This Online Training Course has Concluded

The sessions were presented live during January, February, and March 2011.

Purchase the Video

Download the full online course for $139.99. Code examples and slides are included.

Price: $299
What's Included:

• Eight sessions
• Free ebookshelf, a $100 value
• Full access to course videos

Schedule:
This class is full and registration is now closed. If you missed this course and want to be notified of future Tapworthy courses, please email training@oreilly.com.

Wednesdays @ 10am PT
January 26 - March 23, 2011
Each session is 120 minutes.

What you'll learn:

• Choose app features according to user needs, mobility, and the iPhone's strict economies of time, attention, and screen space
• Design a physical interface that accommodates a user's fingers and thumbs
• Organize your app's collection of multiple screens by looking at the big picture
• Learn best practices and usability gotchas for using the iPhone's standard controls
• Craft your app's visual identity and style
• Design your app icon, launch image, and introductory screen to make a good first impression
• Use a broad range of gestures and reinforce them by providing users with cues and feedback
• Design iPad apps, based on iPad ergonomics and observed behavior of its users

About this online course:

Want to create an iPhone app that truly delights its users? Learn how to go from initial idea to exceptional app with this 8-week online course. You'll discover how to "think iPhone" as you plan and build app interfaces in tune with the psychology, ergonomics, and culture of an audience on the go. Experienced designers and newcomers alike will learn the techniques and mindset required to craft a tapworthy iPhone app.

This course isn't just for geeks. It's for everyone involved in the app design process-designers, programmers, managers, marketers, clients-as well as iPhone enthusiasts curious about what makes this thing tick. You'll learn how to use aesthetic, technical, and usability options to create fun and useful user experiences.

Instructor and expert developer Josh Clark will teach you how to ask the right questions (and get the right answers) during each online session. As part of this incredible package, you'll be able to download the session video only days after it's recorded and review the lesson at your leisure. You'll also receive course examples and slide presentations.

Instructor

Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (O'Reilly), is a designer and developer who helps creative people clear technical hassles so they can share their ideas with the world. As a speaker and consultant, he has helped scores of companies build effective websites and mobile apps, and as a developer, he created Big Medium, friendly software that actually makes it fun to manage a website. Josh is also the author of Best iPhone Apps and iWork '09: The Missing Manual (both O'Reilly).

Before the rise of the Web, Josh worked on a slew of national PBS programs at WGBH-TV in Boston. He shared his three words of Russian with Mikhail Gorbachev, strolled the ranch with Nancy Reagan, hobnobbed with Rockefellers, and wrote trivia questions for a primetime game show. Now Josh makes words and spins code at his hypertext laboratory globalmoxie.com.

Who should attend?

• Web and software designers
• Programmers
• Managers
• Marketers
• Clients
• iPhone and Android enthusiasts

What you'll need:

• A touch device such as an iPhone, iPad, or Android

Sessions

Session 1: The Mobile Context—January 26, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
App design isn't just about pretty pixels: it's about understanding the mobile context, user needs, and the iPhone's strict economies of time, attention, and screen space. The beauty of great apps derives from function: every interface element has to be focused on helping users do what they're there to do. The session provides a framework for creating a clear mission statement that you can use to filter and winnow features. You'll follow a case study to see how a popular app evolved from concept to finished product.

Session 2: Designing for Touch—February 2, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
Because the iPhone is handheld and works by touch, you're doing something more sophisticated than organizing pixels. You're designing a physical interface that will be explored by human hands, manipulated in a way that desktop software never is. This session explores the common iPhone grip and how fingers (and especially thumbs) roam the screen. You'll discover ergonomic guidelines for comfortable tapping and how that affects the visual layout of the app.

Session 3: Organizing Your App—February 9, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
As you begin planning your app, consider how it works-its big picture organizational design. You'll see that its essential operation depends on easy movement from screen to screen. All but the most simple iPhone apps consist of multiple screens, each one dedicated to an individual task or to specific content. How you string those screens together determines how people will steer their way through your app. In this session, you'll tour iPhone navigation styles and explore options for arranging an app's content and tools.

Session 4: The Standard Controls—February 23, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
Standard iPhone controls are the buttons, text fields, list views, keyboards, and icons that comfortingly appear in app after app. They provide a rich and varied set of options for manipulating an app, but because they're commonplace, they're often taken for granted and are sometimes dismissed as visually dull. Don't underestimate how delicious they can be. This session reviews these crucial building blocks and explains the dos and don'ts for each.

Session 5: Crafting a Visual Identity—March 2, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
For all our talk about the importance of efficiency and focus in iPhone app design, there's also the elusive matter of style. Because we use iPhone everywhere, apps are personal in a way that software has never been before. The interface choices you make affect not only what customers can do with their iPhones, but also how they feel about them. This session explores strategies for crafting your app's visual identity. You'll discover techniques for adding color and texture to standard controls, crafting toolbar icons, and creating a sense of luxury by conjuring real-world materials.

Session 6: Introducing Your App—March 9, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
An app's success often depends on its first impression. To draw people in and put them at ease, your app should be attractive, trustworthy, and approachable from the get-go. Elements that you might consider mere accessories-the app icon, launch image, and introductory screen-are essential to a good first impression. In this session, you'll understand how crucial the app icon is to marketing and usability. You'll also explore the importance of the launch image, first screen, and orientations for first-time users, along with techniques for approaching each.

Session 7: Working with Gestures—March 16, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
The iPhone enables a broad range of gestures, the taps and swipes that make the phone do our bidding. Some gestures are immediately evident (tap a button), and others are quickly discovered (swipe a screen to move to the next). But gestures that don't borrow from familiar physical interactions aren't as easy to guess, and some multifinger gestures are just plain awkward. In this session, you'll explore how tapworthy design provides cues and feedback to reinforce gestures. You'll determine which gestures can be figure out right away and what you can do to help people discover new gestures on their own.

Session 8: The iPad—March 23, 2011, 10 a.m. (PST)
Although it's commonly described as "a big iPod Touch," the iPad's form and context create entirely different use cases than its smaller cousins. This session helps you understand of how people use an iPad, including how the iPad's ergonomics demand entirely different rules for an app's visual layout.