developing technology. Mobile Design and Development will help you: Understand how the mobile ecosystem works, how it differs from other mediums, and how to design products for the mobile context Learn the pros and cons of building native applications sold through operators or app stores versus mobile websites or web apps Work with flows, prototypes, usability practices, and screen-size-independent visual designs Use and test cross-platform mobile web standards for older devices, as well as devices that may be available in the future Learn how to justify a mobile product by building it on a budget




Essential Mobile Interaction Design


Book Description

Design User-Friendly, Intuitive Smartphone and Tablet Apps for Any Platform Mobile apps should feel natural and intuitive, and users should understand them quickly and easily. This means that effective interaction and interface design is crucial. However, few mobile app developers (or even designers) have had adequate training in these areas. Essential Mobile Interaction Design fills this gap, bringing together proven principles and techniques you can use in your next app–for any platform, target device, or user. This tutorial requires virtually no design or programming knowledge. Even if you’ve never designed a mobile app before, this guide teaches you the key skills that lead to the best results. Cameron Banga and Josh Weinhold help you master the mindset, processes, and vocabulary of mobile interaction design, so you can start making better choices right away. They guide you through the entire design process, demystifying issues that arise at every stage. The authors share hard-won lessons from years of experience developing more than one hundred mobile apps for clients and customers of every type. They cover important issues that platform-specific guides often overlook, including internationalization, accessibility, hybrid apps, sandboxing, and what to do after release. This guide shows you how to Think through your designs, instead of just throwing together UI elements Allow an intuitive design flow to emerge from your app Sketch and wireframe apps more effectively Reflect key differences among smartphones, tablets, and desktops Design for visual appeal without compromising usability Work effectively with programmers Make sure your apps are accessible to everyone Get usable feedback, and understand what it’s telling you Learn valuable lessons from today’s most successful apps Refresh your designs in new apps and future versions Discover new tools for designing more successfully Packed with iOS and AndroidTM examples, Essential Mobile Interaction Design offers dozens of tips and solutions that will be equally useful on today’s platforms and on whatever comes next. Extensive resources are available at cameronbanga.com/EMIDbook.




Mobile Design Pattern Gallery


Book Description

When you’re under pressure to produce a well designed, easy-to-navigate mobile app, there’s no time to reinvent the wheel. This concise book provides a handy reference to 70 mobile app design patterns, illustrated by more than 400 screenshots from current iOS, Android, BlackBerry, WebOS, Windows Mobile, and Symbian apps. User experience professional Theresa Neil (Designing Web Interfaces) walks you through design patterns in 10 separate categories, including anti-patterns. Whether you’re designing a simple iPhone application or one that’s meant to work for every popular mobile OS on the market, these patterns provide solutions to common design challenges. This print edition is in full color. Pattern categories include: Navigation: get patterns for primary and secondary navigation Forms: break the industry-wide habits of bad form design Tables and lists: display only the most important information Search, sort, and filter: make these functions easy to use Tools: create the illusion of direct interaction Charts: learn best practices for basic chart design Invitations: invite users to get started and discover features Help: integrate help pages into a smaller form factor "It’s a super handy catalog that I can flip to for ideas." —Bill Scott, Senior Director of Web Development at PayPal "Looks fantastic." —Erin Malone, Partner at Tangible UX "Just a quick thanks to express my sheer gratitude for this pub, it has been a guide for me reworking a design for an app already in production!" —Agatha June, UX designer




Learning Mobile App Development


Book Description

Now, one book can help you master mobile app development with both market-leading platforms: Apple's iOS and Google's Android. Perfect for both students and professionals, Learning Mobile App Development is the only tutorial with complete parallel coverage of both iOS and Android. With this guide, you can master either platform, or both--and gain a deeper understanding of the issues associated with developing mobile apps. You'll develop an actual working app on both iOS and Android, mastering the entire mobile app development lifecycle, from planning through licensing and distribution. Each tutorial in this book has been carefully designed to support readers with widely varying backgrounds and has been extensively tested in live developer training courses. If you're new to iOS, you'll also find an easy, practical introduction to Objective-C, Apple's native language.




UX Design for Mobile


Book Description

Get proficient in building beautiful and appealing mobile interfaces (UI) with this complete mobile user experience (UX) design guide. About This Book Quickly explore innovative design solutions based on the real needs of your users. Create low and high fidelity prototypes using some of the best tools. Master a pragmatic design process to create successful products. Plan an app design from scratch to final test, with real users. Who This Book Is For This book is for designers, developers and product managers interested in creating successful apps. Readers will be provided with a process to produce, test and improve designs based on best practices. What You Will Learn Plan an app design from scratch to final test, with real users. Learn from leading companies and find working patterns. Apply best UX design practices to your design process. Create low and high fidelity prototypes using some of the best tools. Follow a step by step examples for Tumult Hype and Framer Studio. Test your designs with real users, early in the process. Integrate the UX Designer profile into a working team. In Detail User experience (UX) design provides techniques to analyze the real needs of your users and respond to them with products that are delightful to use. This requires you to think differently compared to traditional development processes, but also to act differently. In this book, you will be introduced to a pragmatic approach to exploring and creating mobile app solutions, reducing risks and saving time during their construction. This book will show you a working process to quickly iterate product ideas with low and high fidelity prototypes, based on professional tools from different software brands. You will be able to quickly test your ideas early in the process with the most adequate prototyping approach. You will understand the pros and cons of each approach, when you should use each of them, and what you can learn in each step of the testing process. You will also explore basic testing approaches and some more advanced techniques to connect and learn from your users. Each chapter will focus on one of the general steps needed to design a successful product according to the organization goals and the user needs. To achieve this, the book will provide detailed hands-on pragmatic techniques to design innovative and easy to use products. You will learn how to test your ideas in the early steps of the design process, picking up the best ideas that truly work with your users, rethinking those that need further refinement, and discarding those that don't work properly in tests made with real users. By the end of the book, you will learn how to start exploring and testing your design ideas, regardless the size of the design budget. Style and approach A quick and simple guide to design and test a mobile application from the UX design point of view




Designing Mobile Interfaces


Book Description

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




Building a Mobile App


Book Description

Coding is cool, and these fun projects help you get started today! Building a Mobile App offers basic lessons in Android development, designed specifically for kids! Three fun projects walk you through basic coding skills using MIT's App Inventor—a free, online programming tool that uses a simple block style language that makes coding easy to learn. No long chapters to read, and no homework—just dive right in! You'll begin with a basic project that shows you how to make an app that works; next, you'll put those skills to work on a photo editing app that takes your skills to the next level. Finally, you'll level up one more time to become a Game Maker—that's right, you'll actually build a mobile game that you can send to your friends! Each project includes step-by-step directions and plenty of graphics to help you stay on track, and easy-to-read instructions help you complete each project frustration-free. App building can get pretty complicated, but it doesn't have to start out that way. Start small to pick up the basics quickly, and you'll be coding in no time! This book helps you get started quickly and easily, with a focus on fun. Build your own Android mobile apps using a free online platform! Code everything yourself, including buttons, screens, and interactions! Build an app that lets you draw on pictures you take! Create a simple, interactive game you can share with your friends! Adults all over the world turn to For Dummies books for clear instruction with a sense of humor; the Dummies Junior books bring that same "learning is fun" attitude to kids, with projects designed specifically for a kid's interests, needs, and skill level. Building a Mobile App gets kids coding quickly, with fun projects they'll be happy to show off!




Building Mobile Apps at Scale


Book Description

While there is a lot of appreciation for backend and distributed systems challenges, there tends to be less empathy for why mobile development is hard when done at scale. This book collects challenges engineers face when building iOS and Android apps at scale, and common ways to tackle these. By scale, we mean having numbers of users in the millions and being built by large engineering teams. For mobile engineers, this book is a blueprint for modern app engineering approaches. For non-mobile engineers and managers, it is a resource with which to build empathy and appreciation for the complexity of world-class mobile engineering. The book covers iOS and Android mobile app challenges on these dimensions: Challenges due to the unique nature of mobile applications compared to the web, and to the backend. App complexity challenges. How do you deal with increasingly complicated navigation patterns? What about non-deterministic event combinations? How do you localize across several languages, and how do you scale your automated and manual tests? Challenges due to large engineering teams. The larger the mobile team, the more challenging it becomes to ensure a consistent architecture. If your company builds multiple apps, how do you balance not rewriting everything from scratch while moving at a fast pace, over waiting on "centralized" teams? Cross-platform approaches. The tooling to build mobile apps keeps changing. New languages, frameworks, and approaches that all promise to address the pain points of mobile engineering keep appearing. But which approach should you choose? Flutter, React Native, Cordova? Native apps? Reuse business logic written in Kotlin, C#, C++ or other languages? What engineering approaches do "world-class" mobile engineering teams choose in non-functional aspects like code quality, compliance, privacy, compliance, or with experimentation, performance, or app size?




Designing Mobile Apps


Book Description

Embarking on a career (or hobby) in app design can be intimidating, especially when information is scattered, confusing and hard to find. Designing Mobile Apps is a complete guide for those getting started, providing step-by-step details on how to design useful, attractive mobile applications. Authors Javier “Simón” Cuello and José Vittone share their experiences in the world of app design, revealing tricks of the trade based on their work at companies like Yahoo, Zara and Telefónica. Apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone How do operating systems differ? How does one go about transferring from one OS to another? Designing Mobile Apps answers these questions and more, using real-life examples and visual comparisons. The Complete Design Process From the initial concept to app store publication, Designing Mobile Apps covers the full app creation process in simple, easy-to-use terms. It includes numerous examples and doesn’t use a single line of code. Interviews with Top Professionals Designing Mobile Apps contains interviews with leading designers and developers, including Loren Brichter, Irene Pereyra, Erik Spiekermann and Dustin Mierau. They share the secrets they’ve learned while working at some of the best companies in the world. Written Especially for Designers and Developers Not sure how to prepare your design for the programmer? Know how to program, but fuzzy on the details in making your app truly appealing and easy to use? With Designing Mobile Apps, designers and developers can learn all they need to know to work together and create a successful app.




Mobile Applications


Book Description

Spending on worldwide wireless and mobile network infrastructure will rise by $10.7 billion between 2002 and 2007. In this new resource, the authors provide technology-independent principles and practices that no mobile application developer should be without. This book illustrates specific details of mobile technologies and includes mobile application case studies.