Mobile User Experience 1: Usability of Websites and Apps on Mobile Devices
- San Francisco: Tuesday, October 5
Raluca Budiu
Full-Day Tutorial
How do we create a satisfactory user experience when limited to a small device?
This seminar is based on expert reviews, as well as international studies with participants ranging from students to early technology adopters and business people using websites on a variety of mobile devices. We also report on the latest findings from articles published in prestigious journals and conferences.
Our user research included smartphones, touchphones, as well as feature phones from several different vendors. The seminar will discuss the issues in designing for this range of devices, with a focus on smartphones and touchphones, since research indicates that these are the primary devices used for mobile Internet access.
In this seminar we target basic mobile usability principles that go beyond any specific phone model.
What You’ll Learn
- What behaviors users engage in when using mobile devices
- Mobile app versus mobile website: which is better
- Guidelines and best practices about how to make your website mobile-friendly, with emphasis on:
- Features that make mobile sites usable
- Easy navigation on mobile devices
- Writing and producing content for mobile device
Course Outline
Mobile user behaviors:
- What kinds of activities people do on mobile devices
- Differences between apps and websites
- Browsing for news, entertainment, sports
- Finding specific information (weather, movie times, etc.)
- Transactions (such as online banking and other financial operations)
- Shopping: what do users shop for on mobile
- Designing to support user behaviors
Design strategy considerations:
- Creating a dedicated mobile site vs. having mobile users access your regular website
- Designing for high-end models vs. the lowest common denominator
- Direct manipulation UI for touchphones (e.g., iPhone, BlackBerry Storm)
- Indirect manipulation for low-end devices
- Creating a mobile application vs. a mobile website; when to use what
- Differences in designing an app versus a mobile website
Specific design guidelines for mobile sites and services:
- Basic interaction
- Typing
- Dropdown Boxes, Buttons, and Links
- Lists and Scrolling
- Menus
- Carousels
- Forms
- Logging in and Registering
- Search
- Navigation and information architecture (IA)
- Errors
- Page layout
- Search
- Homepages
- Images, Animation, and Videos
- Content usability
- How users read on mobile devices
- Writing for mobile use
- Presenting text: legibility and readability
- Designing for feature phones: differences from smartphones and touchphones
- How to perform usability testing with mobile devices
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, video highlights from user testing, and some exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides
Who Should Attend
Anybody who designs websites, intranets, or online services that have mobile users. People in charge of mobile strategy, including the question of whether to develop dedicated mobile services or simply make the main site more mobile-friendly.
See Also:
This seminar is about the basic usability principles that are valid for both mobile websites and apps and for the full range of mobile devices. A companion seminar, Mobile User Experience 2 focuses on issues specific to designing applications for touchscreen devices.
Instructor
Raluca Budiu is a User Experience Specialist with Nielsen Norman Group, where she presents
tutorials on academic research findings, mobile usability, and cognitive psychology for designers, and conducts
research worldwide on usability for mobile websites and children’s websites. She coauthored the
NN/g report on mobile usability. Previously, Budiu worked at
Xerox PARC, doing HCI research. At PARC, she built computational models of how people search for information in
visualizations of large data structures. She also explored new ways of measuring information scent and conducted
research on interfaces for social bookmarking systems and on the cognitive benefits of tagging. Budiu was also a
user researcher at Microsoft Corporation, where she explored future directions and made strategic recommendations
for incorporating user-generated content and social Web features into MSN. Budiu has authored more than 20
articles and conference presentations on HCI, psychology, and cognitive science. She has a PhD from Carnegie
Mellon University.
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