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Designing for the iPhone

By Tom Radburn - Studio Manager

In today’s rapidly changing web design world, the need to assess how the end-user of your design can access the information in front of them is becoming more important than good aesthetics.

For example, with the increasing number of Apple iPhones in the world (not least the AlphaQuad offices), should graphic design teams already be considering the iPhone when designing for the web?

With iPhone sales approaching 5 million, it seems there may now be a need to change the way web sites are designed in order to maximise their functionality on the hand-held media.

In August of 2008 alone, the iPhone accounted for one in every 333 web page hits.  Taken in context, for a technology in its infancy, that’s pretty impressive.

The iPhone can show you the entire web page at a glance, and the Apple technology allows the user to zoom in to make the text they’re interested in readable. In that sense, and from testing the iPhone on its browser Safari, web designers shouldn’t really have to do anything special to create a web page that will work on it.

However, there are some issues that, thanks to the iPhone, online graphic designers may need to account for in their future web designs:  

On the iPhone, you ‘click’ on elements with your finger instead of with a
mouse. Links and buttons may need to be bigger to accommodate this -
capturing the call-to-action response without frustrating the user.

You have to scroll around a page more so than on a large desktop PC
screen. Ideally, you may have to design for a minimal amount of scrolling
when viewing PC-designed sites on the iPhone.

On the iPhone, typing is more ‘fiddly’ than on a desktop computer, and you can’t copy or paste. You may therefore have to design forms with more
selectable fields, rather than actual text input.

With no access to Flash or Java on the iPhone, the key is to keep things
simple – aim for full functionality and a positive user experience.

When considering typography, don’t assume that your full array of favoured fonts will be available on
mobile technology.

Sites such as Amazon and Facebook already have versions of their web site optimized for mobile media. Even so, mobile brands all tend to display the material differently, making the job a balancing act for designers. The need for compromise will remain until there is standard browsing technology across the board – certainly Apple have now set the benchmark.

iPhone design in practice

Below is a mocked-up redesign of AlphaQuad’s ‘About Organics’ site, illustrating how it may look optimised for the iPhone.

http://www.aboutorganics.co.uk/

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