3 Quick Tips to Boost Mobile User Experience
(This post was jointly written by Merav Cohen and Gal Ofel)
Mobile applications are at the core of most internet strategies. Internet, SaaS and e-Commerce businesses depend on mobile apps to reach their business goals, whether they are constantly looking to increase retention rates, reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) and increase monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and lifetime value (LTV).
Standard and Innovative
Three simple rules will let you stay on top of your app users and focus on optimizing your business goals. We believe an innovative user experience approach tightly combined with standard and common user flow would work best.
Tip 1 – The Single Hand Rule
Put yourself in the place of your users. When are they using your application? Are they doing other things at the same time? Are they at home, school or walking in the street? Are their hands free? Are they holding and operating other objects?
I can think about myself taking the train to work. In one hand holding the handle and with my other hand the smartphone trying to check at what time I will reach my destination or quickly cleaning my email inbox.
There are many other examples involving a quick look and action: account balance, money transfer, like, share, accept and reject, find movie or TV series and watch.
This is quite different than designing, developing and testing the application in your office while sitting at a desk.
Now, envision your app on the smartphone while holding the device in one hand. Does it work? Are all major actions within finger reach? Can the user complete the actions that are important for you to achieve your business goals?
Mobile Phone Interaction
According to recent usability studies, most people are touching their screen only by using one hand:
Pinterest got it right
Hold your finger on the screen and the Pin menu will appear. Drag your hand to the desired action.
Want to be cool, redesign your app
Pie menu (or radial menu) provides users with a choice of three to eight options. Keep the menu as simple and clear as possible. It should offer relevant choices to the user at the point of decision and increase conversion rates.
Draw an invisible circle at the center – center bottom of the screen:
Put the main actions around it:
Fewer as possible options are better:
Position in the center of the circle the entity to take an action on: person, post, location:
Now experiment and measure
You need to measure your application events, compare them to each previous design and then again and again until you’re satisfied. Are you getting more actions from your app? What is the most popular action? It is related to its location on the pie menu?
Improve: add/remove items from this dialogue and/or change the location of buttons, change the flow: dialogue always on, appears on context, appears on touch.
Notes
First, your app may not require the single hand approach. It may be a business application used to enter customer information while meeting a customer. In this case your app is fine.
Second, you may add another UI layer to your app. This will boost the experience of your app without changing the existing layout and functionality.
Tip 2 – Android Versus iOS
Android and Apple devices differ in their hardware user interface. This dramatically affects the software (or application) experience.
Simple rules will improve the user experience on each platform making it standard and will avoid misunderstanding and time wasted by the users.
No phone Menu button on Android
Avoid using the menu button on Android devices. Having the menu part of your application will motivate the users to click on it. This way your application will have a standard flow on any platform: Android smartphones, Apple devices and Android tablets missing the menu physical button. Also, the menu may appear / disappear based on your application context.
Don’t get confused. We love the menu button. It’s the second best to the back button on Android. The button is best used for the phone operations: settings, phone, messaging. In developers native apps we prefer having the menu within the app UI.
Back button on iOS
Android users know that one of the most popular actions on their device is the back button. It’s simple and it’s there. No need for special gestures or home, scroll and such.
Add a back button to your application for Apple devices. Your users will love it.
iOS and Android developers: make sure that using the back button (application object or device button) works perfectly. The user expects to go back to the previous screen, not the app home screen or the beginning of a wizard for example. In many apps this doesn’t work well.
Tip 3 – Be Standard, Don’t try to be Unique
Help your users take actions that will let you achieve business goals. This doesn’t happen with non-standard dialogues, flows and texts.
Rule of thumb: check the Facebook and Chrome applications. Whatever works for both would probably be accepted as the de facto standard by users (except for the menu button :-) ).
Example: Refresh
You need a refresh function to your app content? Do what’s standard: hold and drag down. It’s simple and clear. (We’d love to have it on the great LinkedIn native app as well).
Example: Search, Navigation Field
Locate it at the top of the screen with standard search icon. The users will know the rest.
#BestAdvice #Technology #UserExperience #UX #Innovation #CustomerExperience
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