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Empty State: Mobile App “Nice-to-Have” Essential — UX Planet

The average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install. What’s worse: within 30 days, …

uxplanet.org|Nick Babich

The average app loses 77% of its daily active users within the first 3 days post-install. What’s worse: within 30 days, approximately 80% of daily active users are gone.

Are these low retention rates a result of poorly made apps? Not always.

Users try out a lot of apps but decide which ones they want to delete within the first few days. The key to success is to get the users hooked during that critical period.

An empty state is the thing you usually design last. But empty states are actually full of potential to drive engagement. Even if it’s meant to be just a temporary stage, we must respect its communication value for users.

When do users encounter empty states?

• First use: App first launch
• Errors: Runs into some issue
• User cleared: When clearing the content

The purpose of a blank slate is more than a just decoration. Besides informing the user about what content to expect on the page, empty states also act as part of a cohesive onboarding experience — they tell users exactly actions are required so the app will function as promised. Also empty state is extremely good (or bad) when user runs into an issue.

A successful screen accomplishes these three goals:

• Educate and help
• Delight user
• Prompt action

A good first impression isn’t just about usability, it’s also about personality. If your first empty state looks a little different from similar products, you’ve shown the user that your entire product experience will likely be different, too. Your goal with this state should be a pleasant surprise.

Aaron Walter turns to the hierarchy of human needs for an explanation of what makes an app’s user experience successful; while your app should be functional, reliable and usable, it also should be pleasurable.

Tech Companies Design Your Life, Here’s Why You Should Care

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes, 15 seconds

medium.com|Tristan Harris

Just like the food industry manipulates our innate biases for salt, sugar and fat with perfectly engineered combinations, the tech industry bulldozes our innate biases for Social Reciprocity (we’re built to get back to others), Social Approval (we’re built to care what others think of us), Social Comparison (how we’re doing with respect to our peers) and Novelty-seeking (we’re built to seek surprises over the predictable).

Millions of years of evolution did a great job giving us genes to care about how others perceive us. But Facebook bulldozes those biases, by forcing us to deal with how thousands of people perceive us.

This isn’t to say that phones today aren’t designed ergonomically, they are just ergonomic to a narrow scope of goals:

• for a single user (holding the phone)
• for single tasks (opening an app)
• for individual choices

And a narrow scope of human physical limits:

• how far our thumb has to reach to tap an app
• how loud the phone must vibrate for our ear to hear it

So what if we expanded the scope of ergonomics for a more holistic set of human goals:

• a holistic sense of a person
• a holistic sense of how they want to spend their time (and goals)
• a holistic sense of their relationships (interpersonal & social choices)
• an ability to make holistic choices (including opportunity costs & externalities)
• an ability to reflect, before and after

…and what if we aligned these goals with a more holistic set of our mental, social and emotional limits?

Let’s call this new kind of ergonomics “Holistic Ergonomics”. Holistic Ergonomics recognizes our holistic mental and emotional limits [vulnerabilities, fatigue and ways our minds form habits] and aligns them with the holistic goals we have for our lives (not just the single tasks). Holistic Ergonomics is built to give us back agency in an increasingly persuasive attention economy.

Joe Edelman and I have taught design workshops on this, calling it EmpoweringDesign.org, or designing to empower people’s agency.

What’s at stake is our Agency. Our ability to live the lives we want to live, choose the way we want to choose, and relate to others the way we want to relate to them — through technology. This is a design problem, not just a personal responsibility problem.

If you want your Agency, you need to tell these companies that that’s what you want from them– not just another shiny new phone that overloads our psychological vulnerabilities. Tell them you want your Agency back, and to help you spend your time the way you want to, and they will respond.

Smartphones and tablets have revolutionized the way we access information, and today people consume a tremendous amount of news on their phones. Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach these readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader—and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions. That's because advertisers on these websites have a hard time getting consumers to pay attention to their ads when the pages load so slowly that people abandon them entirely. Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. The project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages. To give you a sense of what a faster mobile web might look like, we’ve developed this demo on Google Search:

Over time we anticipate that other Google products such as Google News will also integrate AMP HTML pages. And today we’re announcing that nearly 30 publishers from around the world are taking part too. This is the start of an exciting collaboration with publishers and technology companies, who have all come together to make the mobile web work better for everyone. Twitter,Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are among the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages.

Resilient Networking: Planning for Failure - igvita.com

www.igvita.com

A successful application is one that is resilient to fluctuations in network availability and performance: it can take advantage of the peak performance, but it plans for and continues to work when conditions degrade.

...

A 4G user will experience a much better median experience both in terms of bandwidth and latency than a 3G user, but the same 4G user will also fall back to the 3G network for some of the time due to coverage, capacity, or other reasons. Case in point, OpenSignal data shows that an average "4G user" in the US gets LTE service only ~67% of the time. In fact, in some cases the same "4G user" will even find themselves on 2G, or worse, with no service at all.

All connections are slow some of the time. All connections fail some of the time. All users experience these behaviors on their devices regardless of their carrier, geography, or underlying technology — 4G, 3G, or 2G.

Networks are not reliable, latency is not zero, and bandwidth is not infinite. Most applications ignore these simple truths and design for the best-case scenario, which leads to broken experiences whenever the network deviates from its optimal case. We treat these cases as exceptions but in reality they are the norm.

• All 4G users are 3G users some of the time.
• All 3G users are 2G users some of the time.
• All 2G users are offline some of the time.

...

Why Infinite-Scrolling in Mobile Apps is Destroying Content Consumption - This is Elevator

www.thisiselevator.com

The one great loss which has resulted from the availability of huge volumes of information online is a sense of completeness. When reading a newspaper, it always ends. There is a finite volume of text within that paper that can be read. And that’s key to the reading experience. The knowledge that when you reach the end, you will know all there is to know. When reading a book, you read with absolute confidence that when you turn over to page 500, you will know the answer. You will know how it ends, and you will have finished something.

The emergence of infinite-scrolling apps like Instagram and Facebook have rejected that experience. At first, it felt great. When there is an infinite amount of content available, we can never be bored. When there is always something new to read, or something new to know, our appetite for information can never be left unsatisfied. It’s like walking into an all-you-can-eat buffet. At first it feels great. But three hours in, you feel bloated and over-indulged. After spending hours scrolling through Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Flipboard our mind feels tired. We feel intellectually bloated, and yet completely unsatisfied. Why? Because there is more out there. What if I’m missing out on something? What if there is some critical piece of knowledge just three flicks of my finger upwards?

This problem of endless dissatisfaction needs to be solved. Mobile app developers need to recognise that a boundary has been crossed. That sometimes, even if not always, people just really want to finish something. Yahoo’s News Digest is attempting to solve this problem, but for a very niche audience. The app distributes the same news content to every user of the app, which is clearly an unsustainable solution. To solve the problem of infinite content, we don’t need to lose personalisation. There is no reason why Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can’t algorithmically determine which, say 20 posts are important to us, and give the option to only view those. There is no reason why a news app can’t collate the top ten stories from our local and international news sources and display just that content.

We lay out the most interesting user flows so you can build your point of view and be inspired to design the best user experiences.

From Web Designer Depot

Documenting user flows is probably something many UX designers already do to some degree. Now a great collection is in one place, and wired to grow as new discoveries are added to the archive. Even more useful, the site is set up so you can easily filter user flows based on specific tasks, such as onboarding, purchasing and sharing, and compare just those.

UX Archive recently added a feature that allows you to compare iOS6 vs. iOS7 (for now, user flows are only archived from iPhone 4S and iPhone 5). A dropdown menu allows you to filter apps by name, but there are now so many, the device has become unwieldy. With such a beautifully designed site, it’s likely to be replaced with a better solution soon.

Myth #1 – Mobile Devices are Used on the Go

In Google’s annual survey of mobile users, they found that 60% of smartphone use takes place in the home.Google’s definition of "away" includes use inside the office, so actual "on the go" is probably well under the 40% remainder. Even more staggering is that 79% of tablet use is in the home: PCs and laptops clock substantially more road use than tablets.

Myth #2 – Only Mobile Users are Distracted

Google’s survey of US mobile use revealed that people are most often using more than one device at once. In fact, 77% of people reported using a computing device while watching television.

Myth #3 – Mobile Should Support a Pared-Down Set of Tasks

Myth #4 – Users are all Thumbs

typical tablet posture

Myth #5 - Mobile has Matured

Looking at this from a different point of view, mobile design can’t possibly be considered mature, because the number of companies offering a complete, satisfying mobile experience is so small. While people are using their mobile devices two-plus hours a day, they are still running into sites optimized for desktop viewing or stuck with incomplete mobile experiences.

Myth #6 – Mobile is Different

A person’s intentions don’t change based on the device he or she uses. We need to look at the user’s experience across devices as a single experience.

• Organize your content in rows
• Make your category headings stand out
• Use partially visible content as a navigational cue
• Avoid making multiple items on the page swipable
• Consider a split view for less back button hitting

• 4 converging forces: Sturgeon’s law, activity vs. experience, market maturity, and the Kano model. This creates a perfect storm.
• Building user experience teams that can work in this storm is tricky. If we want teams to build great experiences, need different skills like copy writing, information architecture, design process management, user research practices. And understanding of technology, roi, social networks, marketing, analytics, business knowledge, story-telling, and more.
• Though the number of skills required is increasing, the number of people on teams is decreasing. We can no longer compartmentalize. We all need to cover more than one skill.
• Invest in Sturgeon’s Law
• Focus on experience over technology & features
• Fill in the gaps between the activities
• Ensure you meet basic needs while you look for delighters
• Build in a feedback process. Feedback: “In the last six weeks, have you spent more than two hours watching someone use your or your competitor’s design?” More than any other activity, this will help improve your user experience because people will be using your design and experiencing the good and bad parts.
• Create your experience vision. Vision: “can everyone on the team describe the experience of using your design five years from now?” The technology will change but the overall experience will not.
• Celebrate learning from taking risks. Culture: “In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?” These are all learning opportunities.