Best Books for Mobile First Design
Insights and best practices in the mobile world
Published in
3 min readMay 30, 2017
While I have covered mobile UX with a general resource list in the past, I’ve returned to this topic in light of the explosion of growth in mobile payment, personalized chat and mobile commerce via app ecosystems.
The future of mobile UX opens up many exciting opportunities for designers — here’s a few resources to help you create better experiences:
- Mobile First (Luke Wroblewski)
Data backed advice on mobile first design — transitioning from a web design perspective, packed with helpful examples. - Mobile Design Pattern Gallery (Theresa Nell)
While there are free resources available online for UI pattern galleries, I found it helpful that each section was organized and filled with a variety of detailed examples. - Mobile Usability (Jakob Nielsen and Raluca Budiu)
Usability for mobile devices explored by the well respected Nielsen Norman group. - Designing for Touch (Josh Clark)
Focused on how touch design feels for users along with constraints and new opportunities. - Designing Mobile Interfaces: Patterns for Interaction Design (Steven Hoober and Eric Berkman)
In depth collection of best practices for content, labels and general interaction design. - The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences (Rachel Hinman)
A guide to thinking about your approach to mobile design. It takes a more general approach to processes/strategies rather than technical examples. - Simple and Usable Web, Mobile, and Interaction Design (Giles Colborne)
A general read on methods to help simplify your design. - Content Strategy for Mobile (Karen McGrane)
A compelling read for understanding the challenge of designing content for small screens. - Designing Mobile Payment Experiences (Skip Allums)
Best practices and principles for mobile payment and transactions. - Designing Search: UX Strategies for eCommerce Success (Greg Nudelman)
While this book is not solely focused on mobile UX, it brings up many sound principles for eCommerce that can be applied in the mobile context. - Designing Voice User Interfaces: Principles of Conversational Experiences (Cathy Pearl)
Introduces basic VUI (voice user interface) design principles alongside many real world examples. - The Conversational Interface: Talking to Smart Devices (Michael McTear, Zoraida Callejas and David Griol)
A comprehensive primer on conversational interface, from history to toolkits and software. - Essential Mobile Interaction Design: Perfecting Interface Design in Mobile Apps (Cameron Banga and Josh Weinhold)
Mobile interaction introduction focused on iOS and Android.
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