Mobile User Experience Guide
Mobile User Experience Guide is a comprehensive guide to any group developing apps across the company. It has everything you need to comply with Dell’s branding and design guidelines. Long a requirement to release an app on an external app store, this guide sets a single style standard for any app on either the Dell app store or a customer-facing store.
Background:
As the design leader in the mobile team, I got a lot of questions around guidance and principles for mobile design across the organization. I noticed that many of the designers and product managers from other Dell teams who are not working on mobile apps or don’t live and breathe mobile development on a daily basis did not completely grasp the nature of designing for native platforms.
Problem:
I’ve looked at the App Store, most the Dell mobile apps designs are inconsistent - starting from the mobile apps icons, splash and user interface.
When I was reviewing mobile apps created by other teams, they have been creating mobile apps that are not even brand compliant - using different colors, iconography and typography.
Know the Brand
First thing that my team took a look at, was to learn the company’s Brand and partner with the Brand and Creative team to ensure that what we design is going to be supported by the organization.
Identify All Mobile Components to Design
Mobile UX team came up with a list of all major components to design.
• Common design elements
• Essential graphic treatments
• Typography guidelines
• Mobile app deployment policies
Establish Go-to-Market Program
I’ve worked with the Go-to-Market team who helps teams in releasing mobile apps in the App Store to establish a process involving UI/UX Design Review step it reaches the production.
Prioritize What to Design
Although everything can be very important, but, in order to come up with Mobile Styleguide in 3 weeks, we need to work on phases. We realize that all teams will need app icons, splash screens and basic standards on UI design, so, we put these at the top of our list and release it as the 1.0 version. Go-to-Market Program’s high-level information was also part of the first release of the guide including the introduction of our Mobile team.
Next Version
After working on the most common components of the Mobile app, we focused next on other components of the app.
TYPOGRAPHY
Worked closely with Development and Brand to ensure that Roboto can be use in iOS and Android in terms of implementation.
PREFERENCES
Footer in the Preferences will be one of the must-haves when creating a Dell mobile app to contain the Dell logo, Copyright, Terms and Privacy Policy information.
ICONOGRAPHY
Mono line icon has been decided as the company’s official icon style. Worked with designers across Dell organization to ensure that this visual treatment will work on various platforms.
OTHER COMPONENTS
Evangelize the New Mobile Design Standards
Propagate the Standards
Upon completion of the latest version of Mobile UX Guide, I had shared it to the entire Mobile team including Developers, Product Managers, and executive teams. Also, I had spoken at brown bag sessions all across various Marketing teams, other UX teams and design communities within the organization globally.
Conclusion
We don’t want to be prescriptive and we don’t want to impose on how to design each components. These are a few guidelines to get started on designing a Dell mobile user interface.
Mobile Standards are now established
We are now seeing more consistency with the Brand and definitely Dell mobile apps are now establishing its own brand identity.
Next Steps
Until today, my team is continuing to grow the Mobile UX Guide.
Expand more on designing the patterns
Create a Website to host the Mobile UX Guide
Make all design assets easily downloadable by external designers/agencies