Style Guides

From MobileDesign

Contents 1 Little Springs Design guides 2 Platform Providers 3 Standards Organizations 4 Carriers and Device Manufacturers 5 Third Party Guidelines

[edit] Little Springs Design guides

Use our sample chapters for cross-platform development discussing screen design and rendering issues associated with both XHTML and J2ME platforms. When you are done, purchase the books for more details:

• User Interface Guidelines for J2ME MIDP.
• User Interface Guidelines for Mobile Web Development.

[edit] Platform Providers

Platform providers are the most obvious source of design recommendations, as they know the development environment and design intentions intimately. In theory, if applications work well, the platform will be more widely adopted. In practice some providers do not provide a comprehensive set of recommendations.

• Windows Mobile Design Guidelines, though the precise location varies and is usually hard to find. Try here first.
• MIDP 2.0 Style Guide for the Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, by Cynthia Bloch and Annette Wagner of Sun Microsystems.
• Graphical Browser Application Style Guide, and similar documents, from [Openwave].
• UIQ Style Guide, from the developer and technology section of Symbian.
• User Interface Design Guidelines, from Qualcomm BREW.
• Palm OS User Interface Guidelines, at Palm OS.
• The Opera Developer Community at Dev.Opera provides information and a forum for discussion of the whole set of Opera products, desktop and wireless.

[edit] Standards Organizations

Standards organizations also provide design guidelines, ones that often reflect a particular agenda. The W3C, for example, is pushing guidelines that will make applications work both on full-sized and mobile devices, which may not be ideal. The Open Mobile Alliance, in a former incarnation, provided a WAP Style Guide for designing generic sites to run on Ericsson, Nokia, and Openwave WML 1.x browsers despite radical rendering differences. This was a least common denominator approach, and sites designed with those generic rules were at best very simple.

• Mobile Web Banner ("WAP") Advertising Specifications from the Mobile Marketing Association standardizes web banners for advertising on mobile phones. These guidelines ensure consistency and adequate usability.
• dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's Guide is an excellent guide by Brian Fling, Jo Rabin, et. al. The dotMobi folks also produce a blog under the MobiThinking name that is worth reading

[edit] Carriers and Device Manufacturers

Carriers have the most motivation to have useful and usable software and web sites, since these drive increase usage and revenue. Device manufacturers want users to purchase their devices over and over, so a good and consistent device and purchased-software user experience is important to carriers. In our experience the carrier and manufacturer style guides are the most comprehensive for developing for the limited environment of the carrier or device type.

• Forum Nokia has an extensive technical, marketing, and design library for Java ME, Series 40, Series 60, Series 80, and web applications with separate documents for games. They also have a set of Mobile Design Patterns
• Sprint Nextel has web, Java ME, and multimedia style guides, but some guidelines are only available if you have a partnership with the company.
• Sony Ericsson has some limited guidelines for various platforms.
• Verizon also has information.
• Motorola provides support for specific devices.
• All public Apple products including iPhone standards are available through the Apple Developer's Connection.

[edit] Third Party Guidelines

Occasionally a third party, either an individual designer or a usability consultancy, will write design guidelines. Serco Usability Services may have been the first company to do this, but their WAP guidelines are neither current nor currently available. Bloggers and other online writers make design recommendations, but their recommendations tend to be rather subjective and the rationale for design choices are seldom clear or well defended. In short online resources tend not to be very strong. There are however exceptions to this general rule.

• Serco Usability Services provides a varying source of guidelines in their Research section. Most of these guidelines are not connected to a specific platform.