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Designing for On-The-Go Consumers
If your web site does not scale well for mobile platforms, your consumers are limited to accessing your site only when they are near a desktop computer. Ensuring consumers can access your site on the go requires designing for scalability and cross-platform capability. While some companies create separate, mobile versions of their web sites, others seek to build scalability into the main web site so consumers have one web experience whether it’s on a desktop computer or a smart phone. As this white paper explores in greater detail below, trying
to design for all browsers and all platforms is a huge undertaking, requiring talent that understands multiple coding languages as well as testers and debuggers for every platform variation.
iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Disregard Of Context
The iPhone will always be part of a much bigger picture. How well you address human and environmental factors will greatly determine the success of your product. All too often, iPhone developers create products in isolation from their customers. In order to create really appealing applications, developers must stop focusing only on the mechanisms of the apps. Zoom out: understand the person using the application, as well as the complex environmental factors surrounding that person.
To better understand the context of these design challenges, we’ll highlight several levels of human and environmental factors.
iPhone Apps Design Mistakes: Over-Blown Visuals
“It’s only 99 cents. Who cares if it sucks? I’m still trying it.” How many times have you said something like that to yourself before downloading the next promising iPhone app? How many screen-fulls of those apps do you have on your iPhone? 4? 6? 10? And how many of them do you actually use?
Probably the oldest, yet extremely popular design problem is overdesign. Designers of iPhone applications often tend to disregard common design and usability conventions by offering users slick and shiny user interface designs that go way beyond their standard look and also way beyond their claimed functionality.