Tapworthy Mobile Design

Josh Clark

From first concept to polished pixel, learn to create a mobile app that delights. This full-day workshop teaches participants to “think mobile” by planning and creating app interfaces in tune with the psychology, culture, ergonomics, and context of an audience on the go. Attendees will learn to conceive and refine an app’s interface and user experience in tune with the needs of a mobile audience—and their fingers and thumbs. The workshop explores the key principles of mobile and touchscreen design, using examples from the major mobile platforms.

This workshop isn’t (only) for geeks. Experienced designers and newcomers alike will uncover the shifts in mindset and technique required to craft a great mobile app. It’s for everyone involved in the app design process—designers, programmers, managers, marketers, clients. The workshop equips participants to ask the right questions (and find the right answers) to make aesthetic, technical, and usability decisions that will make their apps a pleasure to use.

This full-day workshop is built on seven 45-60 minute “chapters,” or sessions, with a series of exercises that build to teams creating a draft mobile design by the end of the day.

You’ll learn:

  • The expectations of a mobile audience
  • The ergonomic demands of designing for touch
  • Strategies for crafting your app’s visual identity
  • How to work with gestures
  • Unique considerations for designing for the iPad
  • Techniques for creating sensational app icons

Josh Clark is a designer specializing in mobile design strategy and user experience. He’s author of “Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps” (O’Reilly, 2010) and “Best iPhone Apps” (O’Reilly, 2009). Josh’s outfit Global Moxie offers consulting services and workshops to help media companies, design agencies, and creative organizations build tapworthy mobile apps and effective websites.

Before the interwebs swallowed him up, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at Boston’s WGBH. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. In 1996, he created the uberpopular “Couch-to-5K” (C25K) running program, which has helped millions of skeptical would-be exercisers take up jogging. (His motto is the same for fitness as it is for software user experience: no pain, no pain.)