Design and User Experience

Understanding the importance of good design and a positive user experience can help drive sales and reduce support costs.

Build upon your existing design skills – use familiar tools to create mobile UI, web, and flash designs for mobile audiences.

Nokia provides resources, tools, and support that help you create better usability and designs.

Creative design

Any designers who are creating web or desktop content can easily begin to extend their range beyond their design comfort zone — check out Visual design for newcomers. Most of the basic principles are similar to general design principles.

Business opportunities within this rapidly growing creative sector are ripe for forward-thinking designers. The Ovi store — the first truly global mobile distribution channel — opens up a wide range of opportunities for creative professionals, accepting themes, flash and web applications, as well as multimedia content.

For those in creative agencies, mobile design is becoming an integral part of digital marketing projects, with clients expecting a handheld strategy that will complement an online and print-based campaign. Forum Nokia offers a range of resources that will help you stay on the cutting edge and take full advantage of everything that mobile platforms can offer.

To learn more about designing for mobile devices, take a look at the following topics:

• Visual and interaction design
• Adobe Flash Lite design and development
• Web page and Widget design
• Theme design
• Multimedia design
• Game design
• Design Update: Europe

User experience

Taking the user experience (UX) into consideration is an integral step in any development cycle. In delivering a better user experience — by increasing emotional engagement and satisfaction with a service — you can increase sales while simultaneously reducing support costs.

Considering user needs early in the development cycle is extremely cost effective, whereas it can be expensive to implement if left until the end of the process. UX evaluation is a great way to discover small changes that can significantly increase usability.

Forum Nokia provides an online guide for those new to UX that illustrates some of the main principles to consider when creating positive user experiences.

For commercial developers who are unable to carry out UX evaluations within their own development team, Forum Nokia partners with usability testing houses to offer a low-cost consultancy service that delivers a comprehensive usability report as well as provides recommendations for improvement.

Explore how to integrate UX into your development process:

• Usability
• Guidelines and checklists
• Usability article series
• Application quality

Rate This