The last time I was in a crowd this big was at an Obama rally. Supposedly 5000+ are surrounding me at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference. The annual gathering is being held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Today is the first of five days of sessions, labs, workshops and networking.
The latter is the reason I’m here. Over the past several months of been working with iPhone developers, helping them to improve the user interface text in their apps and to develop supporting information where needed. It has been a much different challenge than working with traditional client/server enterprise apps.
The development/release schedules are extremely rapid. This is partly due to the mobile apps have a relatively limited feature set. But also because the iPhone SDK is really solid and iTunes facilitates distribution. And iPhone app development is much more about craft than cranking out content and code. The limited screen real estate of mobile apps puts great pressure on every element of the UI to be optimized.
Text is no exception and I’ve found this to be an area that is lacking in many apps. Crafting the right word or phrase in a given context can make a significant improvement in the usability of an app. So one aspect of my work involves reviewing and improving the text choices in the user interface. Using iPhone nomenclature these include labels, alerts, action sheets, and placeholders.
The apps I’ve been working with cost from five to twenty bucks. This a departure from the freeware and 99 cent category of apps. The paid apps are generally more robust than free apps and provide more substantial feature sets. Often the more advanced features are accessed by taps, double taps and pinches. These features are not easily discoverable and a summary Help topic can be very useful to alert users to them.
It is important to optimize the text to be precise and helpful while remaining lean and efficient. I try to shoot for a maximum of sixty words for a Help topic. This is generally what can fit comfortably in the visible screen area without scrolling. The number of words is also based on using font size that is immediately easy to read without the user pinching or clicking to resize the text. Finally, color and icons can be very helpful shorthand for highlighting key concepts.
Some apps have web-sites for marketing purposes. These sites can be a good place to post more substantial procedural and conceptual information, as well as tutorials. Ideally there is a carefully crafted transition between the app and the web site. Single sourcing techniques come into play when optimizing web pages for display in either a standard browser or the iPhone app embedded browser (UIWebView).
