Seven rules allow you to design a better mobile communication experience for your users

A good first impression is very important for every relationship. People are always looking for trust and sincerity, and expect to be able to make their first impressions better through subsequent relationships. This is the same thing in brand and product design, and design is playing such an important role: to build relationships with users and to maintain brand commitment.

Users expect their mobile communications services to be valuable, high performance and easy to use, however, because of the limitations in the design, often do not meet the user's mobile phone service requirements, you may underestimate the importance of this matter, these user experience-related design for users can not be overlooked, In fact, the design of the user experience should be listed as a key element in the design of the mobile phone.

In this article, we will discuss seven design-related codes that can help you meet the needs of users and businesses in performance and shape design. Our team has been designing apps for multiple mobile communications products on different platforms, and these seven codes are based on past experience.

Performance of mobile communication products

People at different times, different places through their communications products to improve productivity, and make life more comfortable, fun, like when waiting for the bus, walking on the sidewalk, looking for a ride on the platform. In a multiple-use environment, the app design for mobile communications must focus on a core function that is fast and trustworthy.

But contrary to the fact, we find that many of the design cycles of mobile products are always the first appeal of high beauty, and the design of a lot of amazing "This is so beautiful!" of products. Of course, those stunning visual design will always be in the first contact to quickly seize the attention of consumers, but the long-term use of the process is absolutely related to the quality of products, and these are also with the performance of the app is not cut open. If an app looks great but doesn't work well, it will damage your credibility, and users will soon find that your app is slow or just like a bad one, and that's not just going to be a terrible use, it's going to ruin your brand. The user is expecting a fast and responsive app, and if your app isn't, it's going to be a very low rating, and fewer people will be using it.

Visually, Twitter's app (pictured left) does not seem to have the cool look of cookmate (the right).

But in the App store, Twitter's app rating is a lot better.

App's performance makes your brand different

The experience of each product will affect the user's perception of your brand. Users are always looking for the best tools to make their lives better. To attract more users, more and more apps are being designed, and you have to think of ways to make your app different, like doing apps that others haven't done, or doing better than others. Performance is a key element, which directly separates your brand from others. If you want to go further, you will be able to break through your performance technology challenges and make the process smoother, which will definitely make a breakthrough in your product sales, and other competitors will be hard to imitate.

Flickr's IPhone app is a good example of Flickr's two main goals in the Internet: helping people to use their photos and managing photos and videos in new ways. Do you know? The Flickr app fully achieves these two goals and thus makes their brand commitment more complete.

Flickr is doing a good job of achieving brand commitment

So when you're planning to design a set of apps, you'd better analyze the market and try to ask yourself these two questions:

(1) What is the difference between this app and other competitors? (2) How do you make this app better than your competitors?

Then, make a good effort to top the three goals that are most important to you. A key design process

The manufacturing design patterns of any kind of product need to be paid attention to, some classic design and engineering guidelines will always be the world to relish. Like the design of the car will affect the aerodynamics in operation, a beautiful bridge in any case is also to let the car and people can walk through. Mobile communication application design is the same, the app's design affects its function, content, interactivity and sense of realism, which is tantamount to affecting the overall performance.

We have found in many product development teams that the final performance of the product depends more on the developer, and that it is too late for the developer to take this part entirely to the designer if it is not well considered for performance and functional performance. But in order to create more possibilities, some of the details of development have to be taken into account when creative ideas are made. Use the following seven guidelines to think about the factors associated with mobile communication interface design (see the next section), and you will understand that to make the user's performance experience more than just coding, the development side effort is an important key!

Ilasmas Bridge in Rotterdam, Netherlands. (Photo: Wikipedia)

What is the performance that affects the interface of mobile communication?

Performance is based on the following functions: Boot time, page loading state, toggle page animation fluency, error and wait time. The following illustration illustrates these features: "App" (with his image performance, interactivity, content, functionality, and coding) runs on "mobile" devices with specific technologies (CPU, screen size, etc.) and platforms (Android,ios, etc.). In different cases, the app is connected to the back end with some platforms (LTE, 3G, 2G) and the network (pictured below) two factors are affected by the design and development team, and the following two factors require consideration of some device limitations.

Factors that affect performance

Each decision on these elements will affect performance. This is a state of mutual influence, regardless of whether such enhancements (such as advanced visuals) or limitations (such as network coverage) may affect his efficiency. For example, in order to load some advanced image content from the back end, you have to run the risk of slow speed, which results in weakening the performance of the program.

Seven rules

Over the past few years, we've seen a huge change in the mobile platform. New communication interfaces began to emerge, and the screens and processors evolved as advanced as desktops, and the input mechanism changed significantly.

In the constraints of these ever-changing technological reforms, designers need to constantly try to create more cutting-edge, refreshing and high-performance products, not just to reduce the size of the picture. Different levels of design decision-making and design process will have a significant impact. Let's take a look at the different design levels that have proven to be useful in seven tools that will guide you to achieve a high-performance mobile user experience.

1. Define the brand characteristics of the use interface

When each user is using the app, make them feel the story of the brand and increase their identity, loyalty and satisfaction. We need to identify which elements of the app are related to the brand image, such as function, visual effects, wording, fonts, and animations. Our design team does different things in different teams, which allows us to make more diverse changes with a few simple interface elements. To define the core elements of our app can increase user usage, prevent others from imitating, and also prioritize design and manufacturing processes.

We recommend defining elements that use interfaces (such as the functions listed above, visual effects, and so on) so that you can create a core element of your own unique style, and in the conceptual prototyping phase, you can define those elements according to some of the following rules:

Make the app differentiated (for example: choose a different photo browsing path)

Presentation of key features (e.g., interface when logging out of a store)

Set a specific design style (for example: put some key screenshots above the background of your head)

The interface that Microsoft designed for Window Phone 7 embodies the perfect integration of typography, typography and integrated layout.

Create a design DNA that belongs to him.

The core identification logo should be very conspicuous, users will continue to see these identification signs, and these indicators will be used in different product interface. If you allow design and process to follow a series of identifying elements, you can increase the recognition of the brand by multiples. 2. Focus on product mix

If a company wants to publish his product quickly, or want to develop a product mix (such as: different products on the same platform, the same product on a different platform or the same product on the same platform) or face the constraints of time and resources, it is very difficult to judge which part should be concerned about first. We think that design and process should focus on the product mix, the product mix is the most important thing. A matrix of product order can give us a lot of help to understand which product design should be the highest priority.

Examples of matrices of different product sequences (the order of design is determined by different products on different platforms, different customer numbers, and competitor classifications)

We have to focus on the most important part so that the overall effort will be shown in the most investment-rate blocks. Assuming that your prospective customers are using the Android phone and your competitor is targeting the group of users, it is more valuable to work on designing a more elegant and efficient Android app than it is to be distracted to design other apps that use the platform.

3. Understand the use of the core users plot

Our team has faced many different projects in the past, and in the initial time to complete some of the product requirements, most time-consuming, less focused and almost impossible to achieve. In fact, when a company is ready to do something, it is often overlooked that the user needs our solutions are usually very specific (their needs are not so marginal).

For example, if you go shopping (regardless of the socializing and the search for inspiration, etc.) it's usually about buying a product, whether it's in a small city, Oxford Street in London (a luxury place) or on the Internet, looking for what you want. Of course it's better to make the whole shopping experience interesting, but the most important thing is to buy what you want. It's the same on the app for shopping, whether it's a game, a music or a coupon, and no matter what other features you design can make the overall experience richer, it's important that users quickly find what they want to buy and buy,

The following illustration shows two designs for the purchase of information pages in one store, and the left is a more evolved version, such as a gift-giving function, a few related products, and an evaluation of the sales shop. And the right picture is focused on the purchase function. If you use the design of the right graph to optimize the concepts that the company wants to convey, the team will not be designed to distract you with some style. Only the core functions of the foundation, plus those features will make sense, as long as those feature styles do not hinder the use of the core users of the plot.

Two different purchase information pages

In the process of defining a product, in order to focus on the development of design products, we need to understand those core users of the use of the plot.

4. Optimize the use of processes and elements

Users don't like to wait. (Google takes "we calculate search time in 1 per thousand seconds" as the second largest creed in the user experience). To optimize the use of frequency screen, process and elements can make users faster operation, but also reduce their use of the process to think "this is a waste of my time."

A. Let app users feel faster

Designers cannot always control the app's watch, possibly because the network is slow, or the user's own device is in the back of a hissing Peacemaker Lu liling  蝿