Issues needing attention in the design of user experience for mobile products

Article Description: website Product Mobile User experience design idea analysis.

It's a weekend full of sunshine. One thing that keeps people busy and worried is still going on. The thought of what I saw before on Weibo is roughly what it says: "Everything is going to be all right in the end, and if it's not all right, it's not the end." ”。 After today's content has been sent, continues to tidy up the belongings, the best, these two days may take the time to make some words to come out again, the next few candidate articles are still good appearance. About 10 days after the move, so the next weekend can be updated on schedule to see the first few days of fortune.

Say the right thing, today's translation of the relative retreat, the original author of a number of mobile products in the user experience design needs to pay attention to the problem, it is worth thinking and for reference; the topic to be further explored the space is not small, all the time, strongly welcome friends through comments to put forward your views. Walk on.

For mobile products (mobile version of the site, Web applications, etc.) user experience design, we will habitually focus more attention on the "moving" aspect. Recall whether you often fantasize about a situation where a user is walking on the commute, waiting for a bus, or crowding on the subway ... They pulled out their phones in a hurry to surf the Internet or tinker with the app, and then keep on rushing.

In reality, the user's use of mobile products and experience needs, in fact, has gone beyond the simple "moving" category, with the popularity of tablets, the type of demand has been expanding and development. As a user experience design related people, we will find that some of the usual tricks, such as simple zoom function or more easily touch the big button, etc., has been unable to meet the user's deeper experience needs.

Mobile devices, applications and mobile Internet development is still accelerating, in this situation, how can we make our web products in the mobile performance to better meet the needs of users and expectations?

Understand the user's actual needs

It cannot be denied that it is not meaningless to assume that it is not pointless for users to spend as much time as possible in a busy state to visit a website or use an application; "Efficient" and "easy-to-use" remain important success factors for mobile products. However, "moving" is only one aspect; an increasingly obvious trend is that users will increasingly use mobile devices in their homes, or in other relatively quiet and stable environments, like desktops or notebooks. With the growing sophistication and ease of use of mobile Internet and mobile applications in terms of functionality, design, and experience, people are increasingly accustomed to using mobile devices to accomplish goals and address demand.

From application software to user demand to market development, the entire mobile sector has broken the monotony of a few years ago. The importance of the user experience design work of mobile products has been Briber in the traditional desktop equipment field; We must be more attentive to the user, understand their behavior in different situations, and the corresponding needs of various aspects.

Understand the functional characteristics of a device

When working on user experience design for mobile products, we need to keep in mind the functional features of the device platform itself that is used to run the application. Typically, the screen type is the first area of concern; Through user research, we can anticipate the device usage of the product's target user group beforehand. For example, BlackBerry users are more accustomed to mouse-style control, and for this interaction, the hover-state style of a button or link is meaningful, and the iphone's touchscreen phone is not.

The performance and speed of the equipment is also an important functional factor related to the user experience. As we all know, in the traditional web industry, the speed of the page loading will greatly affect the product user experience and SEO; for mobile devices, this factor becomes more important because users are more sensitive to the performance and speed of mobile devices than desktop devices. If a mobile site or Web application is too slow to load and respond, it is easy for users to "arbitrarily" think that the product is not working properly, or to blame their own network link problems and give up. The content and function of the page or the application interface are too plump, which will lead to the tight resource of the device in memory, and the load time will increase correspondingly. However, these obvious problems are often overlooked or shelved in the actual product design process.

Control of content structure and page length

The traditional desktop version of the site, the vast majority still through different pages to reflect the structure of the site. Mobile devices, by contrast, tend to be more content-focused, less-structured and more page-style, especially for touchscreen phones, where scrolling is much easier to do than a mouse based desktop device.

But that doesn't mean that all content should be presented in a single page, otherwise, the experience will be very bad for the user--the interactive way of dragging the page for scrolling with the finger is very good, but too often, it will challenge the user's patience. We should try to think about how to output in a more subtle, interactive, and controlled way, such as UI patterns such as pull-down menus or accordion-style "expand/drop" lists, with JavaScript to organize content according to reasonable priorities.

Clear, concise, easy to follow the functional process

Jakob Nielsen has been at the forefront of information architecture innovation. The Elastic Interaction theory (interaction elasticity theory), which he presented in 2008, has an important impact on user experience design in mobile domain.

Simply put, the theory holds that a clear, concise, easy to follow function flow will maximize the user experience and optimize the function. Today, traditional web users seem to be accustomed to complex web site architectures, navigation systems, and operational processes, but these do not apply to mobile versions of sites or Web applications. For user experience designers, it is far less straightforward to follow and practice this theory in the design of mobile products to keep functional processes short and easy to focus and follow, so that users can quickly get information and accomplish goals. The entire "simplification" process may require the involvement of a wide range of relevant departments, especially for the mobile redesign project of existing products.

Avoid shrinking of functionality and content

Mobile version of the site or application, should not be ordinary desktop version of the product version, whether in the function or user experience. But we can find in many mobile products, in order to reduce file size, speed up the download speed, the content of many pictures, videos, and even the copy itself has been deleted or simplified, leaving only some of the most basic information.

For those who have been carefully researched and designed for the desktop version of the Web site products, there are many "non-essential" content or page elements that often exist for reasons such as increased content diversity or ease of use, and whether these elements are necessary in a mobile version of the product, depending on the situation. It is more reasonable to judge these content and visual elements based on their own products, and to redesign the dimensions, layout and structure to respond to mobile devices instead of just wiping them out.

Some of the specific implementation strategies and methods in this area can refer to our previous article on the concept of responsive design, components, basic implementation ideas, and how to implement responsive web design via CSS3 Media query.

The future of Mobility

In the mobile field, whether the user's number and maturity, or the equipment itself has the technology and functions, are continuously rapid growth and development. There are more and more front-end development frameworks like jquery Mobile to help designers and developers in traditional web fields to create Web applications or hybrid applications that are very close to the UI and interactive style of local clients. (Related topics, you can refer to our previous articles, including front-end developers of Cross-platform mobile application development strategies and tools and out of the maze of mobile Internet-site mobility strategy)

Most of today's users have moved away from the naïve stage of "I use mobile devices because it's cool", their insights on devices and applications and their knowledge of technology are getting higher, and the tolerance for poor user experience is getting lower. Many of the principles that we once knew and used to enhance the user experience of traditional Web products are also applicable to the mobile domain. For mobile web site products, can not only from the "mobile" perspective of simple and blind "optimization"-the point of view of the user experience, mobile version needs our thinking and input, and even more than desktop version of the product.