This week we discussed more specifically, how to design for mobile applications. We learned about some key principles that designers should consider when designing apps.
we briefly revisited Jakobs Law, which is the idea that users spend most of their time on other sites, meaning they prefer your site to work the same way.
I think its important to remind yourself of this every so often, as its easy to try and make unique controls but this can sometimes worsen your design by making it less intuitive.
We looked at some early 2000s touch controls on mobile, and how they have evolved. Modern mobile design places a lot of emphasis on the ease of access to certain controls, as the size of the buttons can sometimes affect the usability of a UI. for example, Apples old date selection was very fiddly as the dates were very small. This may have worked for some, but people with bigger fingers for example struggled to make selection.
This is a key consideration as it can truly make or break your UI. If text and images aren’t formatted and positioned correctly, the whole app can become unusable. Kyle also discussed how this is where typescales are really useful, as they can help make sure everything scales correctly on different devices.
This principle explains how quickly a user can move to and interact with a target, such as a button or hyperlink. It states that the time it takes to reach a target depends on two things, the distance to the target and the size of the target. basically large targets that are close to the user’s starting point are faster and easier to click or tap than small targets that are far away. This is why a lot of apps have moved their search bar to the bottom of the screen, as its closer to users thumbs and removes the needs to hold a phone with two hands.
Fro. this specific law and examples we looked at, my main take aways were:
we learned some fun-thumb facts, about how you should size your touch screen targets, the avg. thumb size and much more.