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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.

  • Basic Patterns for Mobile Navigation: A Primer

    Mobile navigation must be discoverable, accessible, and take little screen space. Exposing the navigation and hiding it in a hamburger both have pros and cons.

  • 3D Touch on iPhone 6S: Embrace the Force

    The iOS gesture poses some physical challenges for users. Designers should take advantage of it to enhance the user experience by making pages previewable and supporting quick access to frequently used features.

  • iOS 9 App Switching and the Back-to-App Button

    App switching in iOS 9 can disorient users in multiple ways. Simple design fixes can significantly improve the user experience.

  • Slider Design: Rules of Thumb

    Selecting a precise value using a slider is a difficult task requiring good motor skills, even if the slider is well designed. If picking an exact value is important to the goal of the interface, choose an alternate UI element.

  • Screen Readers on Touchscreen Devices

    People who are blind or have low vision must rely on their memory and on a rich vocabulary of gestures to interact with touchscreen phones and tablets. Designers should strive to minimize the cognitive load for users of screen readers.

  • Very Large Touchscreens: UX Design Differs From Mobile Screens

    Only a few mobile-design skills and design recommendations translate well to designing for very large touchscreens, as found in kiosks and other nonmobile use cases. Users’ field of vision, arm motion, affordance, and privacy are a few of the different considerations for such screens with up to 380 times the area of a smartphone.

  • Supporting Mobile Navigation in Spite of a Hamburger Menu

    Mobile sites using a hamburger or three-line menu need to support navigation activities throughout the site, in case users don't locate or use the main navigation.

  • Mobile Faceted Search with a Tray: New and Improved Design Pattern

    Displaying faceted-search controls on mobile devices in a ‘tray’ overlay is a new effective solution to the challenge of showing both results and filters on small screens.

  • 4 iOS Rules to Break

    Page control (dots), Submit at top, and the Plus (+) and Move icons are 4 common iOS patterns that cause usability problems in testing.

  • Ad Placement for Mobile

    Extra care is required when designing mobile page layouts that include advertisements, due to the limited screen real estate available. Ads must be displayed where they will not create false floors nor block users from reaching relevant content.

  • A Checklist for Designing Mobile Input Fields

    When you design an input field for use on mobile devices, check whether it satisfies this list of 14 usability requirements.

  • Accordions on Mobile

    Accordions conserve space in mobile designs but they can also cause disorientation and too much scrolling. Easy design fixes improve the usability of these UI elements.

  • The Apple Watch: User-Experience Appraisal

    Smartwatch apps should rely on gestures more than on navigation elements, prioritize the essential, support handoff, and create tailored, standalone content.

  • Large Touchscreens: What's Different?

    Designing for larger-scale touchscreens requires particular attention to input, screen focus, and privacy.

  • Mobile User Experience: Limitations and Strengths

    Mobile design must reflect smartphone constraints and strengths: small screen, short sessions, single window, touch interaction, GPS and other phone features.

  • Progress in Mobile User Experience

    Mobile usability has improved over the past 7 years due to better prioritization of content over UI elements and better understanding of the users’ needs.

  • Multitasking on Mobile Devices

    Mobile-phone users have difficulty combining information from multiple apps. Support for multitasking is inherently limited by the mobile-screen size.

  • Tablet UX Research From the Pioneer Days

    The PenPoint tablet was ahead of its time and too expensive and heavy, but had gestural syntax and personal-productivity benefits that we can still learn from.

  • Nonfiction Books on Tablets: Still a Work in Progress

    Book-reading apps need to support rich hyperlinking, nonsequential navigation, and high-quality, detailed illustrations.

  • Responsive Web Design (RWD) and User Experience

    Responsive design teams create a single site to support many devices, but need to consider content, design and performance across devices to ensure usability.