Want to create an iPhone app that truly delights its users? Learn how to go from initial idea to exceptional app with this 8-session video course. You’ll discover how to “think iPhone” as you plan and create app interfaces in tune with the ergonomics, psychology, 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.

Presented by expert developer Josh Clark, author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps (O’Reilly), this course is ideal for everyone involved in the app design process—designers, programmers, managers, marketers, clients—as well as iPhone enthusiasts curious about what goes into a great app. Learn how to use aesthetic, technical, and usability options to create fun and useful user experiences.

• Session 1: Choose app features according to user needs, mobility, and the iPhone’s strict economies of time, attention, and screen space
• Session 2: Design a physical interface that accommodates a user’s fingers and thumbs
• Session 3: Organize your app’s collection of multiple screens by looking at the big picture
• Session 4: Learn best practices and usability gotchas for using the iPhone’s standard controls
• Session 5: Craft your app’s visual identity and style
• Session 6: Design your app icon, launch image, and introductory screen to make a good first impression
• Session 7: Use a broad range of gestures and reinforce them by providing users with cues and feedback
• Session 8: Design iPad apps, based on iPad ergonomics and observed behavior of its users

Once you purchase this video package, you’ll be able to download each session only days after it’s presented live. You’ll also have access to course examples and slide presentations. If you want to participate in these live online sessions—which run for 8 consecutive weeks from January 26 to March 16, 2011—check out the O’Reilly Training Site to register.

1. The Mobile Context
   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.
   1. Marketshare and Demographics (Free Preview) 45 minutes  
   2. Build Flagship Apps 8 minutes  
   3. Design Makes the Difference 17 minutes  
   4. What's Your Story 28 minutes  
2. Designing for Touch
   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.
   1. Week 2 Intro and Homework Review 38 minutes  
   2. Finger-Friendly Design 8 minutes  
   3. Big Bullseyes 18 minutes  
   4. Gesture Jiujitsu 11 minutes  
   5. Target Spacing 21 minutes  
   6. Be a Scroll Skeptic 3 minutes  
   7. Q & A 5 minutes  
3. Organizing Your App
   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.
   1. Organizing Your App 10 minutes  
   2. Flat Pages 21 minutes  
   3. Tab Bar 23 minutes  
   4. Tree Structure 21 minutes  
   5. Get It On Paper 20 minutes  
4. The Standard Controls
   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.
   1. Bars, Bars, Bars 45 minutes  
   2. Table Views: Lists on Steroids 19 minutes  
   3. Displaying and Editing Text 12 minutes  
   4. Multiple Choice, Buttons and Sliders 21 minutes  
5. Crafting a Visual Identity
   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.
   1. What's Your App's Personality? (Free Preview) 31 minutes  
   2. Luxury, Reality, and Illusion 14 minutes  
   3. Metaphorically Speaking 22 minutes  
   4. I Call My Invention, "The Wheel" 19 minutes  
6. Introducing Your App
   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.
   1. Your Icon Is Your Business Card 17 minutes  
   2. Icon Design: Think Shadow Puppet 23 minutes  
   3. The Launch Screen 22 minutes  
   4. Roll Out the Welcome Mat 15 minutes  
   5. Alerts and Notifications 20 minutes  
7. Working with Gestures
   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.
   1. Crafting Gestures 13 minutes  
   2. Shortcuts and Backup Plans 27 minutes  
   3. Clumsy Gestures 11 minutes  
   4. Screen Rotation 23 minutes  
8. The iPad
   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.
   1. Greedy Pixel Syndrome 17 minutes  
   2. Media Hypertrophy (media overkill) 25 minutes  
   3. The Frankeninterface 14 minutes  
   4. Popover Pox and iPad Elbow 36 minutes  
   5. Multitouch gestures 12 minutes