Designing Mobile Interfaces: Patterns for Interaction Design

by Steven Hoober, Eric Berkman

With hundreds of thousands of mobile applications available today, your app has to capture users immediately. This book provides practical techniques to help you catch―and keep―their attention. You’ll learn core principles for designing effective user interfaces, along with a set of common patterns for interaction design on all types of mobile devices. Mobile design specialists Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman have collected and researched 76 best practices for everything from composing pages and displaying information to the use of screens, lights, and sensors. Each pattern includes a discussion of the design problem and solution, along with variations, interaction and presentation details, and antipatterns.

Genres: Design

582 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Sean Savage · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great introduction to the basics of information design and interaction design in the context of mobile devices. It's not about pushing design innovation to the bleeding edge, but it's about the tried-and-true basics which are the underpinnings you need to nail down before you can effectively reach that bleeding edge.

Experienced designers: You won't find any big surprises here, but it's a useful reference book to use when trying to remember a best practice for a specific design question relating to mobile design. For me it will be most useful as something to point clients, stakeholders, business analysts, and especially developers to, in order to save time driving home a point - to more quickly convince them that a design recommendation is based on proven best practices and not just something I dreamt up on a whim.

Non-designers working on mobile projects: This is a good book to have around when you need to know, in a pinch, what's a decent way to handle a basic discrete design decision (for instance: How best to approach pagination on a small screen? Does a particular task call for a simple tap or another gesture? When should you use pulldowns and what pitfalls do you need to avoid on a small screen? Etc.)

The antipatterns sections are particularly helpful – they point out the most common mistakes so you can avoid them.

[Ethan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good reference book, but not something you want to read cover to cover. Definitely good to read before using any particular mobile design pattern, as you have probably not thought of everything about that pattern. The editors did, tho.

The book will be useful for a few years.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

The ego trip of two mediocre computer guys. A whole page of novel like description to tell that a woman might leave the phone ringing during a show. Smart, wordy and completely useless scholasticism. A confirmation is not just "a confirmation", but "When a decision point is reached within a process where the user must confirm an action, or choose between a small number of disparate (and usually exclusive) choices." And, for a book on Mobile Interfaces, the examples start somewhere during the 1930s.

Shot: just examining the apps on your smart phone, what you like on the ones you like and what you dislike in the ones you dislike would help your future interfaces far more than wasting time with this ***.

[Jesse Richards · Rating 1 out of 5]

Most boring way to learn mobile interface patterns possible. Some parts of the appendix were interesting, but the main bulk of the text just outlines every possible UI pattern in excruciating detail. Would have been better to do a 2-page spread for each pattern, with large visuals and simple Do's and Don't's.

[Damien Leri · Rating 1 out of 5]

The focus seems obscure, as if its audience includes people designing smartphone hardware. And the book misses the more innovative types of mobile interfaces such as the way new ipad apps are using gestures.