Partner Article

Mobile-Oriented Design Is Not About Devices Anymore

Once designers got used to the set of tools necessary for the creation of mobile applications, the industry landscape changes. Today, there are so many confusing devices like wearables that add only more complicatedness to the work of IT guys. Contemporary products are intended to be adaptable for multiple devices and designers are experiencing hard times while getting used to constantly changing technology. Nowadays, it’s more about mobility than mobile then it comes to design approach. Rather than concentrate on the development for one device, designing for mobility is a much more multipurpose ecosystem for the design process. Mobility is beneficial in terms of design because it can be carried by any combination of devices. Mobility allows designers to abstract from a single device and study the design environment.

Focus On the Context, Not The Device

For quite some time, it was common to believe that mobile devices and tablets are the only possible touchpoints to find out our background since they were the only representative of smart portable technology. However, for the modern world, that’s no longer true because now we have smart glasses, smartwatch, fitness trackers, pedometers and other wearables that contain a sensor. Today technology collects a great amount of data about who we are, what we do and where we go and uses not only mobile devices to do this.

Thus, in the real world, the volume of information about our context that a platform or application can catch rely upon not only a single device but the merge of all sources of information. Designers need to take into consideration all devices that can be in user’s possession at a particular time.

Focusing on the context also involve designing for situations when the data is limited or unavailable. In particular, this can be applied in cases when you design for a specific device and gather information under certain conditions. For instance, when geolocation services are the only way to collect data.

Responsiveness Has a Different Meaning Now

It guys want to learn more about users’ background to meet their requirements, comply with their needs and, of course, receive more money. In that case, their purchase is just a part of a deal, because no one will give up his or her money for free; they need something valuable in return. Thereby, users provide you with necessary information in exchange for the value they can get. And you can give them this value by responding.

The definition of “responsive” has been distorted and misinterpreted and, as a result, limited to the ability to adapt the design for a variety of screens. It’s necessary to fully realize the meaning of this word and then bring back the full concept of “responsiveness” that stands for the ability to respond and initiate a conversation with users. Thus, responsive interface regards changeable environment in a certain way. For instance, the application can adjust the brightness depends on the time of a day or work offline when the Internet connection has been lost. That’s responsiveness as well, however, designers prefer not to pay attention to this side of “responsive design”.

In order to learn more about user’s background, designers use support tools, for example, analytics that provides an information about the ones who visited the website or used an application. However, they pay attention only to what has already happened. But what if you begin to use analytics and respond in real-time? Taking advantages of the mobility helps to concentrate on user’s needs and establish a better communication with them.

Notifications Rule

Despite the recent trend of the large screen smartphones, screens started to get both smaller and more functional. Smaller visual interfaces are aimed to decrease the time we spend staring at the screen and focused only on the sets of information we need at this very moment. In the majority of cases, such effect is achieved by applying notifications.

There are three key points about notifications:

They are brief and simple;
They don’t require complex design skills and, in fact, the possible design turns are quite limited;
Push notifications interrupt users forcing him to make an action, while pull notifications provide users with information or confirmation upon request.

So, the value of an application is determined by the content it can present at a given moment. From this point of view, app UX is minor compared to the notifications. Most of the last don’t even require the full access to the application (particularly true for the Android).

It imposes a large imprint on a worth of information delivered by the application regardless the beauty of the design. It doesn’t mean that the importance of applications is going to melt. Great apps provide a certain experience that audience doesn’t want to give up so quickly.

However, for every designer, it’s better to keep in mind that notifications are the points that stimulate the user to engage and interact with an application. Design paradigm that states for “notification-first” empowers the value of an application to be delivered via a broad range of media. Furthermore, it teaches to consider the context before layouts, transitions and color pallets.

To Be Context-Aware

If the points made above made you think about including more notification into default settings of an app, you should better stop doing so. Most of the applications annoy users with inappropriate push notifications that deliver that content they haven’t requested, expected or wanted. Notifications is a way to deliver a value of the content, not bother users with something they are not interested with.

This brings software developers to the context-aware strategy.

Technology allows us to access the context, however, designers need to understand what it means, otherwise, it’s a bunch of useless, random information captured by sensors. That’s why it’s necessary to conduct the research and study user’s background in order to ensure better clients’ satisfaction.

Now It’s Not The Right Time To Be Lazy

As you can see, the mobile-oriented design does not consider the type of the device in the first place. Mobility implies a lot of things from widely-known responsiveness in the familiar form (adjust to the screen sizes) to consideration of the context that defines user’s desires.

Thus, UX design is getting more and more complex on a daily basis. Today, more than ever, designers need to be open-minded, thoughtful, collaborative and careful about the audience they are designing for. Moreover, it will not be superfluous to deepen the knowledge of available technologies and newest trends to meet customers’ needs and demands.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Victor Terekhovskyi .