Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design
My first mobile phone, a Nokia 5110 (purchased in 1998!), offered very few features: I could call, text or play Snake. What’s more, these interactions were completely controlled by the manufacturer. With the advent of smartphones, touch screens, and “app stores,” however, the opportunities for designers are now innumerable.
Designing for Mobile, Part 2: Interaction Design
My first mobile phone, a Nokia 5110 (purchased in 1998!), offered very few features: I could call, text or play Snake. What’s more, these interactions were completely controlled by the manufacturer. With the advent of smartphones, touch screens, and “app stores,” however, the opportunities for designers are now innumerable. It’s incumbent upon us to familiarize ourselves with the conventions of this still-relatively-new medium.
Wayfinding For The Mobile Web
When designing mobile first, navigation takes a back seat to content, and ruthless editing paves the way for more focused experiences. The pursuit of simplicity, combined with the tight spatial constraints of mobile viewports, often leads us to strip away elements in an attempt to minimize the interface. But the space-saving convenience we gain through clever editing and a compact UI can come at the expense of the very navigational aids our users rely on. To help balance the craving for visual simplicity with the need to keep websites easy to navigate, we can borrow some concepts from the world of wayfinding. This article shows how you can apply these concepts to the mobile web. The Importance Of Wayfinding Link
The Difference Between Information Architecture and UX Design
Information architects form the blueprints of the web Next to explaining what I do for a living, the second question I most frequently hear is: “What’s the difference between Information Architecture and User Experience?” The line always seems to blur between the two, even though there’s clearly a difference. How should I go about explaining it?
Designing for Mobile Part 3: Visual design
As a direct response to platform capabilities, the first mobile sites were an exercise in ‘compromise’ rather than ‘craft’. Today’s more full-featured devices, however, give us the opportunity to create more visually appealing designs that can not only inspire and attract users, but also increase the usability of the experience. However, along with this opportunity there are also new challenges. In Part 1: Information Architecture we explored what makes mobile different from desktop in terms of physicality and specifications; how, where, and when we use mobile devices; and how we behave and feel when using these devices.
Mobile commerce is crucial to your business – even if you don’t realise it: Control Shift
There are still many business owners out there who are under the false impression that smartphones don’t matter much to their business. Yet most of these same businesses regularly take phone orders, bookings, reservations, quotes, customer service or sales calls over the phone, perhaps along with a little cold calling or warm outbound telemarketing. The thing is that in the vast majority of cases, these calls are made from (or to) a smartphone. According to figures published by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) last year, around 25% of Australians no longer have a fixed phone service – they just use their mobile. In total, around 4.4 million Australians are now mobile only – and that figure is likely to be higher now.
Navigating the Mobile Application: 5 UX Design Patterns
Photo credits Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind when designing a mobile application is to make sure it is both useful and intuitive. If the app is not useful, it has no additional value and no one has any reason to use it. If it is useful yet entails a steep learning curve, people won’t bother learning how to use it.
What Can Sending 2 Billion Emails Tell us About Mobile Email Habits?
Editor’s Note: Today’s post was written by the folks at Campaign Monitor. They are excited to share with you their recent findings. The data presented in this post was exclusively mined from their user base. By now, most marketers have come across the statistics supporting the fact that more and more people are opening their email on mobile devices. That comes as no surprise to those of us surgically attached to our phones. The sharp rise in email consumption on mobile devices has had a profound impact on all aspects of email marketing, from subject lines to design.
4 tools that enable small town designers to sell an idea to companies like Coca Cola
“Tools like FROONT, Webflow, Adobe Edge Reflow and Macaw enable small town designers to sell big ideas to Coca Cola. Making advanced web prototypes, which you can show on different devices is pretty simple and it comes across much better than traditional pen and paper - you do not have to imagine anything and by that you save both you and your client time. Show it – don’t tell it.” says designer from Denmark Kasper Friis Jørgensen.
Efficiently Simplifying Navigation, Part 1: Information Architecture
Advertisement Navigation, as crucial as it is to the user experience, is merely a means to an end — the end being to consume content. This is why users have very contrasting expectations about content and navigation. While content is supposed to be unique, surprising and exciting, navigating to it is supposed to be as simple and predictable as possible. This series of articles, divided into two parts, is a four-step guide to efficiently simplifying the navigation experience, by analyzing the type and amount of content as well as choosing and carefully designing the right type of navigation menu. Four Steps To The Ideal Navigation System
The Elements Of The Mobile User Experience
Advertisement Mobile users and mobile usage are growing. With more users doing more on mobile1, the spotlight is on how to improve the individual elements that together create the mobile user experience. The mobile user experience encompasses the user’s perceptions and feelings before, during and after their interaction with your mobile presence — be it through a browser or an app — using a mobile device that could lie anywhere on the continuum from low-end feature phone to high-definition tablet. Creating mobile user experiences that delight users forces us to rethink a lot of what we have taken for granted so far with desktop design.
