Heuristics for Mobile Design
I enjoyed reading A Loose Heuristic for Mobile Design on UXBooth. The full article is worth the 5 minutes it will take to read, but here’s most of the heuristics in bullet form [with a few comments by me in brackets]:
- Simplicity is a requirement [not just a “good idea”]
- Balance brevity and comprehension [don’t throw the baby out with the bath water by stripping out necessary context]
- Understand, then optimize, your core value proposition [don’t try to do everything your desktop version does]
- “Where” is more important than “who” [understand physical context]
- Assume terrible dexterity [favorite quote: “give it to a young/drunk/old person and see how they do.”]
- The footer is a dead zone [don’t waste time on it!]
- Assume distracted, disrupted, and intermittent use
- Good experience is a subset of performance [it’s gotta be snappy]
- Provide access to the “desktop” version [like it or not, the “non-optimized” version will still work better for some people, depending on familiarity, performance, device, etc.]
- Test on as many devices as possible