Tapworthy: Designing Great Mobile Applications

From first concept to polished pixel, learn to create mobile apps and websites that delight. This full-day presentation teaches participants to "think mobile" by planning and creating interfaces in tune with the psychology, culture, ergonomics, and context of an audience on the go—and their fingers and thumbs. Event runs 9:00am - 4:30pm

THE MOBILE CONTEXT - 9:00 - 10:45

Mobile and tablet design isn't just about pretty pixels. Tapworthy apps are often easy on the eyes, but the beauty of great apps derives from function. Before you start slinging pixels and making interface decisions, you have to start with more fundamental choices: What does your app do ... and why? This session examines the culture and personality of the various mobile platforms, and teaches participants to consider common mobile mindsets to focus an app's feature set.

DESIGNING FOR TOUCH - 11:00 - 12:15

When designing a handheld UI that works by touch, you’re doing something more sophisticated than organizing pixels. You’re designing a physical interface that will be explored by human hands, directly manipulated in a way that desktop software never is. This means your project is not only a challenge of visual and graphic design but of industrial design, too. There are honest-to-god ergonomic issues to account for. Discover ergonomic guidelines for comfortable tapping and what that means for the visual layout of the app.

LUNCH - 12:15 - 1:00

GESTURES - 1:00 - 2:30

A tapworthy interface provides savvy, gesture- and rotation-based shortcuts but also strives to make those gestures easy to discover and use.Explore the gestures users can be expected to figure out right away and find out what designers can do to help people discover new gestures on their own. Not everything should be so effortless, though; learn to deploy awkard gestures to protect against accidental mistaps. The session also explores the role and psychology of screen rotation and the opportunities and pitfalls that creates for designers.

BUTTONS ARE A HACK - 2:45 - 4:00

We wrap with a look ahead at the future of interaction. Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. Find out why our beloved buttons are weak replacements for manipulating content directly. Learn practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. But hang on: if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the damn thing? Learn to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by making it effortless to discover invisible gestures. This talk explains the power of animation, reveals the influence of game design, and offers techniques to build native and web apps according to the new rules of touchscreen design.

About the instructor

Josh Clark
http://globalmoxie.com

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He's the author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps and Best iPhone Apps, and he's a regular speaker at international design conferences including SXSW, Webstock, Future of Web Design, and many others. Josh's outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help media companies, design agencies, and creative companies build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

Before the interwebs swallowed him up, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at Boston's WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the uberpopular "Couch-to-5K" (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for user experience: no pain, no pain.)