AH, THE DAYDREAMS of the gentle iPhone app designer. His reveries roam a sun-dappled land where we users give his app our full and adoring attention. Our fingers swipe, tap, pinch, twist, and flick across the screen with the grace of ballerinas. We instantly understand every icon, tap effortlessly through every screen, take note of every button, and have easy command of all iPhone conventions and gestures. We understand the app because we study it and luxuriate in it just as much as the app designer does.
This, alas, is hooey. The cold reality is that most people don't give much thought to app designs at all, nor should they. The best app designs become almost invisible, and the controls seem to fade to the background to put the user's task or entertainment front and center. Creating this kind of understated but effective design is harder than it looks, but the habits of a mobile audience make it essential.
People often spend only moments at a time with an app, tap quickly through screens without exploring details, then move on to another app. They use iPhone apps on the treadmill, in the car, or in the supermarket. They glance only briefly at the screen so that they can plant their eyes on more urgent surroundings—the road ahead, the date across the table, tonight's reality TV show. They don't know all the standard touchscreen gestures, and they're not particularly interested in learning new ones. The meaning of your carefully crafted icons are lost on them, and, chances are, they find many of your app's features only by accident, if ever.
Don't despair. It's not that people don't care about your app. They may even swoon over it. In the long history of gizmos and gadgets, few devices have inspired as much affection as the iPhone. Along with its big brother, the iPad, the iPhone is in many ways the most personal of personal computers. Our collections of apps are a form of self-expression, where Home-screen icons are as telling as the contents of a handbag or the style of clothes we wear. We ♥ iPhone. And by extension, we ♥ apps. If all goes well, we'll ♥ your app, too.
But just as in matters of the ♥, so go matters of the iPhone. Attention strays, frustration gathers, misunderstandings mount. Even when users love an app, few will give it their full attention or try to understand every nuance. As an app designer, you're embroiled in this dysfunctional romance. You have to forgive and anticipate users' foibles while also crafting an experience that draws them in to explore further. Throughout this book, you'll discover strategies to do just that.
Most of this book explores the nitty-gritty details of specific interface elements and design decisions. Before diving into all that "how," this chapter explores the why. In order to organize your screens, choose your features, or even choose your color scheme, you first have to know what you're up against. This chapter introduces you to iPhone users with a quick survey of the habits and know-how that people bring to the mobile environment. The next chapter will help you build on this broad profile to identify the needs of your particular audience and fine-tune your feature set. From there, you'll dive into all the considerations of crafting the interface for those features.
Go figure, but people use mobile apps when they're mobile. We use apps in all kinds of contexts and in a startling range of environments. This take-it-anywhere convenience is what makes iPhone apps at once so great to use and so challenging to design. Your app competes for your audience's attention—a tough battle to win when you pit a 3.5-inch screen against a big bright world full of oncoming traffic, live conversations, and this thing called human contact. Even when your app does have someone's full attention, it's likely to be in a distracting environment that could break the spell at any time—a crowded subway car, a lively restaurant, the family living room.
That means people are manhandling your app in one paw, with just one eye on the screen, paying only partial attention to your carefully crafted interface. They see a completely different app than the one you see as the designer.
This blurry vision of your app calls for careful attention to the organization of information on your screen, with big, juicy, can't-miss visual targets and a merciless spirit of editing—all topics you'll begin to tackle in the next chapter. But more than that, this context of when and where your audience whips out their apps also tells you something about how they use them.