Designing for Mobile Devices

6/19/2017

The iPhone 6 screen size is both wider & taller; the iPhone 6 Plus has a higher pixel density. Read on for all the sizes you need to know. iPhone 7 Updated!

Headspace, a guided meditation and mindfulness startup, recently raised $30 million from The Chernin Group, Advancit Capital, Allen & Company, Breyer Capital, The Honest Company CEO Jessica Alba, actor Jared Leto, TV personality Ryan Seacrest, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and others. The plan is to hire more engineers and content marketers and expand Headspace’s content.

Now available for iPhone and iPad, the new Kickstarter app doesn't just look gorgeous. It feels fresh.

The new app design has a few advantages over the old version. For one, it's a much more distinctive-looking app. While Kickstarter 1.0 looked almost like it had been designed using an off-the-shelf app template, the new Kickstarter app is a lot more distinct and modern. The entire UI is not only swipe-based, but consistent in orientation no matter where you are in Kickstarter's navigation hierarchy (i.e. a swipe left or right always brings you to the next Kickstarter project, no matter where you are). Kickstarter hopes this will help reduce the cognitive load, letting users lose themselves in the incredible number of ideas, aspirations, and dreams that are realized (or, let's face it, dashed) on the site every day.

We are very excited about our new release of the Yo app. We hope this will help you and users everywhere communicate mor…

It's a one-button photo messenger, where the button to snap and send a picture are the same.

My TechCrunch colleague Natasha Lomas recently argued – quite convincingly – that startups should stop trying to make proximity-based social networking “happen” — that most attempts had…

This video made the rounds yesterday, tugging at heartstrings and giving us all in the Era Of Communication a bit of a kick in the buttocks. It shows a woman who forgot her phone. The premise is hokey at best, but it still tells us something about ourselves these past few years. Our world is endlessly mediated through lenses and screens. They used to tell us we’d get cancer if we sat too…

The first places we turned to were design communities like Dribbble. Before iOS 7 reached the general public, designers on Dribble were playing around with side menu implementation ideas. Our designers stumbled upon a few they felt were sleek and also made good use of the many of the attributes of iOS 7, such as layering and blurring. Those projects include an iOS 7 style inspired menu from Creativedash and a Side Menu concept from Jayson Lane demonstrating layering and translucency.

Mobile is here to stay, with its own set of rules and constraints. At the same time, it’s a rapidly evolving platform, with new technologies and capabilities being added by the quarter. We can’t design for mobile like we used to do for posters and Web pages. So what toolkit and mindset does a mobile designer need to thrive?

Subtle tones. Made well. Film-inspired presets for Lightroom, Photoshop, Aperture & iOS.

Get Keezy in the App Store: http://appstore.com/keezy More info: http://keezy.net Performer: Reni Lane http://renilane.com Director, Editor, Colorist: Pasquale…

Keezy’s bright colors and responsive feel make it a joy to play with. Record a friend saying a few words and mix them up into new sentences. Sample an octave on a real-instrument and play your own melodies. Elepath even suggests you could make a fart machine or insult generator, just in case you thought the company took itself seriously.

There are plenty of other drum machine apps out there, but most are either semi-professional tools that cost a few bucks (DM1), are too complex for novices (Molten), or focus on pre-made instrument sounds (iDrum) rather than letting you make your own. Keezy won’t let you record and refine a masterpiece, but instead you can shove it in the hands of a friend and they’ll be having fun in seconds.

Here are 19 apps that were fully there before Apple showed iOS 7 to the world.

Whether you're new to the iPhone or you've just upgraded your existing one to iOS 7, one of the first things you'll want to do is load up on apps that show it off. Luckily there are lots of apps that are already updated to support the new interface. We've been keeping track of all the app updates we've seen come through and here are some of our absolute favorite apps when it comes to showing off the brand new look and feel of iOS 7!

We toiled through the many iOS 7 updates released, and whittled them down to a list of 20 apps we think really capture the look and feel of Apple's new OS.

Fantastical 2 for iPhone, the best way to manage your calendars and reminders.

To Ive, iOS 7 is about more than a dash of color and Helvetica Neue. It’s about the physicality of the operating system, a functional skeuomorphism which helps people identify layers within apps as if they were papers on a desk. "It’s no longer about mimicking real-life objects visually, it’s about how they work, and the way things move and interact with your finger, and the rest of the elements on the screen," says Jeff Broderick, who co-founded software design studio Collective Ray, and is now creative director at ShopSavvy. If you pull up on the camera icon and then slam it down hard enough, Broderick points out, you can bounce your lock screen up and out of sight as if you had thrown a tennis ball into the ground.

"Finding a good way to utilize physics and the parallax effects are the key to making an app feel good," says Broderick. In other words, it’s not about how the wooden drawer holding your stuff looks, but about how it opens and closes. So have any apps made the jump yet — not just to getting the look right, but to getting the feel right?

The company’s latest iOS app update included a new photo viewer, increased visibility of bookmarked businesses, improvements to review highlights … and about 15 new search filters that should make it easier for users to find the specific types of businesses they’re looking for.

Before the update, Yelp’s iOS app had seven filters including things like Price, Delivery, Offering a Deal and Distance. The update added 15 new filters

The first service outfitted for your friend-guided lifestyle.
From Hollywood to Brooklyn, Weotta's got your back.

Private status updates with your friends and family
By Ketchup Inc.

Bring Your Stories and Ideas 

Forget your mobile calendar and to-do list, take advantage of the unique ZenDay 3D timeline: finally an easy way to see and navigate your time. Zoom in, zoom out. Go forward, go backwards. See what’s ahead, anticipate and decide what to do next.

ZenDay is the GPS of your time.

About two months into the wild, we are fortunate to have received some nice feedback and organic mentions on Twitter, where much of our core audience resides. Undoubtedly, completing version one only means that we have a long way to go, things to add and mistakes to learn from, but with that said, there could be some useful lessons hidden in the tiny decisions Swell made that may help the next mobile developer down the road.
This post is an attempt to collect those decisions and analyze them with the benefit of hindsight, as well as to share them with you all. The list may start with obvious elements, but please bear with me as the decisions get more precise.

No more fumbling through screens of apps to find the one you’re looking for. Cover learns when and where you use different apps and puts them on your lockscreen for easy access.

Dennis Crowley on plans to monetize Foursquare, wether Google's acquisition of Dodgeball was failure, and hazing period the press puts companies though its early days.

Kevin Systrom talks about his company's sale to Facebook, his demotion in title, how he differs from Mark Zuckberg, and if he had any mediocre superpower, why it would be to fly like a Dodo bird.

In a fireside chat with Sarah Lacy, Path CEO Dave Morin talks about why did he turn down a $125 million offer from Google, what happened with Address Book-gate, why so many of Facebook's early employees have left, what he learned from Steve Jobs and whether he could confirm stories about Path's fundraising.

Dustin Mierau and Dave Morin, co-founders of Path, talk to me about how the new version of Path not just brings beautiful design, but helps take advantage of something that others don't: they let users build a private journal that really rocks.

“All these [brands] are producing a lot of apps, but they don’t know how to maintain them, and they don’t really focus on the users after they launch them,” he says. “And the other part of the problem is that a lot of these brands have multiple apps…but most of them are very siloed.”

At Carnival, which has now shifted from being an app-building agency to a mobile platform maker, the goal is to aggregate all of a brand’s users in one place, so they can run analytics on that user base, and allow the brand to run various campaigns, targeting users with content through push notifications, in-app messages, contests, and more.

The platform lets brands reach users using more standard content like text, photos, videos and links – which could be delivered in a “News Feed”-like experience within the app or pushed to the end user’s device via a notification. But Carnival supports other, more interesting or interactive content, too, like coupons, sweepstakes, or polls, or even sending users a fake FaceTime phone call. Users can also be geo-targeted (including via geofencing), or targeted based on other metrics like loyalty, engagement, device, or software version, for example.

TaskRabbit provides a unique service: they connect people who want help completing simple tasks with “Rabbits,” a pre-screened group of errand runners. TaskRabbit came to Cooper to create an experience-rich iPhone application, a crucial component for expanding the reach and utility of the service.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with the TaskRabbit team and with developers at Pivotal Labs to design a user experience optimized for busy, on-the-go people. With just a spin of a unique interactive wheel and a few taps, people can post a task in seconds, often with no typing.

Biz Stone, who made his fortune on the 140-character messages of Twitter, has revealed his next act: an app that allows people to pose questions to their social networks using photos.

In a blog post announcing the app, which is available now for Android and Apple devices, the company said that putting questions on Jelly was about searching for information using humans rather than algorithms like Google’s search engine.

“No matter how sophisticated our algorithms become, they are still no match for the experience, inventiveness, and creativity of the human mind,” the company wrote. “Jelly is a new way to search and something more – it makes helping other people easy and fun.”

On the surface, posting a question on Jelly doesn’t seem much different than putting it out on your Twitter or Facebook feed. Your Jelly queries go out to the same groups of people, who can then forward them to others if they choose.

SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has launched his next act : a mobile app called Jelly.

On Jelly not being Twitter with images:

“We actually made an effort to have this not be very conversational. Early prototypes sort of mimicked how a lot of stream-based or timeline-based social media applications work, and we found that we were encouraging a lot of similar behavior. That isn’t bad. But if I posted a picture of my son wearing a hat to protect himself from the sun and asked if this was a good sun hat for my kid, a lot of people would respond saying, ‘He’s so cute,’ or ‘He looks like you,’ or ‘He looks like his mom,’ or ‘What a cutie.’ And I would say, ‘But what about the hat? Hello?’

“So we switched to a new model. You have to make a decision right then and there. You have to know the answer right now. You are not going to be smarter in five minutes. You think about it for two seconds: Do you know the answer to the question or is there someone in your contacts who really is good expert on the question, say your gardener to answer a question about mold on tomato plants. Or do you want to swipe down because you don’t know the answer and you don’t know anyone who knows the answer. It’s less conversational and it works more like a search engine.”

Provides guidelines for designing the user interface of an iOS app.

Scout Stevenson is the creative director at ExtensionEngine where he and his team take a strategic approach in developing creative marketing solutions that engage users visually while driving business results. Prior, he was Co-founder and Creative Director of Jetpak Media which was recently acquired by ExtensionEngine. Throughout his 17 year career, he has built and led creative teams at numerous top Boston agencies. Scout is an adjunct professor at Boston University's College of Fine Arts where he lectures on web and experience design. He has won numerous industry awards for both B2C and B2B creative campaigns and is a MITX judge.

Published on Feb 5, 2013

Guide to working with relative and linear layouts for the Android.

UI with Layout
* Relative: Able to put things relative to each other.
- Reall easy to mess-up UI, so only use a little.
- Put things in corners or middle.

This is just a relaxed tutorial showing the basics of how to get started with making GUIs in Android using Eclipse. In particular this video covers how to make an Android version of an iOS GUI - which you will probably be required to do quite often in this day and age due to the popularity of the iPhone.

Published on May 17, 2013

Nick Butcher, Roman Nurik

Design on Android is no longer a complex mystery of disjointed patterns; the Android design guidelines have paved the way for a design renaissance following the tenets of content forward and responsive mobile design. In this talk we'll explore the arsenal of tools available to Android UI engineers that let you implement some of these important guidelines, including responsive design with multi-pane layouts, metrics and layout grids, and core navigation components.

Published on Oct 10, 2012

Is mobile the next form of mass media? Best-selling author, speaker and mobile project lead, Luke Wroblewski thinks so, and in this video from Cascade SF, he'll talk about what that means and how that impacts mobile UX design.

Luke will also use real-world examples to demonstrate how mobile user experience can be leaner, meaner, and much more effective.

"Mobile first," is a concept that serves us well as a design tool, putting constraints on our messaging, layout, etc. But to use "mobile first" as a complete mobile strategy can lead to some dangerous lines of thought.

There's a bigger picture that needs to be seen, and it's what we've always done when developing experiences for the web. We need to put the "Experience First." Then we can think about "mobile", "desktop", "lean-back", and whatever other technologies are released in the next several years. It's not about devices, it's about users and experiences.

Presentation first given at BarCamp Nashville in October of 2011.

Uploaded on Oct 16, 2011

"Mobile first," is a concept that serves us well as a design tool, putting constraints on our messaging, layout, etc. But to use "mobile first" as a complete mobile strategy can lead to some dangerous lines of thought.

There's a bigger picture that needs to be seen, and it's what we've always done when developing experiences for the web. We need to put the "Experience First." Then we can think about "mobile", "desktop", "lean-back", and whatever other technologies are released in the next several years. It's not about devices, it's about users and experiences.

Presentation first given at BarCamp Nashville in October of 2011.

Uploaded on Apr 23, 2010

(April 15, 2010) Jeremy Lyon shares his personal perspective on how to approach the design of mobile applications and provides some examples.

Palm executives including VP, Directors, and Senior Product Managers lead a course on mobile application development on the WebOS. Students have the unique opportunity to attain the technical knowledge needed to create their own apps, get insider information about the application submission process at companies like Apple and Palm, and network with various members of Palm's executive team.

Since its launch three years ago, Flipboard has been feeding users billions of pieces of content through live, magazine-style feeds. With version 2.0, users — as well as publishers, brands and advertisers — can now make their own magazines with content they've found on Flipboard. "It's the first time people can program content back into Flipboard," says Feng.

Creating a magazine on Flipboard is not unlike creating a board on Pinterest. As you browse articles and videos about yoga poses on Flipboard or on the web, you could save ("flip") them to your own magazine of yoga poses by clicking on a "+" button in Flipboard or by clicking on Flipboard's new bookmarklet for web browsers. You can then edit your magazine using a web-based tool Flipboard is releasing in conjunction with the iOS update, and which it soon plans to bring to its apps. Once you're finished, you can share your magazine with your friends and to the rest of Flipboard's userbase, or keep it private.

We made this app - http://simplesimple.co/currency/ Itunes - http://itun.es/i6JC9Dh

Avocado® is the best way to stay connected with the most important person in your life through chat, lists, calendars, sketches, photos, and more!

We understand the need for a fun, fast, reliable and private way to stay connected to your partner when you’re out and about. Something as simple as staying in touch throughout the day can improve and strengthen a relationship.
Why Avocado?

Avocado trees don’t self-pollinate — they need another tree nearby to bear fruit. The fruit itself grows in pairs on the trees, and Avocados are Aztec symbols of love & fertility. Also, we just think it’s cute, and tasty!

Wroblewski calls these native experiences "micro mobile interactions," and you can see them in action in the demo video embedded at the top of this post. The key word is "micro": a quick glance here, a flick or tap there, and done. The more of these interactions you can fit into your user experience, and the more seamlessly and delightfully you can serve them up, the more engagement you’ll build. Even if your app does nothing but ask whether kittens are cuter than babies.

Polar is Wroblewski’s object lesson in the power of micro mobile interactions. He’s literally taken an activity that is either pointless (seriously, kittens or babies?) or downright annoying (when was the last time you actually filled out a customer service questionnaire?) and transformed it into something that you want to do--and keep doing. When you’re standing in line, bored, and want to kill 10 seconds on your phone, what do you do? Fire up Instagram--or Polar, after you’ve tried it once. It’s that good.

"We chose to do a consumer thing, a fun thing, to put our ideas into action," Wroblewski says. "So far we’ve gotten great results. People can get in, get out, and get value instantly. We’re starting to rethink polls. But once you understand this medium, you can start to rethink everything." I agree. By the way, which is better: gestural UIs or buttons? Don’t worry, this’ll only take a second.

Published on Nov 23, 2012

Making sure that the Polar iOS application (polarb.com) can be used quickly and effectively with one hand. These timed tests voted on and created news polls using only one thumb and/or audio input. Our goal was to allow people to vote 10 times or create a poll in under 60 seconds using only one hand.

Have fun collecting & sharing opinions.

Polar is a super-fast and easy way to create and vote on great-looking photo polls. Get our free iPhone app.