Effective design: How to guide users in real time in mobile applications

The author of Mobile One, the famous user experience expert, Luke Wroblewski, is a very happy person to share, especially after he has developed a voting application polar, he often shares his experience in product improvement, recently, Lukew in some of his blog articles on his own in the polar some of the improvements, discussed in the user guidance and functional location settings on the thinking.

For some of the complex application of interaction rules, the instructions to the user instructions is necessary, in our commonly used app, many applications will be their novice boot in the application after the launch. But in fact, for most users, such a design is not very meaningful-on the one hand they are eager to quickly skip the Guide tutorial into the application, on the other hand, before the application interface is not seen, it is not reasonable for users to memorize complex rules by memory. Therefore, such designs often have little effect.

To solve this problem, some people think of using a transparent interface to guide users-after the application, in the actual application interface will be a translucent description to tell the user each button interactive mode and function. But in reality, users often use a few of the operations, leaving the actual operating experience, they can easily forget some of the interaction rules, once users need to use some of the features not commonly used, they tend to get into trouble.

So, in polar, Lukew adopts a third way-splitting the operation instructions into the application and then making a hint when the user actually uses it, the idea being the famous tapworthy:designing great IPhone apps author Josh Clark is called "Just in Time education".

For example, on polar, when a user slides load a new voting content, the system pops up a description page that tells you that you can skip the ballot by sliding to the left if you encounter a vote that you don't like. In Lukew's words, tell him what to do when it comes to judging a user's possible use of an operation.

In the design of functional position, polar also used a similar thinking.

Before that, Lukew added a feature button to the right of the top bar of the voting page, and the user clicks on it to find Twitter, Facebook, or other contacts that also use polar, Lukew hopes the design will help polar add social attributes and stickiness.

After this version exits, although the icon position of the add contact is obvious, the button can convey its function at a glance, but only a few people use this function. The reason, Lukew, is that users are less likely to jump to other pages when they use the main requirements feature in their applications.

So they changed the function to a window design--when users voted 20 times, they asked users if they needed to find friends on their social networks. After this improvement, the effect was greatly improved, so they decided to use this design in parameter setting, request scoring and so on. Incorporate these features into the main functional interface rather than splitting them into separate functional components.

Lukew I benefited from these two sharing, because in peacetime use a lot of apps, I also encounter confusion, one is sometimes do not know how to operate a function, and the other is not aware of the existence of certain functions. Therefore, if the application developers can use the design to correctly figure out the user behavior, at the right time to give hints, may be a good choice. For example, some application downloads may prompt me to set up a new version of the installation package automatically in a Wi-Fi environment when I batch update applications. Of course, this does not mean that you have nothing to give you a pop-up tip to allow users to grade you, and not shut off.