Day 79 - Five Mobile Conditions for Social Apps

It's a cliche at this point but astounding mobile growth continues.  What's different about building social apps on mobile than it was on the desktop.

1. Smartphone apps can access your address book, bypassing the need to build your social graph on a new service.
2. They can access your local photo library, uploading your photos to different websites is a nusance.
3. They can use push notifications rather than emails. The millennial generation generally don't use email.
4. Smartphones provide geo-location.
5. Crucially, they get an icon on the home screen.

Day 69 - 5 Mobile Design Tips We Sometimes Forget

1. Lead the user toward the next step.
2. Match your interactions to your platform.
3. Use clear and simple icons.
4. Less is more.
5. Not everyone speaks English; remember your international users and see number 3 above!

Day 38 - 10 Mobile Interaction Design Tips

Taking complexity and making it easy is hard. Focus, iteration, testing, and polish is required for good app design. Keep these mobile tips in mind when designing an app.

1. Stay focused on the goal.
2. Start with sketching, not a computer. It's not about drawing it's about design.
3. Match the interactions and affordances to your platform. Pay attention to developer design guides, conventions, and patterns.
4. Less is more so keep it simple. Limit and consolidate the number of elements for a clean design.
5. Provide the user with cues and meaningful feedback about their interaction whether the user makes mistakes or not.
6. Create hints for users so you can lead them through a design.
7. Build a visual and approachable hierarchy.
8. Sliders should convey movement or progress.
9. Remember to consider international users. Great icons don't require text. Just be careful of cultural bias.
10. Empower your user with mobile interfaces that accommodate to their skills.  Your app should adapt with a learning process progression so that users can do things faster once they understand the basics. Let go of the hand holding and give them shortcuts so that the app alters itself to a user's comfortable experience.

Take notice of some of the best mobile interactions you've experienced as wells as the poor ones.  Think about the apps you interact with daily on your device and how you engage with them.  As a writing exercise list them out.

Day 30 - Mobile Basics: Voice Recognition

Speech recognition uses your voice commands to interact with applications. It converts spoken words to text, allows you to perform searches, send messages, set reminders, interact with maps, dictate orders, etc.

Although voice recognition technologies have been around for many years the technologies have a long way to go before they truly recognize natural conversation.

Things to consider when designing for speech interactions and touchless operations:

1. The voice persona.
2. Provide immediate feedback for every speech input.
3. Is active voice vs. passive voice preferable.
4. Is voice support absolutely necessary.
5. Will voice be used for both input and output.
6. Environmental barriers e.g. people around you listening in to your voice commands, privacy concerns.
7. Error rates in speech recognition can lead to abandonment of the product.
8. Avoid modes, but allow users to quickly turn speech recognition on/off or easily switch to other ways of interaction.
9. Use speech when the user's eyes and hands are busy.
10. Developing the right voice interactions can make the user experience more human.

Technologies such as Apple's Siri, "Ok Google", and Microsoft Cortana open up a world of interaction possibilities.  What are some ways you use voice interactions?

Day 28 - Mobile Basics: Gyroscope

The gyroscope is a hardware sensor in your phone and tablet that gives you the changes in any rotation orientation of the device.  It rotates around gravity.

Used with other hardware features like the accelerometer, magnetometers, and compass, the gyroscope can be used for augmented reality apps, gaming, and navigation systems to name a few examples.

An example of an app that uses a gyroscope is a constellation app whereby the user simply points their device to any part of the sky to identify constellations, stars, and planets.

When designing for mobile, don't just think in terms of a flat space on a 2d screen. Think about 3d space, the environment a user is in, the context of the problem you're solving, and how the mobile device hardware can be used in your designs.

What sort of applications would you design that take advantage of a phone's gyroscope?

Day 24 - Mobile UX Tips to Improve Usability

Follow these mobile design tips to improve usability for your mobile customers.

1. Innovate but don't reinvent the wheel.  Use mobile design patterns and models.
2. Keep context in mind. Mobile users are on the go.
3. Design for the immediacy of now.
4. Don't let interruptions get in the way of user experience. Make the app easy to disengage and easy for people to pick up where they left off.
5. Align with device conventions so as to not create confusion, e.g. don't user iPhone controls if the app is running on an Android device and vice-versa.
6. Ensure that your designs are tap and finger friendly.
7. Break larger tasks into smaller ones so that you don't overload the user.
8. Use in app analytics such as Google Analytics or Flurry to measure and improve the experience.

What are some other best practices?  List them out or add them in the comments below.

Day 21 - Mobile Device Fragmentation

There's dozens and dozens of smartphone and tablet manufacturers which means device diversity with large numbers of different screen sizes, densities, and resolutions.  We need to develop a basic understanding and be aware of this when designing for mobile.  Designing for the wide variety of sizes and densities can be challenging.

When designing for mobile:

1. UI needs to be able to adapt to those different devices.
2. Know the difference between responsive design, mobile web, native apps, hybrid apps.
3. Don't think that a smartphone screen is a small desktop screen. They are different experiences.
4. Understand the basic leading target platforms Apple's iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
5. Understand why you are choosing one platform over another.
6. Understand the context of how your mobile app will be used by your target user.
7. Plan early so as to minimize the amount of time and effort required for your platform/s.
8. Have a basic understanding of the phone's built-in hardware capabilities that can enhance the experience.
9. Pay attention to device density and documentation.

Take a look at ScreenSiz.es
It's a screen size chart of common mobile devices sortable by device name, operating system, screen size, resolution, pixels per inch, density, and popularity.