Guidelines for Mobile Applications

[Prasanna]

Hi..Am new and wish to learn guidelines required for a good mobile applications. Do you all have any inputs to this?. Thanks, Prasanna

[Beth Adele Long]

I wish I had something useful to offer you. This is something I'm interested in learning also, so I would be delighted if the community can point to useful blogs, articles, books, etc.

Thoughts, anyone?

[Karen Bachmann]

My only mobile experience helping design and document UIs for DOS and Windows CE handheld scanners, so my personal experience is definitely not on the high-end of mobile application design. However, in my rather random research, I have not found what I would consider definitive guidelines. Of course, the iPhone, new generations of iPods, and emerging development for the iPhone platform seems the most likely to set a true standard.

While Apple is an obvious company to follow for great design, another worth following in the mobile computing space is Nokia. I've attended several presentations by Nokia's usability specialists at UPA and other conferences. Check out the usability section of their forums and developer success stories.

Other than companies offering training or consulting in designing mobile applications, I have found more information focused on testing mobile applications than designing usable mobile applications. "Usability Testing of Mobile Applications: A Comparison between Labo...," published in UPA's Journal of Usability Studies, is just one example of many (a Google search returned over three million hits).

Small Surfaces seems like a promising blog about mobile devices and usability.

I look forward to seeing resources others have found helpful in their work or even just general research.

[Lisa McMichael]

An additional idea: Dan Saffer's Designing for Interaction (book); he has general guidelines for creating smart applications and clever devices. I can recommend this book, although I am mainly focused on its content for website design. With that, Dan is about to release his 2nd book, Designing Gestural Interfaces.

Here is something he wrote on Mobile App Design (http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/03/sxsw_2007_mobil....).

Last note, Design for Mobile 08 conference is around the corner (9/23).