Designing Mobile Interfaces: Patterns for Interaction Design

Designing Mobile Interfaces, by Steven Hoober & Eric Berkman.Designing Mobile Interfaces: Patterns for Interaction Design is the comprehensive, platform-agnostic reference for your mobile design work. Whether you design or develop for smartphones, featurephones, tablets, or other touchscreen devices, common principles are discussed and codified as 76 universal interaction and interface patterns. Designing Mobile Interfaces has been translated into multiple languages, used to teach interactive design at universities, and guided the creation of countless apps, websites and even entire OSs like Firefox.

Each pattern explains the underlying psychology and physiology, describes best practices in implementation, and lists pitfalls and "best practices" you should watch out for and avoid. Every pattern is grouped with similar or optional patterns, and appendices detail key background information from typography to the principles of mobile networks. You get not just a list of designs and out of date screenshots, but have a base of knowledge to make up your own mind, and react to the always-changing mobile environment.

"Designing Mobile Interfaces is another stellar addition to O’Reilly’s essential interface books. Every mobile designer will want to have this thorough book on their shelf for reference." — Dan Saffer

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Read it Online

Or, you can just read the whole book right here on this wiki. Pretty much every bit of content from the book is posted online.

It is also regularly updated, especially the reference sections, so even if you buy the book check back for updates, and contact us with errors, suggestions or to get access to the wiki to add updates yourself.


Designing for Fingers, Touch & People

If there's anything I'm the expert on now, it's how people hold and touch their mobile phones and tablets. I'm trending towards fully writing a smallish book on it. I am working on it over hereabouts, but since it'll be a mess for a long while, just check out the Touch overview page for the most current complete articles, presentations, videos, guidelines and references.

 


Not Desktop, But Not Quite Mobile

Though the patterns in Designing Mobile Interfaces are supposed to be general enough to apply to kiosks, telematics, 10-foot Ui, etc. and my touch research originally was also, experts in those fields insist they just aren't the same. I have given in and in the interest of increasing knowledge, am going to start linking to the good stuff in related domains. If you know of a good info source for any of these, tell me about it and I'll add it.


Speaking Engagments, Presentations, Webcasts...

Eric works in Sydney, Australia. Steven lives in the Kansas City, Missouri (US) area.

We're pretty busy with day jobs, freelance jobs and so on. But if we're scheduled to go somewhere and talk about anything remotely related to mobile (and it's an open meeting you can come to) we'll post it here.


Mentions, Reviews & Other Writing

We (and especially Steven) write a lot still. Here we've gathered a list of articles of note, articles in which we're mentioned or interviewed, and reviews or other important mentions of this book.