Tablets Need UX Love Too

Good UX Means Good Business

In a world where technology is rapidly advancing and user expectations are rising, it’s no longer enough to have an average user experience; to delight your users and surpass your competition you must strive for the exceptional.

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Now that the newest Android tablets (Motorola XOOM and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) have come close to matching Apple’s iPad in terms of fit and functionality, I expect the demand for Android tablets to show a marked increase in sales.  There has been a considerable amount of material written around Android smartphone  User Experience (UX) designs and how to deal with the many shapes and sizes that they come in.  However, the Android development community and UX design experts creating the wireframes and mockups that we developers work from have been slow on providing material on how a particular application would look and function on a tablet.  I was reading some material on tablet design considerations and the author made the statement that I thought was relevant in that the “Android tablet is not a giant phone”  He went on to state that a developer should not be simply reusing the Android phone layouts for large and extra-large resources files. A mobile development project that plans to include tablets as a deliverable need to take into account additional UX considerations (this is where iPad developers have a leg up due to a year’s head start of experience) when creating the tablet application and not rely on the developers to just “supersize” the smartphone app.