Designing Interfaces, 3rd Edition

Chapter 6. Mobile Interfaces

Look around on any city street, and you will see people with their heads hunched down looking at their mobile devices. The world is full of iPhones, Android phones, and other smartphones and tablet computers. There are entire countries where people reach the internet primarily through their phones. By 2025, five billion people are projected to be mobile internet users worldwide.¹ It is likely the users of your product will primarily interact with your product via a mobile device. Designing for mobile is not just good design practice or a practical business concern, it’s common sense.

It stands to reason that mobile devices have become an indispensable part of daily life. A cell phone is not simply a phone or means to connect to the internet; it has become a primary gateway to communication, commerce, entertainment, transportation, and navigating one’s way. Smartphones and tablets in particular also have the benefit of direct manipulation—being able to touch the object you want to select or edit—which makes mobile interfaces easy and intuitive to learn.

Simply making a compact version of your website is no longer the way design is done, and a mobile-first (designing for the mobile experience prior to designing for a fuller featured web experience) or responsive-design (designing for a web experience that can gracefully scale to fit different screen sizes) approach is adopted by companies who want to ensure their digital products can scale for the future. ...