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mobile user interface design patterns
This post starts a series on mobile user interface design patterns. Future posts will contain a "pattern of the week", excerpted from Designing the Mobile User Experience, John Wiley & Sons, 2007.
A design pattern documents known good solutions to frequently occurring design problems. In some cases, the solutions themselves become encoded as user expectations: an application that violates the common design could jar user expectations. A user interface design pattern is a user interface that works well for frequently occurring human-machine interaction situations.
User interface design patterns, or universal patterns, are solutions that likely work across a wide range of applications and on different platforms, although some patterns are platform-specific. In addition, organizations with a complex set of offerings may also create a set of highly specific, fully stylized, corporate patterns in a pattern library frequently with code associated with the pattern.
User interface design patterns are generally identified and articulated by design experts. They can then be used by less experienced designers or by designers wishing to create a consistency in user experience.
Mobilization
While the world of desktop design patterns assume a consistent set of capabilities of the computer, patterns targeted at the mobile space must take into account the varying capabilities and user interface styles of the native operating system.
Some mobile UI design patterns are identical to the same solution from desktop design. Other patterns vary due to size of screen, cost of connectivity, input mechanism, technologies available, et cetera. In general, be suspicious of any desktop navigation or screen layout pattern - it may not mobilize well.
Mobile design patterns do not follow a strict categorization by application development platform. There are some portions of the wml namespace that, if present, enable interaction like AJAX or even Java ME. Thus a solution for one platform might be useful for a wildly different platform.
Desktop UI design patterns are reasonably stable regardless of platform. Tab navigation may look different in a Windows dialog box than it does on the Apple web site, but the basic concepts are the same. Only when multiple rows of tabs are needed does the underlying platform have much influence over design.
In contrast, mobile patterns rely on both device user interface style and platform. Whereas tabs are a useful mechanism on a stylus-driven device (web or local application), they are less useful on a scroll-and-select device application, and should be implemented as horizontal navigation instead. The same navigation in a web browser on a scroll and select device should either avoid the problem altogether, or use a drop-down list.
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