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specific mobile design recommendations
September 5, 2007 by Barbara
One reviewer of Designing the Mobile User Experience bemoans the lack of platform-specific design recommendations. I did this for an extremely simple reason: I didn't want to publish a 600 page book, particularly when there are so many free and cheap resources available and the information is so dynamic. Below is an updated list of good references; do let me know of good additions. In the meantime, I'm adding the information below to our resources section.
Platform Providers
Platform providers are the most obvious source of design recommendations, as they know the development environment and design intentions intimately. In theory, if applications work well, the platform will be more widely adopted. In practice some providers do not provide a comprehensive set of recommendations.- Windows Mobile Design Guidelines, though the precise location varies and is usually hard to find.
- MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, by Cynthia Bloch and Annette Wagner of Sun Microsystems
- Graphical Browser Application Style Guide, and similar documents, from Openwave
- UIQ Style Guide, from the developer and technology section of Symbian
- User Interface Design Guidelines, from Qualcomm BREW
- Palm OS?? User Interface Guidelines, at Palm OS
Standards Organizations
Standards organizations also provide design guidelines, ones that often reflect a particular agenda. The W3C, for example, is pushing guidelines that will make applications work both on full-sized and mobile devices, which may not be ideal. The Open Mobile Alliance, in a former incarnation, provided a WAP Style Guide for designing "generic" sites to run on Ericsson, Nokia, and Openwave WML 1.x browsers despite radical rendering differences. This was a least common denominator approach, and sites designed with those "generic" rules were at best very simple.- Mobile Web Banner ("WAP") Advertising Specifications from the Mobile Marketing Association standardizes web banners for advertising on mobile phones. These guidelines ensure consistency and adequate usability.
- dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide is an excellent guide by Brian Fling, Jo Rabin et al.
Carriers and Device Manufacturers
Carriers have the most motivation to have useful and usable software and web sites, since these drive increase usage and revenue. Device manufacturers want users to purchase their devices a second, third, in fact many times, so a good device and purchased-software user experience is important to carriers. In our experience the carrier and manufacturer style guides are the most comprehensive for developing for the limited environment of the carrier or device type.- Forum Nokia has an extensive technical, marketing, and design library for Java ME, Series 40, Series 60, Series 80, and web applications with separate documents for games.
- Sprint Nextel has web, Java ME, and multimedia style guides, but some guidelines are only available if you have a partnership with the company.
- Sony Ericsson has some limited guidelines for various platforms.
- Verizon also has information.
- Motorola provides support for specific devices.
Third Party Guidelines
Occasionally a third party, either an individual designer or a usability consultancy, will write design guidelines. Serco Usability Services may have been the first company to do this, but their WAP guidelines are neither current nor currently available. Bloggers and other online writers make design recommendations, but their recommendations tend to be rather subjective and the rationale for design choices are seldom clear or well defended. In short online resources tend not to be very strong. There are however at least two exceptions to this general rule.- Little Springs Design offers style guidelines intended to cover all devices for a platform. These are available for web, Java ME MIDP 2, and media content production.
- Serco Usability Services provides a varying source of guidelines in their Research section. Most of these guidelines are not connected to a specific platform.
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