Tim Wood - iOS Wow Factor: UX Design Techniques for iPhone and iPad

It's a tough market out there, and as I'm sure you know, it can be very difficult for your application to get noticed in the App Store. There are literally hundreds of thousands of both interesting and not so interesting applications available for download now. Just having a highly functional and stable application from a development perspective isn't enough to get your app the recognition it needs to go mainstream. Users expect to be Wowed with their iOS apps, this is probably something that you have experienced yourself. As you probably know, it's the Wow Factor of that initial app experience that sets the hook and gets users engaged with the features and functions that you or your development team have been working so hard to create. It's Wow Factor that gets you world of mouth recommendations between friends and great reviews in the app store. It's Wow Factor that can drive the viral adoption of the application that ends up funding your early retirement! The big question is, what is Wow Factor, and how do you get it?

Those are not easy questions to answer, but the good news is that there are answers, and I certainly will address those later in this book - but you need to know that you can get to Wow if you are willing to start paying close attention to the details of your application experience. There's no doubt about it, critical thinking, excellent problem solving skills, and solid design methods are behind any great user experience. Elevating your design practice to a higher level is absolutely necessary to get that Wow that you are looking for, and that's at the heart of what this book is about. But Wow takes more than good design practice. It's also rooted in how you think about, or frame up your design problems and that requires a greater understanding of the wider context for the design decisions you are going to make.

It's my firm belief that you can't truly know where you are going without a good understanding of where you have been. The iPhone isn't the first smartphone to appear in the market, although it is one of the most successful and influential. As an application designer, or developer, you understand at some level the huge opportunity this new platform presents and obviously you'd like to take advantage of it. By looking into the past we can understand why the iPhone is the way it is and why it is held up as a shining beacon of great user experience.

As you think about your application, you may need to build upon some of the fundamental concepts behind that experience the core experience of iOS, but on the other hand, you may just want to toss them aside. The idea behind this book is fairly simple, to give you, designer and developer, practical insights into the nature of the iOS user experience, while empowering you with information to create your own exceptional applications. For many people, Apple's Human Interface Guidelines is the starting point for understanding the possibilities that iOS enables for users. But what do you do if you need to go beyond those rudimentary guidelines? Because they are just that, rudimentary - and that's just not going to cut it for you! This book intends to help push you beyond the basic assumptions you may have about iOS applications provide you with the ideas and techniques that will help you build upon your own insights and free your personal creativity.