Designing Mobile Interfaces: Patterns for Interaction Design

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 You get not just a list of designs and out of date screenshots, but have a base of knowledge to make up your own mind, and react to the always-changing mobile environment.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

Buy it from Amazon:

• Paperback, 582 pages, color.

• For your Kindle.

Buy it direct from O'Reilly:

• Paperback, 582 pages, color.

• eBook. DRM-Free PDF, ePub, Kindle-compatible .mobi, DAISY, and Android .apk for pretty much any reader you wish.

Read in other languages

• Designing Mobile Interfaces has been translated into Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Italian. Other languages and editions

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. This is where I am working on it or 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.

• Kiosks even if they are made by strapping an iPad to the wall, have different context, and different environmentally-derived interactions. Design them differently.

  • Designing Software for Kiosks by Studio IQ. Good tips. Keep bugging them, and maybe we'll get a full repository of info out of them.

  • Designing Intuitive Point-of-Interest and Point-of-Sale Touch Interfaces

• 10-foot-UI is any interactive experience viewed from a distance. The usual assumption is a TV in a living room. Smart TVs have brought this out of the game console, and made it more mainstream. Your website is getting viewed at 10 foot range, in group settings.

  • Global Experience Language - TV by the BBC - Style guides and many guidelines and principles for TV graphics and interactive TV.

  • TV Screen Sizes by popularity of Web viewing, September 2013

• Telematics

  • Dark Screens in Cars a discussion that took off with many good links.

  • Car UX is just a bunch of photos of car control panels. So, continuing the bad tradition of confusing UI with UX.

• Games No matter what they are on, game design is a bit different. Different enough I did not cover it in anything else in this book. Game design resources (TBD) should be referenced generally.

  • That Game's UX terrific blog on gaming, with all sorts of great UX principles applied or reviewed.

  • Designing Better Controls for the Touchscreen Experience from Gamasutra.

• Augmented Reality - Not really a platform like the others, I have seen enough good stuff that is really pushing the bounds of what we think of as interaction and interface that I think AR also needs a separate and robust set of standards. I have also used an Occulus Rift and it. Is. Awesome. AR and VR is maybe going to happen and we need to not be surprised by it and muddle through this transition. We need standards. Now.

  • Augmented Reality Standards and Examples that I have gathered

  • W3C Working Group on AR Standards

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.