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5 Tips for Ergonomic Mobile Interfaces

Posted on by Mario

mobile user interface

Ergonomics design has been very popular in design world recently. No wonder, every good web designers or graphic designers will absolutely considering the ergonomic design when it comes to mobile design interfaces.  But do you know what ergonomic mobile interface is.  Ergonomics has always been very important to industrial designers, but it’s becoming increasingly important to digital designers since we no longer use a keyboard and a mouse, but we use more physical activities, such as tap, pinch or stroke them.

This new physical activities demand designers to not only think about how a design looks and feels, but also the physical aspects of using it. So, how can we create a mobile design that is comfortable to use as a result of being ergonomic.

  1. Design for Multiple Holds

If you keen enough to observe how people hold their mobile devices, you will discover that they use variety of different holds. Therefore, creating a design with multiple holds in mind is important. For example, you need to test your designs out across a range of holds to see how comfortable your design on each of them.

  1. Design for Thumbs

Thumbs is the most used body parts when it comes to gadget. In fact, thumbs drive the majority of all smartphone interactions. This is because thumbs are exclusively used when a mobile is held in one hand and heavily used when it is held in two hands. Therefore, you should create tag targets which are slightly bigger than your fingers. A good tap targets should at least 44 x 44 points (16x16mm), with at least 7 points (2.5mm) between them. Bigger target is always better rather than the smaller one. However, if you still want to make a smaller target, you better not go any smaller than 44×30 points (16x11mm). This size can be used as a standard in making tap target in any device.

  1. Place Popular Controls in Reach

Locating links and buttons in easy to reach place will ease your user interactions. The middle and bottom is the most favorable place to locate any controls, buttons, or links. Moreover, you should be careful when placing the menus at the bottom corners, since it will easily lead to a tricky tap, especially when a device is being held in only one hand.

  1. Place Content above Controls

To prevent any disruption or halt when you are playing the content as they tap the screen, always try to place content above controls. Moreover, you also need to put key information outside the screen area to avoid any finger or thumb’s disruption.

  1. Design with Portrait Mode in Mind

Although, you can choose either to use smartphones vertically or horizontally for the majority of the time, horizontal is usually used for particular tasks, such as viewing videos or photos. Of course a mobile design should ideally support both vertical and horizontal modes, but unless you are designing a video or photo-heavy site or application, please always design with portrait mode in mind.

The Difference of Customer Experience and User Experience

Posted on by Mario

Customer experience vs user experience what’s the difference

In marketing a product, one should know what it is user experience and customer experience as the wrong understanding about the two of them will lead you to a wrong experience. Even many companies are sometimes confused of being care about users experience and customer. If you are a web developer or mobile app developer, this topic should be understood clearly. Here are some of the ways to define user experience or costumer experience.

Generally, User Experience (UX), deal with people interacting with your product and the experience they receive from that interaction. UX is measured with metrics like: success rate, error rate, abandonment rate, time to complete task, and (since we deal in digital) clicks to completion.

Customer Experience (CX), in contrast, encompasses all the interactions a person has with your brand. It might be measured in: overall experience, likelihood to continue use, and likelihood to recommend to others. In essence, UX is part of a broader CX, but CX contains some aspects outside of a product that UX does not.

So, it is likely that UX is a part of CX as User experience is narrower than customer experience. In fact, CX includes UX, or in other words, UX is a part of CX.

If you create a good UX, it will provide you with:

  • Quickly and easily find information on a website
  • Make a desired task complete easily
  • Easily search web pages

While having a good customer experience will make you:

  • Have a pleasant, professional, helpful interaction with organization/company representatives
  • Feel generally positive about the overall experience with that organization/company and everything associated with it.

From the above explanation, you can realize how UX and CX are actually closely related as if you cannot achieve a good CX without a good UX. So, it will be better if one focuses on CX as it will offer you the overall success to your digital business while failure in one of the area will lead to a bad customer experience.

Android M, the Future of Android from Google I/O Schedule

Posted on by Mario

Mobile development is continuing to be explored, especially for Android. The launch of Android’s newest version always become the most awaited event for its customers each year, no wonder Android has become the most popular mobile OS. After the last version of Android, Android Lollipop (5.0), people encourage to see that we can expect more from Android. Google I/O 2015 has now been scheduled in and they have given us a lots of hint of what’s coming up. One of those is the development of Android M. Wondering what is it and what can it do for you? Here is what we know so far about Android M.

  • Improved Notifications

As there are so many complains about irrelevant notifications, so it seems that the next step of Google is reviewing notifications and to unify them across all platforms. This is intended for creating comfortable eye-seen notification, which only appears when someone needs them, but it is still continuing to be developed as this is not an exact science.  For example, a notification seen on your PC would not appear on your phone or tablet.  It means that the customer really can expect some changes to the way notifications are both displayed and interacted with on Android M.

  • Smart Home

Even though, Android 5.0 Lollipop already has a good focus on creating and consolidating everything that Android has brought us these days, but in the future, adding application such as smart home apps will become one of important features of Android, by providing complete control between your connected devices at home and in the office via Nest or other third-party makers.

  • Android Auto

As it is said in a report from Reuters, Android M will have a significant focus on Google’s Android Auto Software, and it is said that there is a chance that android M may be suitable to be built into upcoming cars as standard without the need to plug in a phone. Moreover, the car-optimized version of Android M will allow you to control all of your vehicles entertainment, messaging and GPS in a standalone format.