At the SXSWi conference this past week I attended a lot of great talks on iPhone applications that covered its user experience, development, and how to create apps that emulate the features of a native app but are quicker and easier to create.
User Experience
Josh Clark‘s talk on creating apps that are “TapWorthy Applications” was one of the best talks I attended.
The following categories have successful iPhone applications because they focus on what the user wants to accomplish while “on-the-go”:
- microtasking
- capturing lost time
- location based
- entertainment
Each of these categories requires improving the quality of each tap by making it very useful for users. To do this you have to think about the basic functionality that users want that is divided into primary and recurring tasks. Simplifying the design requires focusing on the mobile context, what the user is trying to accomplish when micro-tasking, creating opportunities for exploring – secret panels and hidden doors to provide additional functionality without cluttering the design, and to think about ergonomics and industrial design so that it is easy to use the application itself. You will also want to condense the amount of data that is being presented to users, which Josh describes as the “glance test”, i.e. a lot of information can be gleaned by just glancing at the app. Apps that do this well incorporate large graphics and minimum amounts of data e.g. Weather App.
Finally prototyping on paper is a good way to figure out what it is users actually want and how they interact with the app before spending a lot of time building a code base for it.
Development
Jonathan Stark‘s presentation focused on developing browser based mobile applications but still provide a lot of the richness of a native app. To accomplish this feat he suggests using the following tools and APIs: jQTouch, PhoneGap, CSS3 and HTML5.
jQTouch is a jQuery plug for developing mobile applications that emulate a lot of the functionality that a native iPhone app would have. The app loads in Safari but has a lot of the same characteristics that a native iPhone app would. The benefit is that it is a lot faster to develop and does not need to be approved by the App Store.
PhoneGap essentially fills in the gaps of taking a web-based application and transferring it to a mobile platform.
