When users start to get to grips with your mobile app, they will need a little help from time to time. The good news is that standard design patterns can reduce design time for help in mobile apps. Here are some practical guidelines that you can use to improve the UX of help in general.You should no
We live in a world of distractions, and so do your users. Hence, your designs must factor in users’ contexts and behaviors amid distractions. Let’s look at a simple, yet effective test to evaluate how quickly and easily users can complete their tasks: the “one thumb, one eyeball” test. Luke Wro
We all enjoy a good story even if what we define as a “good story” differs significantly from person to person. If we can tell stories, we can get our message across more clearly and in a more engaging manner, but what constitutes a natural storyteller? You’ll be surprised to find out the answer. On
There’s nothing more annoying than when things don’t function the way we expect them to. When users interact with a UI, they make sense of its elements in relation to the “real world”—think of the trash can icon or a button: in essence, they look like their physical world counterparts. Cognitive fri
User experience is essential; we know that as UX professionals, but how do we communicate the benefits to those who pay for our services? The easiest way is to develop metrics that can indicate that our work benefits the organization we work for. So, what kinds of metrics might we want to use? We’ll
Discoverability sometimes also referred to as “learnability” is the ease at which users can find new features or functions with an app and learn to use the things that they find. While this has always been an important part of user experience design – it becomes even more important in the mobile des
Discoverability is not a new concept for web designers. In fact Search Engine Optimization and various forms of Search Engine Marketing arose from the need to make websites easy to discover by users. In the mobile application space this issue of discoverability is becoming ever more important – with
Fun is the key to how games work, and it’s the key to making gamification work, too. Without fun, gamification is simply another feature of a system or product – with fun, your product or system becomes much more enjoyable to use.There are several criteria which need to be met in order for a game to
The classical Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) made many groundbreaking discoveries about the way people interact, masterfully breaking down a phenomenon such as public speaking into its constituent parts. Aside from his famous three appeals (logos, pathos, and ethos—the fundaments of an
Determining the nature and properties of trust at first may seem pointless because it is so much a part of the human condition. Although we can define it as “a strong belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of a person or thing”, we know that trust is a deep concept. We tend to feel i
In order to understand “the moment of truth”; it’s important to understand the customer lifecycle with a brand or product. There are many moments at which a customer (or potential customer or former customer) will interact with a brand.A moment of truth is simply any interaction during which a custo
Let’s look at a story from a Manhattan restaurant to understand the relevance of what Google calls “micro-moments.” Context awareness and the ability to identify micro-moments help us deliver the best user experiences. Here, you’ll learn how to design for those micro-moments.Mobile devices have chan
In mobile user experience (UX) design, it’s important that we respect a user’s task and mindset, as well as the device’s limitations. Here you’ll learn about the general principles that can help you get started with your design.Josh Clark, the author of Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps, descri
Design is hard work and focusing on solving user and customer problems is the crux of that work. If you can find a tool that keeps that focus whilst eliminating some of the hard work then it’s clearly advantageous to use that tool. That’s where design patterns come in. They save designers from havin
Before we dive into design approaches for mobile, you need to understand the context of mobile users and their unique characteristics. That means you need to know when, why, and under what conditions and constraints users interact with your app or mobile content. If you, therefore, understand the bi
Responsive Design allows people to access content across multiple device resolutions. As more people interact with websites through mobile devices, users now expect websites to be responsive. Here we’ll look at the main principles of responsive design and how it supports accessibility and device-swi
It can be easy to get bogged down in developing features when we get into user experience design. It’s not that features aren’t important but that they are often secondary to the reason a customer or user buys our product. That reason is simple; the user buys the product to solve a real world proble
“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”—Nelson MandelaEducation truly is our most powerful tool, and that’s why it’s so important to celebrate World Teachers’ Day. Teachers facilitate learning, spread knowledge and push us to be curious and excel—they deserve t
Content design strategies are usually, though not always, based around enabling websites to convert visitors into customers. There are a million ways to develop kicking content and there’s no tried and tested formula that you can use to get yours right. However, there are some UX principles that may
There’s a trend which takes the use of products from companies such as Adobe and Microsoft from single-purchase goods owned by the consumer to monthly subscriptions. Unlike most dark patterns, this one does not trick users into agreeing with a system of recurring payments, but simply encourages them
