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Mobile & Tablet Articles & Videos

  • How to Fit Big Tables on Small Screens

    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.

  • Multitasking on Microsoft’s Surface Duo

    The Duo is a two-screen foldable mobile device that enables users to use two applications side by side, but most apps do not take advantage of the two screens. Support for information transfer from one app to the other is limited and multitasking within the same app is at times confusing.

  • Easier Input on Mobile Devices

    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.

  • UX Guidelines for Augmented-Reality Shopping Tools

    Ecommerce AR tools are relatively new, so must be highly discoverable and easy to learn. Calibration issues run rampant, and users must dedicate focused attention to interact with this unfamiliar feature.

  • User Interface Design Fails

    Jakob Nielsen discusses the biggest failures in today's user interface design. (Recorded at the Virtual UX Conference.)

  • Virtual Reality and User Experience

    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.

  • Accordion Icons: Which Signifiers Work Best?

    The caret icon most clearly indicated to users that it would open an accordion in place, rather than linking directly to a new page.

  • Mobile-App Onboarding: An Analysis of Components and Techniques

    Onboarding is the process of getting users familiar with a new interface. It can involve one or more of the following components: feature promotion, customization, and instructions.

  • Mobile Tutorials: Wasted Effort or Efficiency Boost?

    Our research shows that tutorials don’t make users faster or more successful at completing tasks; on the contrary, they make them perceive the tasks as more difficult.

  • Mobile Microsessions

    Notifications, widgets, quick actions, and Siri shortcuts or Google Assistant routines are all ways to support mobile sessions shorter than 15 seconds, with minimal interaction to complete a user goal.

  • Designing Effective Carousels for Websites and Mobile Apps

    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.

  • Simple Design Is Relative

    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."

  • Touch Targets on Touchscreens

    Interactive elements must be at least 1cm × 1cm (0.4in × 0.4in) to support adequate selection time and prevent fat-finger errors.

  • 3 Design Considerations for Effective Mobile-App Permission Requests

    Mobile permission requests are often poorly designed. Consider the content and timing of these requests, avoid dark patterns, and enable users to reverse their decision.

  • Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices: The Vortex

    Many users report anxiety and lack of control over the amount of time they spend online. We call this feeling “the Vortex.”

  • Mobile-Checkout Experience: Tips

    Remember these essential experience elements that are often overlooked or easily forgotten during the mobile-checkout design process.

  • Designing Effective App Permission Requests

    App permission requests are an important part of the overall user experience, yet they are often neglected by app designers. Here are 3 tips for designing them well: get content, timing, and decision reversal right, or users will just say NO.

  • Social Features in Chinese Apps

    Social features (like online communities and experience sharing) are very popular in Chinese apps. This video offers examples and tips for adding social features to your product.

  • The Mobile Checkout Experience

    Optimize the checkout experience on mobile ecommerce channels by taking into account the strengths and limitations of mobile devices. Aim to minimize the number of steps and typing, and take advantage of capabilities such as geolocation and the camera.

  • Five Mistakes in Designing Mobile Push Notifications

    Provide value to users before asking them to receive your app’s notifications; tell them what the notifications will be about. Don’t send notifications in bursts; make it easy to turn them off.

  • How to Fit Big Tables on Small Screens

    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.

  • Easier Input on Mobile Devices

    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.

  • User Interface Design Fails

    Jakob Nielsen discusses the biggest failures in today's user interface design. (Recorded at the Virtual UX Conference.)

  • Virtual Reality and User Experience

    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.

  • Designing Effective Carousels for Websites and Mobile Apps

    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.

  • Simple Design Is Relative

    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."

  • Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices: The Vortex

    Many users report anxiety and lack of control over the amount of time they spend online. We call this feeling “the Vortex.”

  • Mobile-Checkout Experience: Tips

    Remember these essential experience elements that are often overlooked or easily forgotten during the mobile-checkout design process.

  • Designing Effective App Permission Requests

    App permission requests are an important part of the overall user experience, yet they are often neglected by app designers. Here are 3 tips for designing them well: get content, timing, and decision reversal right, or users will just say NO.

  • Social Features in Chinese Apps

    Social features (like online communities and experience sharing) are very popular in Chinese apps. This video offers examples and tips for adding social features to your product.

  • How To Setup a Mobile Usability Test

    There are a lot of elements involved in a mobile usability test. In this video, we'll walk you through an example test setup, including the necessary equipment, and discuss how to prepare for a test.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Scan and Shake: A Lesson in Technology Adoption from China’s WeChat

    QR-code scanning and shake serve as effective ways of communication between the online and the offline worlds and enjoy wider use in China than in the US.

  • Mobile User Behavior in India

    Mobile users in India are concerned with storage and data consumption, share devices, use app lockers for privacy, and log in with one-time passwords.

  • WeChat: China’s Integrated Internet User Experience

    User research finds that tightly integrated services with simple and unified design make people use WeChat; mainly through traditional GUI interactions, not a “conversational UI.”

  • Visual Indicators to Differentiate Items in a List

    Users are 37% faster at finding items within a list when visual indicators vary both in color and icon compared to text alone. If choosing between using color or an icon, icons with strong information scent perform better than color alone.

  • Mobile First Is NOT Mobile Only

    Mobile-navigation patterns make navigation unusable on the desktop and decrease its use. Porting an unchanged UI to a different platform hurts UX.

  • Hamburger Menus and Hidden Navigation Hurt UX Metrics

    Discoverability is cut almost in half by hiding a website’s main navigation. Also, task time is longer and perceived task difficulty increases.

  • Mobile Websites: Mobile-Dedicated, Responsive, Adaptive, or Desktop Site?

    Different approaches to implementing mobile websites have each their advantages and disadvantages. All should follow the same mobile user-experience principles.

  • List Thumbnails on Mobile: When to Use Them and Where to Place Them

    Decide whether and where to display thumbnails for list items based on the images’ importance relative to associated text, on whether images will be displayed for all list items, and on whether the small images are recognizably different from each other.