In this week’s lecture, we discussed UI design with a specific focus on mobile applications. We discussed many different principles and rules to consider when designing for mobile applications:
This is key when designing for a rather limited screen real estate. Appropriate positioning of elements such as text or images are crucial. A consideration to type-scale is also important as all of this text has to be legible whilst pertaining to a certain sense of visual hierarchy.
Touch-screen devices have became the standard method of interaction between an application. Attention needs to be payed to both the size of hit targets and the space between these interactive elements to avoid an interface that is hard to use and unfriendly to touch screens.
This refers to similarity and standards across all UIs. Users spend most of their time on other sites. Therefore, people prefer your site to function the way others that they are familiar with do.
The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and the size of the target. This is highly applicable to hit targets and other interactive elements in a UI.
People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us. This is useful to consider when designing icons as simple icon design allows little room for confusion.
All text should be legible within an interface and this comes down to two main factors: colour contrasts and text size. Colour contrasts also should follow accessibility guidelines.
The time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically. Therefore, the usability should very much be guided and have targeted, specified user flow.
When designing buttons and interactive elements for touch screens, it is highly important to consider how the user will interact with it. A focus on the pixel size in relation to finger and thumb sizes is important.
