Mobile Design Pattern Gallery: UI Patterns for Smartphone Apps

I have greater respect for apps that have been well designed. The hard work is in making apps intuitive and easy to use, and this book has many examples of how experts got it wrong, and how to do it right. This book would help new developers using "drag-drop-drop" and "no-coding" website and app builders.

While the visual aesthetic of interfaces has evolved since its publishing, all of the principles laid out in this book are still rock-solid. Use this book to teach you the best practices of mobile app design while using resources like Dribbble for the latest trends in "styling" your app. This book shows you how to choose appropriate components based on a wide variety of scenarios while also showing you how not to use them. I'm in my 5th year as a UX designer and, after this book, I know that I'm making the correct UI decisions for mobile (and some desktop) applications.

Although examples of mobile user interface design can be found everywhere: in our day-to-day usage of our own favorite mobile apps, on blogs, and at meetups and conferences, this book contains 1,000 color screenshots categorized into useful categories. I'm a data visualization person, and it's always hard to figure out how to put a chart effectively on a small mobile screen. The author has an entire chapter on charts, highlighting apps such as FitBit and MySugr for iOS and Gaug.es for Android, which saved me quite a bit of time researching (i.e. downloading a bunch of apps and testing them) and now I have some recommended apps to go straight to. I haven't come across more books like this, probably because apps are constantly changing. Yet, it's just something designers and developers should have in the office because it's so rich in examples. On another note, what has been rewritten from the first edition, from what I understand, is the tutorials and invitations section. The author shares that dialogs, tours, video demos, etc. have not been proven effective in user testing, in fact, most users skip them or find them an inconvenience or annoyance. She offers some general rules instead and final words of advice: "Don't wait until the end to design your tutorial," she writes. "Tutorials should be treated as one of the most important elements of your app. If they fail, your app fails." Again, the book is a reference guide, not really a read from beginning to end. I tend to jump around a lot in the book and, yes, there is an extensive index. I took off one star because for a design book, the design could have been much sleeker (although the page designer did a quite a job making every page layout look different). I really needed a boring layout because having all the pages layout differently was hard to follow and I needed a pattern myself for a better user experience. With the text and white space, the positioning of the screenshots was different from page to page, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. The typical O'Reilly book is a certain height and width, kind of small, which did not work for this book which is mostly screenshots. To clarify, I wouldn't have minded if the book had been bigger, even atlas-sized, with screenshots (all portrait or all landscape orientation) lined up, stacked next to each other with the author's notes in the margins on the edges. I also got lost not knowing what section I was in from time to time. The chapter is indicated in small print at the bottom of every page, not the top or the side, which would have been my preference (on the side with a different color indictator for every chapter).

The mobile web today is just like the web sites of the late 90s and that means there is a ton of opportunity for improvements. For over 20 years I have spent time helping companies optimize their online conversion rates and lately more and more of that focus is becoming the mobile experience. This is a must have resource when trying to understanding the ever rapidly changing landscape of mobile UI and design choices. This one stays on my desk at all times.

Great product. I got what was described.

The idea of this book is great. If you want to improve the UI of a mobile app, look at 1000 or so screenshots from various popular apps and see what other developers are doing both right and wrong. But it has some glaring omissions. To the author's credit the first very first chapter is navigation which is surely the biggest pitfall of multi-platform app developers. But that's also where she missed the boat big time. She gave dozens of examples of good and bad navigation but never once did she compare the same app on both iOS and Android. (much less Windows Phones which she does cover some) Apple now allows a 5 button tool bar. Android only let's you use 3 buttons. Things like this are BIG issues for developers. Indeed she criticizes Quora for Android for 'Squeezing in" a forth button which makes thing cluttered. Yet on iOS, Quaroa's designers could use 4 buttons and have 1 to spare. It would have been considerably more useful to show the same apps on both platforms and how the designer(s) made decisions (ie compromises) on how to customize their app for each platform. The biggest challenge to a mobile UI designer is non-standard environments and the author seemed to not even consider it. If she took even a dozen well known apps and did screen shots on both platforms (and perhaps on tablets) the book would be gold. [UPDATE: The author left me a nice comment and mentioned she had touched on this topic on her blog. (check first comment for link) That post is worth reading.] The other big fail was in the section on forms. She shows several flight booking apps (which by definition require large amounts of form input) and gives them as examples of bad form design for being cluttered. Then in the next few pages she shows login forms (you know, with 3 elements, username, password and sign in button) as examples of good form design. Well duh! That's like complaining an 18 wheeler won't fit in a compact only parking spot. ON THE GOOD SIDE: I give her credit because apparently in one section of the first edition she like really blew some of her advice and she owned up to it and corrected it. Also she does give some coverage to Windows which she could be excused for skipping. All things considered it's worth spending a couple of hours with if you're a UI/UX newbie but if you have any experience at all, you'll be wanting more. I hope this review helped and good luck designing the next killer app.

Great overall depictions of modern day mobile design patterns. Bought for a class and will probably keep on my desk at work for reference.

Time for an update! ;-)