Design Principles

Focus on benefits to users, not technical features

Provide an efficient and balanced set of features to your app.
When considering features, always weigh what could be gained in terms of user benefits with the added complexity that will be brought to your app.
Start with only the essential set of features and add features only until you reach the sweet spot that provides the optimal user experience, and no more.

Streamline your design to support key use cases.
Common tasks should be accomplished with the minimum number of steps. If you can make the most common functions accessible by just one touch or one tap, users will love your app.
Consider how users will hold the device--important actions should be visible and easy to reach while holding the device comfortably. See the guidance on Laying Out Content and Controls.
Design your app layouts to minimize clutter--focus attention around the key activities and objects and place less frequent or important activities a tap away.

Build upon established and familiar interaction patterns to make your app feel natural and intuitive.
Use the built-in webOS UI components and follow these design guidelines wherever possible.
Using familiar components and patterns gives your app an instant sense of familiarity and usability.

Once you have ensured that key interactions are highly accessible and easy to use, layer in shortcuts to allow more experienced users ways to more quickly accomplish common tasks.
Adding these shortcuts should not be at the expense of creating visual clutter, nor should shortcuts be the primary or only way to accomplish a task.
Rather, these shortcuts should become discoverable in time and provide a pleasant surprise to users as they gain experience with your app.

Designing for a tablet form factor is not simply an exercise in scaling a phone app to a larger screen, but is instead a bona fide new form of design, with its own particular contexts of use, ergonomics, and design considerations, which should be borne in mind when designing an app on the tablet.
Tablet apps should generally provide a larger-scale experience than on phones. A user should not have to rely on a separate device, such as a PC, to complete tasks.
The following page highlights other key differences in designing for phones and designing for tablets.