Development of interface templates and design of guidelines for touch gestures for smartphone applications

Abstract:

This report is a documentation of a Master thesis conducted at KTH in 2012 on behalf of Microsoft Sweden. The purpose of this project was to design interface templates for three different application types for Windows Phone: a RSS-reader, a school application and a news application and to provide guidelines for touch gestures. Windows Phone is a relatively new operating system and the competition on the market is tough, which is why these interface templates will become a tool that facilitates and speeds up the work of the application developers. The templates will be available for the developers to download after the completion of this project.In order to design a strategy and to form an understanding of the task, early studies of user-centered design, C# programming and the structure of Windows Phone were conducted.A user-centered approach was used throughout the project which is why the development of the templates started with a survey in order to find out about the users habits and needs. This resulted in a number of concept sketches containing the functions that were pointed out in the survey. With this as a base a tactility test was created and conducted to clarify which touch gestures that were optimal to control the functions. Based on the concept sketches three prototypes were created with the help of Microsoft Sweden. These prototypes were then usability-tested to point out the user obstacles the prototypes possibly contained. With the results of the usability tests the templates were created in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone and Microsoft Expression Blend 4 for Windows Phone.The results of this project are three interface templates that are based on three different application types and a set of guidelines for the use of touch gestures to control the functions found in the templates.