Organization:
- When it comes to organizing the content and actions on mobile, solid information architecture principles like clear labeling, balanced breadth and depth, and appropriate mental models remain important
- Align With Mobile Behaviors
- You need to think about what mobile is uniquely good at and align it with the needs of your customers
- Josh Clark focused on three critical mobile behaviors - micro-tasking, "I'm local," and "I'm bored."
- These align pretty well with Google's breakdown of mobile users into three behavioral groups: urgent now, repetitive now, and bored now
- Mobile usage generally consists of a couple of interaction types:
- Lookup/Find (urgent info, local) - I need an answer to something now - frequently related to my current location in the world
- Explore/Play (bored, local) - I have some time to kill and just want a few idle time distractions
- Check In/Status (repeat/micro-tasking) - Something important to me keeps changing or updating and I want to stay on top of it
- Edit/Create (urgent change/micro-tasking) - I need to get something done now that can't wait
- Aligning with mobile behaviors also naturally aligns your website with real-world needs
- Content Over Navigation
- As a general rule, content takes precedence over navigation on mobile
- Pivot and Explore
- Keep navigation bars small
- Bottom menus are useful because you can decide where you want to go once you are finished with the current page
- However, they shouldn't just duplicate a menu that can be found elsewhere
- A simple anchor link in the site's header jumps people to navigation options at the bottom of the page
- Having this list present at the bottom of content pages allows people to pivot and explore other parts of the site
- This design uses a minimum amount of navigation elements (just a single link at the top), gives people an opportunity to pivot and explore when they get to the end of content, doesn't duplicate the content of another menu, and (best of all) only requires a simple anchor link to work
- Contextual navigation options are also useful for tasks
- Getting Back
- Adding another back button in your mobile web experience's header only confuses things
- When designing mobile web experiences, you can leave "back" back in the native app
- Sticking To The Bottom
- Native iPhone applications (many of them) use fixed position navigation bars at the bottom of the screen - these menus make key actions easier to access with our thumbs
- However, unlike mobile web experiences, native iOS applications don't have web browser controls eating into their screen space
- When developing a native mobile application you could adjust a menu's position to account for physical buttons below the screen, but mobile web experiences need to work across platforms - physical buttons below the screen or not
- Navigation menus fixed to the bottom of the screen might be a good idea in some native mobile applications, the variable presence of web browser menus and physical controls below the screen on mobile devices means they are often a poor idea in mobile web experiences
- If you need a fixed menu, better fix it to the top
- Maintain Clarity and Focus
- Because we only have people's partial attention - the sites have to be clear, focused designs to get things done - not lots of navigation options getting in their way
- Minimizing the amount of navigation options on mobile screens help to prevent errors as well
I also read Persona, Denotation and Connotation, Digital Skeuomorphs, Geon Theory, and Touch Target in IIDC.
- Personas are a type of user model that allow designers to predict how users will act and think, and why they want to accomplish a given task
- Denotation is the direct meaning of an object; it is its pure definition without any emotions or associations to it
- Connotation refers to the different ways people interpret an object, through emotions, beliefs or prior experiences
- Digital skeuomorphs give users the ability to make connections with objects that they are familiar with in the physical world
- Geon theory states that we recognize and break down objects we see into a basic group of shapes
- Touch target refers to the target area of a digital button or link in relation to a person's finger size
I also did 25 thumbnail sketches for my app.
I also created my persona.
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