6th
Notes on App Style
This continues my notes from the iPhone Tech Talk in Toronto this year.
As you can see from my notebook, I signed up to meet with Eric Hope for a UI design audit for my next iPhone application. With this in mind, I sat in the front row and paid close attention to what Hope had to say about iPhone User Interface Design Essentials.
I had already read the iPhone Human Interface Guidelines, the notorious MobileHIG.pdf — I had even a recent copy printed and bound at my local Kinko’s for this trip. But the talk covered larger subjects.
There is no carrier name shown on Apple screenshots, just “3G”
Photos use a grid table, because, well, photos don’t usually come off the camera with meaningful filenames. So they emphasize the images themselves. (I could totally imagine other operating systems including awful little labels like IMG_0667.JPG under each image…)
Now. What is your App Style?
Two axes : entertainment to tool, and serious to fun.
Mail is a serious tool. The focus is on user data. There are minimal graphics, you don’t want to clash with the user content. The standard UI should be here like nowhere else. Keep it clean with alignment. Serious tools often need serious hierarchies to keep flows organized.
Maps is a fun tool where the user explores data the developer provides. It’s moderately graphical, and has a simple hierarchy, if any. In fact, Maps has no navigation bar at all!
Games are fun entertainment, of course. Avoid using standard UI. Rarely hierarchical. Use multitouch gestures. Use loud sounds. Games should be easy to begin.
Funny story about racing games, which come from a rich tradition of consoles, where users are willing to sit through six screens to select and configure their car, the course, etc. “This makes no sense on a mobile device,” Hope says. You’re sitting at a bus stop, and you want to race a car. Now. Drop the hierarchy.
Note on “loud sounds”: audible response to user actions can motivate users with a “pavlovian response” that makes them keep coming back. Shows Bed Bugs app from Igloo Games: “if the score just goes up, users might not even notice. They don’t know if a given action is good or bad. But with (the right) sound, they know.”
(Apple really loves the dude from Igloo Games. He’s the goofy-happy fellow in the developer video who is traveling the world coding games using income from the App Store, which is admittedly a great story.)
serious entertainment sounds odd, but unlike games, refers to applications that are “ALL content”, such as the iPod Touch’s Music and Videos applications, and App Store. Similar to serious tools, but instead of creating and managing user content, the user is selecting and consuming someone else’s content.
Utilities are in the dead center of the chart. Half entertaining tool, half serious fun. “Utilities are the fast food of the app world,” says Hope. Not junk food, quick consumption. 15-30 seconds to get something done, large, clear display visible from 5 feet. When testing a new application, see if you can force a user to accomplish a task in ten seconds.
Jose Vazquez gave a nice talk about this class of applications at c4[3] in Chicago last September.
Hope had a lot more to say, which I’ll continue in another posting.
(Note: Registered developers can download a different version of Hope’s talk from ADC on iTunes, along with some other iPhone Tech Talks released earlier this year.) Allan Schaffer confirms the ADC version are indeed the 2008 Tech Talks, which had a different focus.
