In record time, our smartphones have become indispensable, and as mobile technology has become integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, our smartphones are shifting from device to dependency. But while it’s now clear that we are locked in an intense relationship with our smartphones, one has to wonder why this courtship hasn’t turned into a love triangle with tablets. What is it about our smartphones that makes them so attractive? And why is the addiction we feel toward them so much stronger than to our tablets?
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Building persuasive user experiences is like a relationship and you need to treat it like one. So, what do you want? A one-night stand or a lasting partnership? There are three common challenges when engaging users with a product: Sign-up challenge: seducing your users, first-time use challenge: falling in love with your product, and ongoing engagement challenge: staying in love. Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. We will examine the three stages of a user relationship and what tools are appropriate to use for each challenge. This article is a summary of Anders’ talk on designing with persuasive patterns at the Push Conference 2015.
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In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will review the platforms available today, what you can do on each of them, how to plan the architecture, and how to develop apps or companion services for these new devices.
Do you remember the shoe phone from Get Smart? The shoe phone you saw on TV was followed by many other wearable devices on TV. Many years later, we can say that wearable devices are here and ready to use. We, as designers and developers, need to be ready to develop successful experiences for them. Today, Maximiliano will cover the most important platforms ready to support our content and services, what we can do on them and where to start in terms of languages, SDKs and emulators.
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In this article, Denys Mishunov aims to provide you with the reasons and theories for why things function in certain way. He will use examples that are observable in the offline world and, using principles of psychology, research and analysis in psychophysics and neuroscience, he will try to answer some “Why?” questions. Denys will also cover psychological aspects of some practical cases, like performance optimization of an existing project, how to deal with the better performance of a competitor’s website and how to make users barely notice any waiting for your services.
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Your app has become another victim of the latest trend, joining a whopping 41% of today’s apps that are abandoned after only a single use. The most impressive warship of the day, Vasa floundered and sank just one mile into its maiden voyage due to fundamental design issues. In this article, Greg Nudelman will explore how the lessons from the Vasa ship can help you keep your mobile project from sinking right out of the port. Before you begin, put your vision in place as a storyboard. Take the time to test it with potential customers and stakeholders — ensure that they are as enthusiastic about your idea as you are.
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Mmost products contain at least one element of anticipation. Aaron Shapiro from HUGE defined anticipatory design as a method where it’s up to the designer to simplify processes as much as possible for users, minimizing difficulty by making decisions on their behalf. Look at the examples in this article, and consider the checklist to spot opportunities for improvement in your current user experience. If you are starting out from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to embed these principles from the outset.
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So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays. In this article, Christian Holst will explore how e-commerce designers could use responsive upscaling to craft a tailored experience for users with big screens. He’ll cover one core principle, along with 11 ideas for upscaling different parts of the e-commerce experience to deal with the various usability challenges observed during our e-commerce usability studies.
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As designers on the web, we have a responsibility to create things that empower kids and make them smarter, not the opposite. In this article Trine Falbe will give you some insights about what kids are like from the psychological point of view, and how this affects the way they use the web. She’ll also cover practical design guidelines to create better web stuff for kids. We should be the ones who make sure that the kinds of things that go on in apps like Talking Tom and The Smurfs’ Village don’t become the norm. Designing with respect should be our norm.
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Research should always influence our work. Not every project has a content strategist, but that’s no excuse for copywriters to write blindly. If you have the opportunity, seek out a content strategist or a user researcher; if research has already been conducted, they’ll be happy to walk you through it, and if it hasn’t, then now is the time to get involved. Even just one or two of these research processes and tools will help you learn a great deal about your users, and ultimately it will improve your final content.
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All too often we forget that applications are built by real people with opinions, ideals and fears. When a whole company is formed around a single product that’s about to get relaunched, there’s a lot of tension — after all, these people rely on that product’s success for their own financial security. This is the story of redesigning the UX for a popular calendar tool on Android: Business Calendar. Günther Beyer & Nino Rapin are sharing this story because everyone’s standing on the shoulders of giants and this is their small contribution to better information design thinking. They hope they’ve learned enough in this project to make you a little smarter, so that you can make us smarter in turn. Thank you.
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