Date: January 5, 2011
Speaker: Suzanne Ginsburg — Ginsburg Design
The iPhone is no longer the only platform that needs app design. Clients are now asking, “Do you design for Android, too?” Most companies plan to start with one platform, see how things go, then decide whether to invest in a second platform. This roll-out strategy is often tied to engineering costs. Since few developers possess the coding skills each platform requires—Objective C for iPhone, and Java for Android—it’s often necessary to hire two development teams. But what about design?
Would designers, too, have to do twice the work when designing for the iPhone and Android? And what will happen if the Windows, Palm, and Blackberry app stores take off? This dilemma is reminiscent of the browser wars back in 1996, when Netscape and Microsoft hired evangelists to teach design and coding for their respective browsers. Eventually, industry-wide standards replaced their proprietary standards, but it didn’t happen overnight. In this talk, Suzanne will discuss the current state of affairs for smartphone app design and ways app designers can cope with increasing fragmentation.
To see Suzanne’s presentation slides, click here.
About the Speaker
Suzanne Ginsburg is a user experience consultant based in San Francisco and the author of Designing the iPhone User Experience. She works with many different kinds of organizations, from established technology companies to small iPhone startups. Suzanne also maintains a UX blog, iPhone UX Reviews, where she reviews iPhone and iPad apps and provides advice on app design.