Book Image

UX Design for Mobile

By : Pablo Perea, Pau Giner
3 (1)
Book Image

UX Design for Mobile

3 (1)
By: Pablo Perea, Pau Giner

Overview of this book

User experience (UX) design provides techniques to analyze the real needs of your users and respond to them with products that are delightful to use. This requires you to think differently compared to traditional development processes, but also to act differently. In this book, you will be introduced to a pragmatic approach to exploring and creating mobile app solutions, reducing risks and saving time during their construction. This book will show you a working process to quickly iterate product ideas with low and high fidelity prototypes, based on professional tools from different software brands. You will be able to quickly test your ideas early in the process with the most adequate prototyping approach. You will understand the pros and cons of each approach, when you should use each of them, and what you can learn in each step of the testing process. You will also explore basic testing approaches and some more advanced techniques to connect and learn from your users. Each chapter will focus on one of the general steps needed to design a successful product according to the organization goals and the user needs. To achieve this, the book will provide detailed hands-on pragmatic techniques to design innovative and easy to use products. You will learn how to test your ideas in the early steps of the design process, picking up the best ideas that truly work with your users, rethinking those that need further refinement, and discarding those that don’t work properly in tests made with real users. By the end of the book, you will learn how to start exploring and testing your design ideas, regardless the size of the design budget.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
10
Bibliography and References

Design Principles and General Design Planning

"If you can design one thing, you can design everything."
- Massimo Vignelli

Every day we interact with many elements in our environment, for example, turning off the alarm clock, opening doors, greeting our neighbors, or brushing our teeth.

Some of these interactions are positive, whereas other interactions can become really frustrating. We enjoy a fresh drink while relaxing on a sunny day. However, nobody likes waiting in a queue, getting lost in a building, or filling in long forms. Well-designed products and services result in positive interactions.

A saucepan with handles like the one shown in the preceding image is hard to lift when it is full. This is part of The Uncomfortable, a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects, designed by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani. Unfortunately, finding uncomfortable objects around us is not that unusual (refer to the source available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/colalife/14624508474/).

The User Experience (UX) of a product or service is defined by how we perceive the summary of our interactions with it. A positive UX is the result of a careful design that is centered on the user needs. This perspective represents a big departure from the classical technology-driven approach that has produced many unusable products throughout history.

This book provides real-word guidance for a user-centered design process. The process described is based on both sound design theory and practical experience. We shall describe the steps to create successful mobile products and provide advice on how to apply these steps in the real world.

In this chapter, you'll learn the following essential aspects of a user-centered design:

  • How to adopt a user-centered perspective
  • The principles that make a product well-designed
  • The basic steps in the design process
  • The general challenges you'll find when you apply the concepts learned in the real world

All of these aspects are important for the design of mobile apps, but they are also useful in the design of other products.