Taking your app to a new platform requires that you adapt to your users’ expectations and needs in that new medium. When moving from desktop web to mobile interfaces, developers have had to rethink interaction design to work around a constrained screen size, a new set of input gestures and unreliable network connections.
In this article, Bear Douglas and Sara Culver will walk you through their extended UX guide which will let you design a good experience end to end, but here, they’ll focus on identifying basic assumptions about users, considering UI aspects that are specific to messaging platforms, and writing app text for conversation.
Read more…
Vitaly Friedman has spent a lot of time working with various companies trying out various approaches and studying them in usability tests. This series of articles is a summary of observations and experiments made throughout that time. He’ll be exploring everything from carousels to car configurators. Let’s look into the design of date and time pickers today. With a date picker you can combine day, month and year into one input field, add a fancy calendar icon, and prompt a calendar overlay that exposes the main purpose of the calendar prominently. In fact, there are plenty of contexts in which date pickers matter! Let’s find out.
Read more…
IoT is a vast topic, and there are many ways to approach it. In this article, Svetlin Denkov will introduce readers of different backgrounds to prototyping IoT experiences with minimum code knowledge. This article assumes you are using a Mac, but much of the content carries over to Windows systems as well. For the coding sections, he will be using Arduino’s integrated development environment (IDE) and the C/C++ programming language. There are different ways to get to the same result, so pick the board and programming language that you are most familiar with. There is a lot of ground to cover, so let’s jump right in!
Read more…
This two-article series will introduce readers of different backgrounds to prototyping IoT experiences with minimum code knowledge, starting with affordable proof of concept platforms, before moving to costly commercial offerings. Stay tuned! In this first article, Svetlin Denkov will identify the problem, the criteria for selecting hardware and, finally, show you a step-by-step guide on how to put together all of the hardware components into a working rig.
Read more…
While functional aspect of a design is key to product success, aesthetics and visual details are equally important — particularly how they can improve those functional elements. Shadows and blur effects provide visual cues that allow users to better and more easily understand what is occurring. When carefully applied, such elements can (and should) improve a functional aspect of design. In today’s article, Nick Babich will explain how visual elements, such as shadows and blur effects, can improve the functional elements of a design.
Read more…
Taking your first steps into VR as a UX or UI designer can be daunting. VR experiences range from the mundane to the wondrous, their complexity and utility varying greatly. In this article, Sam Applebee & Alex Deruette will share a process for designing VR apps that they hope you’ll use to start designing for VR yourself. You don’t need to be an expert in VR; you just need to be willing to apply your skills to a new domain. They’re building a rocketship, a joint effort by designers around the globe to boldly go where no designer has gone before. The sooner that producing VR apps make sense for companies, the sooner the whole ecosystem will blow up.
Read more…
While an instant response from an app is the best, there are times when your app won’t be able to comply with the guidelines for speed. A slow response could be caused by a bad internet connection, or an operation itself can take a long time. For such cases, in order to minimize user tension, you must reassure users that the app is working on their request and that actual progress is being made. A wait-animation progress indicator is the most common form of providing a system status for users when something is happening or loading. It’s important to provide feedback to the user about what is happening with the app within a reasonable amount of time.
Read more…
After being surprised to see how little the topic of optimistic UI design is addressed in the community, Denys Mishunov brings you this article, where you will find out what concepts it is based on, and he will look at some examples as well as review its psychological background. After that, Denys will review the concerns and main points regarding how to maintain control over this UX technique.
Read more…
Are gestures a powerful mode of interaction? The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices has dramatically changed the way we think about interaction. Gestures are more than merely entertaining, they are very useful and feel familiar. Today, the success of a mobile app significantly depends on how well gestures are implemented into the user experience. There’s no way to design a mobile app without thinking about gestures. They should serve as facilitators and time savers. In order to design a meaningful gesture you should tie it to an action and allow the gesture to stand with the action.
Read more…
With the tools getting more user-friendly and affordable, virtual reality (VR) development is easier to get involved in than ever before. Our team at Clearbridge Mobile recently jumped on the opportunity to develop immersive VR content for the Samsung Gear VR, using Samsung’s 360 camera.
Read more…
