Mobile & Tablet Articles & Videos

  • Carousels on Mobile Devices

    Carousels on touch screens are plagued by low discoverability and sequential access, and not all designs implement swipe as a carousel control.

  • Design for Kids Based on Their Stage of Physical Development

    As kids’ physical development throughout childhood changes, so do their physical abilities, constraints, and device preferences. Touch gestures such as swiping and tapping big targets are easy for all children, but fine mouse or trackpad gestures such as dragging are hard for young kids.

  • Distracted Driving: UX’s Responsibility to Do No Harm

    I walked away from two distracted-driving accidents in one week. Can we use known UX principles to reduce harm?

  • Banner Blindness Revisited: Users Dodge Ads on Mobile and Desktop

    Users have learned to ignore content that resembles ads, is close to ads, or appears in locations traditionally dedicated to ads.

  • The State of Mobile User Experience in 2018

    Ten years from the original iPhone, the field of mobile UX has finally reached maturity.

  • M-Commerce: Terrible UX

    Traffic and sales data show that ecommerce sites had 111% higher sales-per-visit on desktop than on mobile on Cyber Monday 2017. Better than 2014 when desktop sold 288% more.

  • iPhone X: The Rise of Gestures

    Replacing the Home button with a swipe gesture creates some UX difficulties, but they are likely to be overcome by the benefit of a larger screen.

  • We Can Do Better on Mobile: Designing for the Medium

    Mobile designs need to do more than shrink a desktop experience to a smaller screen: they must create innovative, integrated and enhanced experiences.

  • Mobile Tables: Comparisons and Other Data Tables

    Locking headers and allowing users to select a subset of data according to their needs make large data tables usable on mobile devices.

  • Small Pictures on Big Screens: Scaling Up from Mobile to Desktop

    To transition images from mobile to desktop, consider relative screen space and information density. Pay attention to cropping, scaling, and proportions.

  • Mobile Subnavigation

    Accordions, sequential menus, section menus and category landing pages are popular options for implementing mobile subnavigation.

  • Don’t Use Split Buttons for Navigation Menus

    Menu on hover, category landing page on click: we discuss challenges and solutions for replicating this pattern on touchscreens.

  • A Checklist for Registration and Login Forms on Mobile

    Typing a password takes twice as long on mobile than on desktop. Follow these 12 guidelines to make registration and login less painful on mobile devices.

  • The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques

    Modal ads, ads that reorganize content, and autoplaying video ads were among the most disliked. Ads that are annoying on desktop become intolerable on mobile.

  • Big Pictures on Small Screens: Remove, Resize or Reorganize

    When using large-screen images on smaller screens, remove images that don’t add information. Then, pay close attention to cropping, scaling and placement.

  • Anchors OK? Re-Assessing In-Page Links

    While jump links have caused problems in the past, they can successfully be used to move users down long pages and directly to content, on any screen size.

  • Optimizing for Context in the Omnichannel User Experience

    Design for each channel’s unique strengths and role in the customer journey to create usable context-specific experiences.

  • Using Swipe to Trigger Contextual Actions

    Implementations of swipe-to-delete or swipe to reveal contextual actions often suffer from usability problems.

  • Reading Content on Mobile Devices

    Readers can understand short, simple text content on mobile devices just as well as on computers, but they slow down when reading difficult text on mobile.

  • App Lockers for Shared Phone Use in India

    App lockers ensure privacy, parental control, and data safety for Indian phone owners who share mobile devices with others.