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User Interface Guidelines for Mobile and Tablet Devices

by Simon. Average Reading Time: about a minute.

The official user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) guidelines from the manufacturers, links to which you can find below, are a source of inspiration for mobile web and application design. Here, you will find guidelines, samples, tips, and descriptions of common mistakes. Many of the guidelines focus on native application development, but we can apply most parts of them to mobile web design.

To provide the best possible experience on each platform, don’t deliver an iPhone experience to a BlackBerry or Android user. Every platform has its own UI and usability guidelines that every user is expecting from your application. For example, the popular Twitter application TweetDeck has a different user interface and therefore user experience between its iPhone and Android versions, albeit the TweetDeck team aims to provide a similar user experience on both devices. The same can be said between mobile an tablet devices with Reeder and Pulse prime examples on iOS devices.

Apple (iOS)

BlackBerry

Google (Android)

Microsoft (Windows Mobile, Windows Phone 7)

Nokia (Symbian)

Palm/Hewlett Packard (webOS)

Sony Ericsson

Others

If you know of any other examples of UI guidelines for mobile or tablet devices or have any general thoughts, please feel free to add them to the comments.

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  • Rick le Roy

    At androidpatterns.com you will find a nice set of interaction patterns for Android (feel free to share yours :) .

  • Pingback: User Experience: What are the best resources for UX on mobile/handhelds? - Quora

  • http://commonsware.com/ Mark Murphy

    http://www.androiduipatterns.com/ is a nice blog on Android UI patterns. They also point to Mutual Mobile’s Android Design Guidelines document: http://www.mutualmobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/ADG1.1.pdf

  • http://muhammadghazali.web.id/ Muhammad Ghazali

    Wow, this is great! I should bookmark this one. Thank you.

  • http://manuelrocha.co/ Manuel Rocha

    That’s so useful, I’ll be trying out some of the guidelines in this post. Thanks for sharing!

  • http://www.verious.com Michael Coleman

    Create collection of links Simon, really helpfull!