interface

Knowing What Is Augmented Reality and Its Implementations

Posted on by Mario

Knowing-What-Is-Augmented-Reality-and-Its-Implementation

Augmented reality is a new digital phenomenon that changes the environment around you into a digital interface. It places virtual objects in the real world and in real-time. Therefore, it provides the power of learning and technology together.

Nowadays, you can experience augmented reality through a wide variety of activities. This is because AR aims to simplify human’s lives by combining virtual information to surroundings view of real environment. The usage of AR is limited for Mobile. Although, it also works on some desktop browsers but it doesn’t produce the same experience as a smartphone did. That is why this area is mostly developed by mobile apps developers.

In general, there are 3 main categories of augmented reality (AR) that you can distinguish:

Augmented Reality 3D viewers
This type of AR allows users to locate life-size 3D models in your environment with or without the use of trackers. Trackers are better known as simple images that 3D models can be applied to in Augmented Reality.

Augmented Reality Browsers
This AR’s type will enhance your camera display with contextual information. Hence, you can display any history or estimated value of one building only by pointing your smartphone at it.

Augmented Reality for Gaming
The last and maybe the most popular way to experience Augmented Reality is through gaming. Have you ever heard or played Pokémon? This game utilizes your actual surroundings and has become very popular because of it.

All of these 3 categories have been applied to many fields of lives. Hence, in this article, we would like to broaden your knowledge about the implementation of AR. Below are some of the good examples of AR that you can learn for:

Augmented Car Finder
If you often forget where you park your car, augmented car finder can be a good idea for you. Augmented Car Finder will help you identify location of your vehicle in a maze of parking lots. The apps will show a marker where your car is parked; it also shows the distance between you and your car’s location. Moreover, it will guide you to reach your car area.

Layar
With Layar, you can connect digital content with the real world. There are many more advantages that you can get through Layar. For instance, magazines come alive with videos right on the page, easily buy items with direct mobile shopping links, connect with links to web content and share items on social  media, and browse and view thousands of Geo Layers to find stuff nearby, like ATMs, restaurants, historical locations.

EyeDecide AR app
AR implementations are also developed in healthcare industry. One of them is EyeDecide AR app. EyeDecide AR app is created to provide patient-engagement tools for healthcare providers. Developers can use the camera to simulate the vision of a patient. Here are some basic features of this app:

  1. Leverage interactive anatomical models to enhance patient understanding.
  2. Effectively educate patients by comparing normal and abnormal images and using 3D animation videos of most common conditions.
  3. Improve patient and surgical retention by helping patients make more informed decision about the care.

 

Guidelines to Avoiding Google’s Penalty Caused by Intrusive Interstitials

Posted on by Mario

Intrusive interstitials guidelines to avoiding google's penalty

This year, Google has made one recent change known as the intrusive interstitial update. This update aims to penalize intrusive popup ads which affect the mobile user experience. No wonder that some websites have experienced lowered mobile rankings. If you are working in SEO service field, this thing may become one of your concerns. But, don’t worry as you can avoid Google’s penalty caused by intrusive interstitials. Figure out the solutions in the passages below.

Decrypting the Intrusive Interstitial Update
First of all, it’s a mobile popup penalty.  Secondly, it’s an intrusive popup penalty. In light of this, Google wants to make sure that ads and popups do not interfere with the user experience. By devaluing pages with popups and overlays on the screen, Google can help users access the content they’ve requested in the first place.

What is the Impact of this Latest Update?
Pages with intrusive interstitials will no longer consider as being mobile-friendly. This is because obstructing content on mobile with ads or other popups is against Google’s guidelines. Ads or popups on screen causes the content inaccessible for a few seconds. In fact, Ads displayed over content are no longer acceptable on mobile. This includes popups that appear when you load the page from Google or when you scroll down.

What Constitutes an Intrusive Interstitial?
Intrusive interstitials will lead to a frustrating experience for desktop and mobile users alike. In fact, it tends to block most or all of a page. This will hinder visitors from experiencing your site as they block the content that visitors seek unexpectedly. In light of this, intrusive interstitials has become the biggest enemy as on desktop they are annoying at best and can ruin the entire experience on mobile.

What is still Permitted and not?
Even though, you have to deal with pop ups ads, but this doesn’t mean that all pop ups are forbidden. In fact, some popups are still permitted, such as:

  • Intrusive popups are still ok on desktop
  • Interstitials triggered by exit intent are still allowed
  • Page to page interstitials will not be penalized

Types of intrusive interstitials that will be forbidden are:

  • a popup or modal window that blocks most or all of the content on a page (this is basically a full-screen interstitial above the header);
  • a standalone interstitial that’s not responsive and that blocks the content;
  • a layout in which the content above the fold has the look and feel of an interstitial and requires dismissal or scrolling in order for the user to reach the main content beneath the fold.

Workarounds
Popups is frustrating indeed, but companies use them as at some points they are effective. So, if interstitials still become the best options to convert users for your websites. You can consider keeping them on the website by a no-index tag in your code. However, this will cut off organic traffic from Google to that page.

Therefore, designers, developers and marketers must create another ways to generate revenue. A sound strategy would be to leverage content marketing to educate audiences and guide them through the buying process. In the other words, you should move away from interruption marketing towards permission marketing.

So, the solutions that you can do related to this situation are; audit your popups, cookie notifications, overlays and big banners. This is to make sure that they comply with Google’s new guidelines. Furthermore, make sure that don’t take up space more than 15% from the screen to avoid penalty.

Is Ghost Button an effective UX design?

Posted on by Mario

is-ghost-button-an-effective-ux-design

Ghost button may be one of the most used buttons that reached its peak around a year ago. But, this button is still popular to this day; you can find them across a wide range of websites. This type of button is usually used on minimalist or flat design.

If you are web designers, ghost buttons can be a good choice for creating an attractive design perspective. Their subtle design can give prominence to other design elements on the page. Moreover, it is also a good choice if you want to work well with responsive websites.

However, this makes it hard for people to see if their contrast with the background image is poor. Moreover, some people find it is difficult to spot the button, as they can be too subtle sometimes.

The Pros of Ghost Buttons

In the right context, ghost buttons will give a great look; they can give an elegant, subtle feel to a design. As a result, your pages will appear more minimal and lighter. Moreover, they can give you a deep visual hierarchy of a design when you can use them well. On the other hand, they will highlight an order of importance when you have more than one CTA on a page. This will give a more subtle effect to a secondary CTA.

The Cons of Ghost Buttons

While providing lots of benefits, in the other hand ghost buttons also bring some issues for users that affect in important page elements being overlooked. This has made Ghost buttons become a very questionable design decision since it often suffers from usability and accessibility issues. Based on the data available, it was clear that the ghost buttons were harder to spot during the tests.

Conclusion

Considering what impact you’d like your CTA to have is important. Only by this, you can decide which type to use. Even though, some experiments have shown that Ghost button grab less attention than solid CTAs. However, for some people Ghost button is still a ‘visually pleasing’ design.