So, you’ve spent months working on your iPhone app and are finally ready to release it to the showcase that is the App Store. But wait – have you considered how it will look against your competitors in the App Store list view?

If you have  high-hopes, then you won’t just be competing against apps that provide a similar feature-set to yours – you’ll be competing against a diverse range of apps on the Top 25 page for a fraction of the user’s attention. We already know the App’s name, star rating & price have a big impact on downloads. But what about the Icon?

No doubt, a lot of the decision process is subjective. If you’re after a specific app then you’re going to try it out no matter how it appears in the App Store. The ‘A Fake Caller’ app is successful because it provides utility, but it’s no beaut. A quick once-over from a visual designer and the app would get even more downloads.

Differentiation from competing apps is key here – what’s going to make someone download your amazing Touch app from the ten other Touch apps that are out there? It must be stressed that first impressions are key. As with the packaging of food goods, a quality icon will yield a higher perception of quality of the product itself.

Of course, we still need to think about how the icon will look on the Home Screen.
iPhone app icons are like pin-badges on your jacket – they add a touch of decoration and add personality. They are digital jewelry – gems that I love to leave installed on my iPhone, even if just for cosmetics.

Need some help designing an app icon in context of the App Store or Home Screen? Here are some Photoshop templates we use when designing our app icons.

A couple of weeks ago we attended UX London, a new conference that started this year aimed at the user experience community. It was great to meet other designers and hear presentations from some key industry figures including Peter Merholz (@peterme), Luke Wroblewski (@lukewdesign), Dan Saffer (@odannyboy), Jared Spool (@jmspool) and Don Norman.

The conference also featured two days of workshops where we got to work in teams with other attendees – that’s always interesting and fun, and a way of seeing first hand how others who we don’t work with on a daily basis work to create design solutions.

One of my favourite presentations came from Jared Spool, who has an entertaining take on UX – combining examples of good and bad designs interjected with his own brand of humour. His style works really well to communicate the many UX issues that still exist with many products and their effect on users.

The keynote presentation was from Don Norman – who is something of a legend in user experience. His book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’ is a classic and one that many interaction design courses have as part of their reading lists. Don has been a champion of simplicity in the past, but at this conference he actually argued that complexity can be a good thing. He illustrated his argument with real world scenarios – like learning to read music, or learning to fly a plane – he argued that although at first glance these are complex, there is fun and learning involved which in itself is complexity and without that the experience would not be so fulfilling. It posed interesting questions about how we handle complexity when it is all around us and natural in many ways.

Resources:
Below are links to presentations and notes from the presentations given by the speakers during day one of the conference:

Dan Saffer of Kicker Studio:
http://www.kickerstudio.com/blog/2009/06/designing-from-the-inside-out-behavior-as-the-engine-of-product-design/

Eric Reiss talking about Service Design:
http://www.slideshare.net/ericreiss/reiss-on-e-service-ux-london

Luke Wroblewski ‘Parti and the design sandwich’ talk
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?838

Don Norman talk notes ‘In Favour of Complexity’ (notes via Luke Wroblewski)
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?837

Jared Spool ‘What makes a design intuitive?’ (notes via Luke Wroblewski)
http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?835

Over the past few months we’ve not just been busy on creating new branding for Taptu, but we’ve also been beavering away on an iPhone app which you’ll hear about in more details very soon. We couldn’t find any templates on the web to help us preview our new iPhone logo in-situ, so we created our own.

If you’re also developing an iPhone app and want it to stand-out amongst the crowd in the App Store, then this download is for you.  Download the templates below and you can see how your app will look before it’s submitted.

Just drag your icon into the template to see how it’ll look with Apple’s funky  gel-effects applied.  Or better yet, design your app icon from scratch from within these templates.  We use these to design in context so as to ensure we are thinking about how it will look from a user’s point of view – in the App Store list, the Home Screen dock, and on the Desktop iTunes Store.  If you’re a designer or a developer, you’ll find these assets ultra-useful.

The templates are in Photoshop PSD format with full editable layers.  We recreated the gel-effects using vector paths to give you greatest flexibility.  The pink symbol is there just as an example.  Hopefully the layers are all quite self-explanatory – if not, give us a shout.

Click here to download the whole zip package.  There are templates for the Home Screen, the iPhone and Desktop App Store as well as individual 57×57px and 512×512px icon PSDs.

Just the other day we were having a brainstorming session about a future mobile application we’re developing. One of the issues we discussed was how we can speed up the search response time – the time the user waits for results to load after submitting their query.

While we’re chipping away milliseconds in every way we can by tweaking the service’s responsiveness with every release we do, we’re serving results as fast as possible and some aspects – such as network latency – is out of our control and can’t be made any faster.

Then it struck me – maybe we were thinking about it the wrong way. The problem was reminiscent of a real story, as quoted by Bruce Tognazzini of the Nielsen Norman Group:

“A classic example occurred in the 1930s in New York City, where “users” in a large new high-rise office building consistently complained about the wait times at the elevators. Engineers consulted concluded that there was no way to either speed up the elevators or to increase the number or capacity of the elevators. A designer was then called in, and he was able to solve the problem.
What the designer understood was that the real problem was not that wait time was too long, but that the wait time was perceived as too long. The designer solved the perception problem by placing floor-to-ceiling mirrors all around the elevator lobbies. People now engaged in looking at themselves and in surreptitiously looking at others, through the bounce off multiple mirrors. Their minds were fully occupied and time flew by.”

When solving any problem it’s easy to get tunnel-vision. It’s important to remind yourself “why are we doing it this way”, take a step back and readdress the actual problem. Rather than walking along, looking down at the pavement for ideas, try looking up at the sky…

As 2009 begins, we wanted to take the opportunity to share some of the UE design blogs we read regularly. For those interested in all aspects of user experience and mobile user experience, these should offer some varied reading into what people are thinking and working on in the field right now.

If you’re so inclined, feel free to grab the OPML file here to import into your RSS reader.

In early 2008, we also created a list of 20 great resources for mobile web developers and designers which you may like to have a look at again.

On with this year’s list, then!

Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect

Jan is a researcher for Nokia. He travels the world observing and understanding people in their own countries – recently in Afghanistan, Africa, Japan, China and many more countries. His blog consists of a range of beautiful photographs taken on his travels, with insightful observations at each step of the way. The guy has the most interesting job we’ve seen in a long time!

Boxes and Arrows

This site offers a wide range of articles and stories written by designers and consultants. It’s a good place to go if you want to find out about particular design methods and techniques. It has a deep searchable archive of the articles so you can find anything UE-related you can think of.

Signal vs Noise

The guys behind the site are pretty well known for their no-nonsense approach to software design and their products – including Basecamp. They are really clued up on design, web development, running a small business and have an ethos of ‘getting real’. Their writing is always compelling and relevant and the blog is updated daily.

Putting people first

The authors are a design consultancy, featuring and linking to stories and news from all over the user experience and usability world. The benefit of this blog is its wide coverage of all aspects of the UE field. It’s updated often too.

Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is a writer and speaker specialising in business, design and user experience environments. He worked for a number of years at Microsoft and now works as a freelance author and speaker. His blog is always insightful, digestible and thought provoking. The ‘essays’ section of his blog offers varied and interesting articles around creative thinking, motivation and advice for managers to name a few.

Cooper Journal

The Cooper Journal is written by a team from an Interaction Design consultancy in San Francisco. The ethos of their blog is ‘A blog about design, business and the world we live in’. Different authors from within the company write regularly on everything from elevator design, to car dashboard design and how good designers can create ‘evil’! They update regularly and one of the best features is the breadth of content and authors.

Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog

Alexander comes from a mobile background. He often raises thought-provoking insights into new technologies and their effects on human behaviour.

UIE Brain Sparks

UIE Brain Sparks has frequent postings from its founder, Jared Spool. It mainly focuses on human observation and web usability.

Small Surfaces

Small Surfaces is a mobile-centric blog, touching on all aspects of the design process. You may have heard of its author, Gabriel White, from his involvement with two of the world’s leading design consultancies: Punchcut & Frog Design.

Adaptive Path Blog

Adaptive Path are a strategy and design consultancy based in San Francisco. They have a mixed-bag of authors, ranging from design researchers, marketing gurus, and design strategists. We’re even thinking of trying out Alexa’s ‘magnetic prototyping’ concept on our next project!

[Image: Jan Chipchase Blog: Mobile phone polishing services in Kabul]

Carriage number 7 is at position 7 at the platform – as printed on passenger ticket

As a UE designer, I often find myself looking at the world around me for ideas and inspiration. Ideas come from all kinds of products, services and experiences. I found myself observing many of these on a recent trip to Japan, where things are done differently to the western world.

Back in October I wrote about the Tokyo metro user experience. This next example is about the complete ‘end-to-end’ experience as a passenger on the Bullet Train service in Japan.

Looking back at the journey, it’s the small details of the service that compounded to make the journey flow so well. Especially when compared to previous experiences of train journeys in the UK and other countries I’ve travelled in.

In essence it was about two things: organisation and reliability. The best way to explain this is to describe the sequence of events that made the journey…

The journey experience started with the ticket – which has a carriage number and seat number printed on it in advance of the journey.

Once at the platform the carriage numbers are marked clearly on the platform concourse – so passengers can work out where to stand using the number on their ticket.

All of this helps the passenger to be more organised and relaxed for their journey. When lugging large cases etc. none of us want to walk up and down the platform more than we need to. It also removes the chance of people crowding to one door of the same carriage and so on.

Then, when the train draws into the platform it stops exactly at the right place for your carriage – the number on the carriage side matches the one on the platform.

Once on the train, the journey starts exactly on time.

And of course, the rapid speed of the train is a key factor – it gets the passenger to their destination so quickly and efficiently. It feels almost like air travel.

So what did I take away from the experience? Most of all, it’s clear that the service has been designed and implemented to a degree that creates a ‘near perfect’ passenger experience. That’s certainly something I don’t see every day!

Marc is one of the iPhone owners here at Taptu, and following a lunchtime conversation about how we feel about that much-talked-about phone, he was prompted into writing a post about the few things that irritate him about it. (Granted he’s pretty irritable these days with a little sprog who wakes up in the night! )

1) No ‘Silent mode ON’ indicator in UI
I often flip the Silent switch on when I’m in a meeting. But when I get out I often forget to flip it back resulting in a barrage of missed calls. There are even times when I use my iPhone unaware that it’s still in Silent mode, and will be for the next 4hours. Let’s face it, the Silent switch is pretty discrete. I’m not saying I’d like a gargantuan neon button on the front of the device, I’m just saying that the iPhone is in desperate need of an elegant UI solution – a visual indicator in the header area to remind me when it’s in Silent mode.

2) Privacy of incoming SMS’s

I invested in an Apple iPhone 3G Dock to show off my prized possession in the office and reduce scratching on the back. But there’s an unexpected flip-side: whenever I get an SMS, the backlight comes on and the body of my SMS is shown proud to all – no user-interaction is involved. This is pretty neat when in the confines of your home, but can be pretty embarrassing when you’re in the office and a risqué message comes in from your wife/girlfriend/mistress. Give me a setting for this behaviour, Apple!

3) Dictionary auto-correction drives me nuts

Why doesn’t the dictionary automatically learn the spellings I frequently use?

It’s so irritating to have to dismiss the auto-correction popup every time I use the word “dood” into an SMS or email, and even more annoying to find it has sneakily auto-corrected it to “food” for me leading to much confusion for the recipient. [Ed.: Possible that Apple sees more sense than Marc and thinks "dood" should be banned from the English language? However "w00t!" is accepted and in the dictionary... apparently!]

4) Inconsistency between native applications
Here’s one example: In cover-flow mode in the iPod app you can press the little ‘i’ icon in the bottom-right to flip the album cover-art over and see it’s track listing. Ok, I’ve got the hang of that now – it gives me additional contextual info. So, when I’m checking the temperature in Boston in the Weather app, why does the very same ‘i’ icon flip over the panel to reveal a settings page for *all* my cities? Seems like odd behaviour until you get used to it. Aside from consistently using a flip transition, the panel the ‘i’ icon behaves very differently at times, leading to unexpected behaviour.

5) Where do I go for what?
And don’t even get me started on having to remember to go to the iPod app when I want to play a video… my device isn’t an iPod, it’s an iPhone. ‘iTunes’ would be a more suitable name to get to my music/video as that’s what it’s called on my Mac, so why do I have to relearn the terminology for each device? Here’s a suggestion: relabel iTunes > iTunes Store, and iPod > iTunes.

When you were frantically unpacking your iPhone 3G were you also having problems figuring out how to put the SIM card in? In my packaging was a loose O2 SIM which obviously needs to plug into the iPhone… somehow!

Sure, the small hole in the top looks like a familiar place to engage the mechanism, but do you really want to go ramming a bent paper-clip in your shiny new priced-possession willy-nilly? I used to think I was pretty clued-up on product design – I have a 1st-class degree in it for god sake – but sometimes you start to question yourself. Surely I must be missing something??

Flicking through the user-manual didn’t help either. It’s pretty frustrating to have to:

1. Give in and resort to flicking through the manual for help* and
2. To not find the solution in there anyway.

After 5 more minutes of hitting things, it turned out that the SIM Ejector Tool was fully integrated INTO the packaging itself – you have to open up one of packaging compartments to reveal it. There was absolutely no indication that it would be hiding in there.

This is a great example of Cleverness vs Clarity. Apple decided to (mistakenly) go for the former on this one. I expect a clear distinction between a product’s packaging and the product itself. Apple: do you want your users to feel dumb?

[Ed.: He's a man, what do you expect?! ]

Within Taptu, we have a type of page that we call a ‘Content Summary’; they’re the useful little pages containing snippets of information for every search result. These pages make us different – they make it easier for users to get mobile search results in a digestible, clear format.

How does it work? Once the user has selected a result, we take them to the content summary page. We do this rather than linking directly to the source site – which is what happens with most desktop search engines.

The content summary offers key information and content for the chosen result. Sure, it goes against common wisdom that “less pages is better”, but this means that users can stay within Taptu if they wish – they can defer (or avoid) navigating off to a poorly composed mobile internet page or a transcoded page. This creates a better user experience by avoiding additional navigation and scrolling of pages.

What issues have we considered in our ‘Content Summary’ design? Some of them are discussed below with a ‘Song’ result.

The 4th annual MEX conference opened in London yesterday morning, with a packed house of the leading thinkers in the mobile business. Operators, handset manufacturers, media companies, software developers and user experience consultants from 21 countries filled WallaceSpace, bringing with them a diverse range of views and a wealth of new ideas.

In the afternoon, Steve presented, following Scott Jensen from Google, discussing how search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment. Later on, it’s with great excitement that we received the Commercial MEX Design Award (Check out the smile on Conor’s face, on the right!)

Marek covered the first day’s events in greater details and announced the Design Award winners on the official MEX blog. Today, the conference continues, with tons of insightful presentations.

If you didn’t make it to MEX, we’ll also be attending Mobile Monday London next week, Being-Digital on the 10th and Fuel Conference on 13th June, so we hope to meet you there!