Most companies approach standards from a branding perspective. Some may even approach them from an interface design perspective. But there’s more to creating standards, especially for mobile devices. . Mobile platforms differ from traditional computing, for which you can make certain assumptions about the work being performed and the people performing it. And modern mobile devices are different from the phones of the past with T-9 typing and text-based layouts that limited the breadth and variety of interactions you could design.

Mobile is amazingly versatile, and design for mobile is about the culture of your audience, the tasks they are trying to complete, and the context in which they are completing them. Design for mobile and therefore mobile standards need to be approached from a human perspective. The primary purpose of mobile standards is the same as if they were created for a more traditional interface. From a business perspective, they are created for two reasons:

  • Standards save time and money by avoiding duplication of effort by developers and designers across projects and interfaces.
  • Standards enable the creation of interfaces that are efficient and familiar to users, thereby increasing usability and decreasing the learning curve.

These two benefits should be fulfilled in any guidelines documentation. But with the advent of standardization of mobile interfaces, there are so many other ways guidelines can be expanded to serve the audiences they affect: the developers and designers who implement solutions based on the standards, and the end-users of the products being created.

Read the rest of the article:  Raising the Bar for Mobile Standards @ UX Magazine.