Mobile web & app design

Mobile web and app design changes the surface of commercial design as the web did many years ago. The designs and GUI's of yesteryear are taking on a new direction, users now need different levels of interaction depending on what format of information is being presented to them. Your users are coming into a pretty organic application environment where interaction between machine and user is much more simply understood than other levels of computing interfacing. Touch and gesturing technology takes a bold new approach where the user feels like they are more in control interactively, however many developers and companies have yet to truly experiment with user interactivity and more developers are just trying to replicate web interactive experiences. While the web is not going anywhere, how we interactive with it is changing heavily and not just on a design interfacing basis but on a functioning platform as well, so having a key understanding of user interactivity and user control must be taken into account in order to deliver a successful experience in both web application and app developments.

MOBILE WEB

We are so use to the click and rollover functionality we get from a mouse device and this works fine for web on a basic computing platform but for today's devices in the marketplace that support touch and gesturing we have to look into presenting a more robust user interaction. Our mobile web sites or web apps should allow users to interact on a touch and swipe basis and our technology that runs our web site should be rerouted to accommodate for this new medium, so mouse rollovers should be handled differently and clicks should be treated with new coding structures. Many in the web would disagree to reface the internals of their web structure, but how else can you take full advantage of the web coding advancements created for mobile web apps and sites. Take for instance a normal site that doesn't function as a web site but more like a flipbook, so instead of going from page to page you can swipe across the screen and the screen would scroll to different pages or maybe flip like a 3d cube or burn away like a paper on fire. The possibilities for design and function are endless and are only limited to your creativity or the most outspoken person in your company's group meetings. Outside of design many new approaches to storing and caching web data have emerged, such as the ablility to save files locally on the device or to access a light database as well giving you the freedom to capture call and retrieve more data in a more efficient manner. Companies should consider creating touch and gesture optimized sites instead of a tablet adjusted web-site for the level of user interactivity will be greater and user will be more inclined to engage your site if it has applications appeal ( meaning interaction, animation, usability, and adventure ). I know that when I am on my iPad I want to have a unique experience every time I am on it, this is why we download so many different apps, we want engaging levels of interactivity and you can deliver that out of the box.

Picture a website that allows the user to choose different ways of how the site will function and how they will interact with it. What if the site reacted organically to finger touches like 2 fingers made the navigation bar appear and a four finger rotate brought a user to their shopping cart or shaking the tablet or phone takes a user to your contact page. These are just really basic example but they should raise ideas as to what you can do to increase user participation on your site.