IKana touch is a very well designed iphone application in that it visually looks great, has a very clear hierarchy of functions and visually emphasizes important elements very well.įor me you can't get much simpler than this. There are many examples of this I could point to, instead of the usual twitter clients (which also display this well) I am going to show off one of the tools I use to practice Japanese text called iKana Touch. For the iPhone it's more about designing your application from a hierarchical design and making any one function not take too long to get to. IPhone UI Design / Emphasizing elements through Contrastĭue to the contained space inherent to iPhone Applications you cannot follow some design ideals that Mac Developers follow. In web browsers the web page is the primary object and thus takes up the overwhelming majority of the UI, in fact every bit of UI on web browsers like Google Chrome or Safari are pretty much just to help you navigate to other webpages in 1 form or another. In iTunes songs are definitely the primary object and so take up the biggest chunk of the UI.

You can see this already in just about any great app. Now look at your primary objects category, those objects should take up most of the UI. Then break that list up into the primary, secondary and tertiary objects categories. So if we were to take iTunes we could start out with the obvious: Songs, Artists, Playlists, Albums, Videos, etc. One way of starting out in designing a good UI I heard was to start out and just sit at a white board and write down all the objects in your application. So I want to point out some do's, some do nots & just some general Mac OS X & iPhone OS tips I presented at a DM Cocoaheads meeting. I am not even going to be able to write as much as I'd like here on the topic of UI design, because to be frank this material could fill reams & reams of paper and still have a lot left to say. An application that is visually appealing but not well designed will lose out to an application that isn't as visually appealing but has a well designed user interface. Good user interface design can make or break your application, it's not just visual appearance but workflow & accessibility.

Mac os gui interfaces cocoa