I’ve developed a systematic methodology to design a mobile app test suite and offer an online course that teaches this methodology. http://www.udemy.com/how-to-test-mobile-apps/
The course assumes manual testing, but is completely applicable to testing with any automated tool. Click here to view the course notes, which incude a list of specific design techniques and some background info.
The key ideas of this methodology are:
It is of course useful to automate test cases and to do good design in the first place, so that an app is usable, attractive, and useful. However, automation in itself is not enough, especially if it only automates “happy paths”. And, even the “coolest” design will not matter if the app crashes, hangs the device, or generates garbage.