Discussion on user education in mobile device Product Design

With the upgrade of mobile phone hardware, the application functions are gradually enriched, and the interaction process is becoming more complex. Therefore, whether a mobile phone application can make users shine, in addition to its successful product architecture design and marketing operations, simple and clear user education has also played a very important role.

What is user education?

It is neither a usage instruction nor a boring user, nor a rigid help document. Instead of interrupting the logic flow of users' thinking in the process of using software, we can supplement the limited mental model of users in some appropriate ways, users can easily and clearly understand how to use deep gestures for control, click a button to change functions, and use function labels to switch scenarios. It is a kind of suggestion to the user's subconscious, making the user more active and more natural in the process of using the product.

So how to design appropriate user education? Next, let's take a look at how existing user education helps their users "fall in love at first sight "!

Road signs direct to user education

Road signs point to user education. They are mostly used to start the interface, and there are multiple touch methods on the interface for users to choose. When user education appears, the arrow must be unique and clear, and the accompanying text must be concise and clear. Allows you to quickly know where to start and why to start using the text instructions corresponding to the arrow. Just like the street signs on the viaduct, the only direction toward the destination makes the user feel happy from the beginning.

As shown in the above three figures, there are many triggers on the Interface: each contact, the bottom tab bar, and Switching tags. For new users, they are easily lost in so many buttons. The road signs point to the emergence of user education, which easily answers users' questions and avoids their frustration caused by incorrect choices.

However, the beauty of roadmap pointing to user education is that although it emphasizes a function, it also weakens other functions. For example, its appearance may cause Partial Functional obstruction and background gray effect. Because of the role of "First Impression" (First Impression), you can easily ignore the blocked functional buttons. Therefore, when there are two important parallel functions that need to be introduced to users, it is not suitable for single-path user education.

In addition, this kind of roadmap user education is also very suitable for the use of a new interactive design to replace the original design. For example, "Sina in the Palm", the original navigation bar design is a horizontal rolling design, instead of the solution is to hide the navigation bar in the top title bar. Therefore, after the release of the new version, it cleverly uses a roadmap to point to user education, avoiding users' questions about "where to navigate.

So how should we design user education when there are multiple features that need to be explained to users at the same time without having to prioritize them? Don't worry. Continue.

Single interface User Education

Single-interface user education refers to displaying all functional instructions on a single interface before you perform actual operations. This design is suitable for mobile apps that require multiple features to work. You can read a page to quickly learn the main UI and function operations.

Although the single interface user education can notify users of more functions at one time, the information entries should be kept within five as much as possible, and the introduction should be as short and associated as possible. There are two reasons for this restriction: first, because of the size limit on the mobile phone screen, we need to consider how to layout the information in the small screen; second, in the short-term memory mental model, the length of external information reception is limited to. The design of 5 pieces of information display allows users to quickly remember and directly perform feedback operations in subsequent operations.

For single-page user education, because multiple pieces of information need to be listed on one page, the layout of information is also very important. Streamlined or ordered information layout can make the display more in line with the logic of users' thinking. The Pulse user education provides user prompts in four directions, allowing the user to establish a cognitive model from the perspective of the concept. dow.jump builds a cognitive model for the user in the execution sequence, it is also very easy for users to remember. In contrast, because Skyfire's single-interface user education is just information arrangement, there is no layout in the cognitive order, and the content is slightly messy.

This kind of single-page user education has another design focus: to inform users how to ignore this kind of user education information and how to re-enter the education interface. On a single page, user education generally disappears after clicking any location and appears only when the application is enabled for the first time. However, the user may accidentally trigger the "Ignore" operation without reading it. Therefore, it is best to provide users with an entry that can be accessed again in settings or other regions for single-page user education. This allows users to "reeducate ".

There are also some special examples in the design of single page user education. This year, Google Search launched a new version with better user experience and introduced more deep touch gestures and functional controls. Because many users need to be educated, although it still uses single-page user education, it does not mark all the information on one page. Instead, a hidden method is used, which requires you to trigger reading one by one. This design is designed to avoid information congestion. On the other hand, the cognitive process triggered by clicking can deepen the recognition of new functions and new operations in the user's mental model.

Tutorial-based user education

Tutorial-based user education is actually a combination of multi-level single-page user education. Because many users need to be notified, a certain amount of information is provided on each page. Multiple pages are combined to form user education similar to the tutorial. This kind of user education applies to the introduction of multiple important functions and important interfaces, but you also need to pay attention to the limitation of short-term memory capacity of the user, as far as possible to control the number of pages within 5 pages, and the information should be classified as much as possible.

Like single-page user education, tutorial-based user education should also be designed to provide users with a new entry. Because users may want to see the entity of the application as soon as possible during initial use, and skip this education section without reading it carefully.

Process User Education

Process-based user education is suitable for game applications or applications that require multi-task execution. The features of such applications are that the process is complex, and as the process goes on, the interaction method that can be added to it will be more complex. If it is displayed to the user at one time, the user cannot fully understand it. Therefore, when educating users, it will gradually give the user corresponding prompt information as the process is different, and until they complete the corresponding task objectives.

In the design of process-oriented user education, we must analyze tasks rationally to ensure that users are educated at every step of the process, the user can understand the meaning of the task and the corresponding operations used. This type of education is similar to a learning-type education. Generally, after one step of learning, users will repeat similar tasks to help them use them cyclically in their brains to deepen the effect of short-term memory. Then, through the improvement of the task level and the deepening of thinking depth, a new reminder will be given. Therefore, after the user completes the task, the user needs to provide feedback on the task completion to inform the user that they have successfully learned the information in user education.

In the process of design, process-based user education disconnects the corresponding operation tasks, which may make the tasks too independent during the learning process and do not know how to merge the tasks. In addition, after learning a step, you need to practice this step repeatedly to trigger the next process. This may make the user bored or make the application very complicated.

Text description-based user education

Text note type information prompts are generally displayed in the text box, using a piece of text appear in the lower part of the screen with a weak visual focus. Describes the status in progress or the form to be filled in. This is actually a simple explanation. for users, it allows them to subconsciously understand how to complete the current step or the next step. For example, the BBC listener application requires users to wait for a long time to download the program list during the first loading process. If there is no text description-based user education, the user may misunderstand that the program is suspended due to poor network connection or program disconnection.

Summary

To sum up, we can find that in fact, the design of user education is a small part of the ordinary design that we are accustomed to adding or reusing, the key to designing user education is that as a designer, you can understand what information the user needs to know and how to tell the user. This is the secret of the mobile phone product "love at first sight.