10 Design Tips for Mobile Devices

Photo credits: Irita Kirsbluma

If you’re designing for mobile devices – either apps or web pages – there are things you need to keep in mind. While a lot of design principles stated by design bloggers still hold true for mobile phones, there are also things you need to think about specifically for designing for smaller screens. We’re going to go over ten specific design tips that will help you when you’re developing apps or websites for a variety of mobile devices.

 

Design Tips for Mobile Devices

 

Here’s a look at ten specific tips for designing for mobile phones.

 

1. Know Your Users – The first thing you should do is take a look at your audience. This will tell you what you should include and leave out of your mobile app.

2. Speed is Important – As with normal websites, getting your app to load quickly and seamlessly is very important and should be considered from the very early stages of development.

3. The 80/20 Rule – As with other mediums, you still want to remember that only 20% of your users will use 80% of the functionality.

4. Task Based Design – This is another important element for anyone designing for mobile devices. What it means is that you want to separate different tasks so that users aren’t overwhelmed with too many options.

5. Platforms – Knowing the benefits and limitations of the specific platform you’re designing for can help tremendously – especially for user interfaces. This isn’t as important if you’re using HTML5, but try to use the benefits of a specific mobile device if you can.

6. Input – While capturing input via touch is nice and essential, you want to make sure this is not the only way that people can interact with your mobile application.

7. Come Back Later – Your design should take into consideration that people may have to come back later if something happens in the real world and their attention is taken away from your app. Make it easy for them to return to where they left off and they will thank you.

8. Focus Groups – Putting together a focus group is a good idea for any design project, but for mobile design it can be even more important. Try to find a group of people that can access your application on the mobile device you’re targeting.

9. Use Intuition – As a designer, you should sometimes trust your gut. You need to know the rules in order to be able to decide when to bend or even break them. You shouldn’t break the rules of design often, but if your gut is talking to you – listen.

10. Test then Deploy – Before you deploy, you need to make sure you test all of your features on a variety of devices. This doesn’t have to take a lot of time or money if you work it into your overall plan.

 

 

Using the tips and techniques above, you’re going to be able to come up with a much better experience for people who access your content on mobile devices.

 

Written by: Shorna stiksal looked for Super Bowl Hotel Packages online so she could save money. She loves learning about different reputation management strategies.