10 user experience design guidelines for iPad applications

Like many excellent products, the success of iPad applications also depends on factors such as the core value of the product and the user experience model. In addition to games, most types of applications must be able to help users solve certain problems in a certain context. It should be simple and easy to use, so that users can get started smoothly without complicated settings and learning.

The performance of products in terms of visual appearance, interaction, and emotional connection will directly affect users' satisfaction with the application experience. In this article, we will share with you some guiding principles that you need to carefully consider and implement in your design work. We will not explain the complete design process for creating an iPad application, nor spend time on almost any mobile application design.ArticleTips on the small methods mentioned in all the details. The main purpose of this article is to help you make more reasonable and correct product design decisions in the actual iPad application project.

1. Aiming at core requirements and simplifying product functions

Excellent iPad applications usually allow users to complete one or more clearly defined task objectives in the simplest way. You need to select and discard functional models in the product concept phase. Try to use a target-oriented approach to determine the value of a function in a product: to determine the direction and concept mode of your product, imagine which typical use cases users will use, record all the requirements and task objectives that can be thought. Next, brainstorm with your team to list all the functions that users may use to accomplish these task objectives. Then, in this function list, we will extract a streamlined set of functions that can ensure the fulfillment of requirements. Finally, we can add some special features that will help improve the user experience of the product to this minimal functional blueprint.

Let's look at some instances. Epicurious is a recipe applied in the intensive aspect of core functions-without complex interfaces and operation methods, you can learn and perform operations while enjoying the cooking pleasure. Especially in the landscape, the left side shows a clear raw material configuration list, and the main content area on the right side shows the detailed cooking operation process. You can easily record the current cooking process by dragging the positioning tag. In addition, the comments and technical tips about the current recipe are all integrated into the tab view below, which ensures the simplicity and clarity of the interface, in addition, users can easily view the content as needed.

Whole Foods is also an auxiliary cooking application. If you want to try some recipes, it can help you make the ingredients you need into a shopping list. However, unfortunately, this application ignores the issue that different recipes contain the same ingredients, so that the final shopping list may be duplicated in some projects. We can see in the following that banana sang appeared three times:

In addition, do not use visual interaction elements such as buttons everywhere. In many cases, the operation control behavior can be completely completed through gestures. For example, there is no entry to the normal editing mode for the memos that come with IOS. You only need to press the interface to enter the editing status, and the content will be automatically saved, so you do not need to perform related operations. IOS native selection, cutting, copying, pasting, and other editing functions can be completed with simple basic gestures. The Undo operation is special. You need to shake the body. Remember to hold it first.

2. Create a more intelligent and personalized product experience

No one prefers to spend money to buy an application. complex settings must be performed before it can be used properly. Make full use of the technical capabilities of the iPad and related web services to provide a more accurate understanding and analysis of all aspects of the user's context. Consider whether it is possible to make reasonable and legal use of the user's geographical location information, calendar, Weibo feed, subscription or address book in the Gmail account, this allows your applications to provide users with more intelligent and personalized content and functions.

Zite is an amazing content-reading application that reads users' content information in Google Reader, Twitter, and delicious accounts and analyzes users' personal preferences, in addition, we recommend related articles from other content sources to users. I (author of the original English article) tried to authorize my delicious account in this application. within five seconds, it completed the analysis of articles I have collected, A fully personalized magazine is generated based on my interests, allowing me to read more new articles that interest me. Such applications are similar to Pandora and other services. The more you use, the more familiar you will be, and the more personalized the corresponding content output will be. Although many people believe that, compared with zite, Flipboard's uidesign and related interactive experience are more attractive, zite can still have advantages in intelligence and personalization.

3. Pay attention to the context of the application product

Based on the core requirements of your product, consider which typical scenarios users will use. Common iPad use environments include restaurants, airports, transportation routes, kitchens, bedrooms, and study rooms. During your Planning of product functions and experience models, is it necessary to consider the impact of application scenarios on existing design models? For example, for recipe applications, there may be a big difference between the needs and objectives of users in the kitchen and those in the bedroom.

OpenTable mainly provides ordering services. On its web side, the display of restaurant search results is a very traditional list of information. The product concept of its iPad client application reflects the high correlation between the Context Environment of mobile applications and functional requirements. The user interface in the default view consists of a map and a restaurant list. You can directly search for a restaurant near your current location. Compared with the Web product model, these features in the iPad application are more in line with the actual needs of users when using mobile devices to complete related tasks.

Awesome Note is also a good example. The default classification method accurately reflects the common environment and use cases of iPad. Groceryiq is an application of the shopping list type. An important feature of groceryiq is to allow users to summarize and filter the items they need to purchase according to different stores, it is a mental model that fits people's actual shopping needs.

4. Consider multi-user and multi-device scenarios

Family members usually use the same iPad to fulfill their needs. In addition, it is common for the whole family to sit around and use it together. Unlike mobile phones or PCs, the iPad has relatively weak personal colors. It is more like a magazine on the coffee desk and has a strong sharing ability. Among many types of iPad applications, account management functions are indispensable, including basic account switching and account prompting for logon. For some content applications with multiple device versions, an important role of account management is to keep content updated simultaneously between iPad and iPhone devices.

For example, the Flipboard allows multiple users to log on through different accounts and displays the name of the current Logon account on the homepage. Although the overall style of the FedEx iPad application is very gloomy, the login account information can still be clearly identified. However, the eBay client is somewhat inadequate in this regard. You must click "My eBay" in the upper-left corner to view the current account information.

5. Create a reasonable Interaction Mode

You can try a variety of complex and dazzling interactions in games or other entertainment products, but for other types of applications that are often used, in terms of navigation structure, browsing mode, and corresponding visual interaction mode, we recommend that you maintain the regular and concise style as much as possible. The innovation of the interaction mode is certainly an important factor to promote the success of an application, but it cannot negatively affect the availability of the product in order to pursue a differentiated experience.

The browsing method of Martha Stewart Living combines creativity and availability. The X-axis scrolling operation is used to view different article pages, while the scrolling operation on the y-axis is used to browse and read an article. The content on the current article page will appear at the top of the page queue. You do not need to enter a single article to understand the general content. The scroll bar at the bottom of the queue can clearly reflect the position of the page pointed to by the current focus in the book. These seemingly simple and simple operations can bring users a simple and easy-to-use, and a sound interaction experience.

Many people will dock their left-hand thumb near the upper left corner of the screen when using a flat iPad. zite's design makes it easy for them to close the current article. In addition, you can click anywhere outside the article container on the screen to close the article interface. This solution is highly elastic, and users who are used to using iPad in other positions can also perform operations without any effort. The New York Times iPad app allows users to close articles by means of Dual-finger kneading. In addition, the toolbar at the bottom of the article also contains buttons that can return to the home page, the toolbar is automatically hidden after the article page remains open for several seconds. Compared with the close button, the kneading method is more free, and users do not need to operate on an interactive element. However, its drawbacks are also obvious: users may need to temporarily change the positions and positions of their hands to ensure that one of them can perform gesture operations freely.

In the process of trying and experiencing various applications, you should observe your feelings in the details, and especially record the places that will make you feel very good, or interactions that make you feel uncomfortable and even interfere with the operation process. Find applications in the same field as your products, analyze their features and experience models, and consider how to differentiate your products. In many ways, iPad applications are still at the forefront, and various novel and dazzling functions and interaction methods will emerge in the application market. In this case, it is also necessary to plan the user experience design scheme of your own products with a pragmatic attitude, so as to avoid blind innovation.

6. Provides the Home Page View

People are used to the concept of homepage. The home page view usually helps you to view the features of the product and provides them with a shortcut to common operations. The home page provides users with a sense of security, so they do not have to worry about losing their way in application software when exploring features and browsing content.

Let's take a look at the visualization explorer from NASA. This application does not have the homepage view mode. After you open it, it will be directly included in the latest article. To browse other articles, you can click the arrows at the left and right sides of the article to view them one by one, or click the icon in the lower left corner to bring up the article list and choose from it. Viewing through the document list has a higher degree of freedom than the first method, but it is still limited by the container size and specification, each article entry in the list can only contain a very small thumbnail and a short article title. You cannot directly obtain the introduction to the article here.

In contrast, the pulse experience is much better. Its homepage view is a content navigation. You can view the latest articles in different content sources in the form of a list; each content entry contains a large thumbnail, article title, and brief content (depending on the article itself). Users can clearly determine what content they are interested in. On the horizontal screen, after you select an article, the entire homepage navigation interface is moved to the left, and the complete article content is displayed on the right. This is a very consistent interactive experience, and users do not feel that the index and content are in two unrelated interfaces. While while the landscape is portrait, the navigation structure will collapse to the bottom of the interface in a single article; although this method is similar to that of NASA, however, pulse always allows users to view the article overview in the queue through a clearer list of Article entries.

7. Use the pop-up effect with caution

In the iPad, the pop-up layer used to help users access the relevant content and navigation structure is awesome. However, this interaction mode may cause a lot of trouble in the operation process. In the design scheme, the height and width of the pop-up layer must be limited to avoid putting too much information in it. We will use awesome note again as an example, but this time the angle is relatively negative. Although we mentioned above, the default folder classification method meets your needs, but you need to edit these folders in a pop-up layer. The presentation of folders is almost identical to that of the main interface, but the sizes are slightly different. For such an important set of interaction objects, if they appear in the same visual representation on the same interface, to a large extent, this will confuse users. In addition, for the visual style of folders and related editing operations, such a pop-up layer seems a little small.

In fact, from the perspective of container size and space utilization, the pop-up layers of the NASA article list we saw earlier also share the same issue. In some cases, it is more reasonable to open a new interface than the pop-up layer. Unless the relevant operations in the pop-up layer have a difficult contextual relevance with the content on the current interface, they can be put into a new interface-more available space and more reasonable layout structure, reading and operations are easier. Why not.

8. Avoid unnecessary startup screens

In the traditional Web field, many websites use the "Boot screen" based on flash or other technologies. Most of them have no meaning, and it takes a lot of time to load them, users can easily lose patience and turn around and leave. For apps running on mobile devices such as iPad, the meaningless startup screen will crash even more. If your application needs to load a lot of content during startup, and you decide to display a startup screen during this period, the user will be less aware of the Waiting Behavior, at least do not keep it too long.

It is best to show some brief content that has been loaded in the startup screen, so that users can maintain a relatively consistent interaction awareness even while waiting. Zite is still doing well in this regard. It will display some thumbnail of the loaded articles in the startup screen to attract users' attention. At the same time, more other content is still being loaded.

9. Correct and reasonable use of gestures

Cool and practical gesture operations are an important way to interact with the iPad. However, make sure that this method is used properly in the product. For example, if the main interaction object on the current interface is a list view in the form of a carousel that needs to be triggered by a sweep gesture, therefore, you should not bind other global scanning gestures to the interface.

If the interaction behavior that needs to be triggered by gestures is difficult for users to easily gain insight, it is best to give a prompt in a conspicuous place. Zite is doing a great job in this regard. In the content classification list view, the prompt in the lower right corner makes it easy for users to understand that the next step is to flip pages.

Discovr is an application of the music exploration type. It integrates the gesture operation prompts directly into the interaction object, that is, the Red Circle labeled "tap me.

After sufficient information is obtained, the text in the red circle will change to "tap and hold me", prompting the user to perform the following operations by means of a long press. This guidance method allows you to quickly and directly master key operations without having to leave the current interaction process.

10. easy identification and convenient touch of interface elements

In the iPad Availability Report, instructor Jakob Nielsen pointed out that the question of "reading-touch inequality" is quite common in iPad applications. (This is the third time that teacher Nielsen has shown up in our article. The previous two topics on prototype design, user testing, and mobile user experience design were discussed respectively)

The so-called "Read-touch inequality" means that the text font size in the interface can be clear and easy to read, but it is still too small for touch operations, and it is difficult for users to accurately touch it in many cases, or you don't know where to perform the touch operation. The following is an advertisement interface from Martha Stewart Living. The title list with the subject chart in the middle is actually clickable, but it is hard for users to notice this, because arrows are not a common icon used to indicate clickable operations, they are also placed on the left. In your design, you must clearly mark the interaction elements that can be clicked on a touch. It is best to be eye-catching and beautiful, so that users can understand their functions without looking for and thinking.

The image area on the top of the cool hunting interface is actually a set of images that can be swept, but it is hard to find this. In fact, a small part of the next image may be displayed on the right side, so that users can understand that this is a set of images that can be browsed continuously.

In addition, IOS itself has some disadvantages in this regard. We must make a decisive decision. As you know, double-click the Home button to call up the multi-taskbar from the bottom of the current interface, but there is actually a set of control panels on the left side of the home interface for music playback. In addition, by default, the switch for locking screen rotation is also here. This is too concealed. Why cannot we provide some visual prompts?