Maximize the value of your smartwatch notifications by making them personally relevant, appropriately timed, non-repetitive, and sufficiently informative.
Breakpoints determine when a webpage may adjust to different layouts. They help designers (and developers) maintain layout consistency across multiple screen sizes, orientations, and devices.
Tables of contents show mobile users an overview of the information on the page and allow them to easily access the piece of content that is relevant to them. Two possible implementations involve in-page links and accordions.
Decorative images should not be used on mobile, as they lengthen the page and make it load more slowly. Use images only if they add informational value to your page.
Accordions provide an overview of the whole page and mitigate the problem of long mobile pages, allowing users to directly access the content of interest.
Our Beijing-based user research team conducted a field study in automated restaurants that serve diners with no staff. Current designs have some advantages, but the UI is too complicated for customized ordering.
Infinite scrolling through long lists of homogeneous items can lower interaction costs, but is less suited to support specific tasks such as finding a particular item.
Before users can use an AR app, they must often calibrate it first. Usability studies find many big problems in calibration designs that can prevent people from ever getting into the actual AR experience.
No matter your screen size, some data tables will be too big for the screen. This problem is particularly common on mobile devices. Simple interaction techniques can help, but you may need to offer users more advanced features for information hiding and column reordering.
How to familiarize users with new user interfaces? Onboarding techniques include feature promotion, customization, and instructions. All must be kept simple.
Onboarding instructions that users must digest before they start using an app or other product require attention and effort and thus reduce usability. They should be avoided as much as possible.
Form filling and other user input on mobile devices such as smartphones can be awkward and error prone, but by taking advantage of the strengths of the phone, designers can improve the usability of these tasks substantially.
Virtual reality (VR) user interfaces are currently more difficult for users to manipulate than a traditional GUI, partly because of more degrees of freedom and partly because VR is still new, so people have less experience using it. Advice for how to employ usability studies to alleviate this problem.
Sliding hero images that rotate through a set of promotions, news, or the like on the top of web pages are often annoying to users and are definitely error prone, unless they are designed according to usability guidelines.
Simplicity depends on the capacity of the information channel and what's simple for one device, can be primitive or intricate for another, since screens are information channels with a limited capacity. When you're designing for multiple devices, don't go by common cliches like "simple is good."
