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Mobile & Tablet Articles & Videos

  • 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.

  • Scaling User Interfaces: An Information-Processing Approach to Multi-Device Design

    Designing for all screen sizes must consider the human–device communication capacity, which depends on users’ memory, device portability, and screen size.

  • Mobile Navigation: Image Grids or Text Lists?

    For mobile navigation, image grids should be saved for deeper IA levels where visual differentiation between menu items is critical.

  • Responsive Design and Intranets and Importance of Content Prioritization

    Two winning intranets—triptic and Abt Associates—use responsive design, prioritize their content, and employ elegant navigation to accommodate and optimize for multiple devices.

  • Availability in the Cross-Channel User Experience

    Don’t limit common activities to a few channels. Identify and support users’ top tasks on all channels and strive to make secondary tasks available.

  • Login Walls Stop Users in Their Tracks

    Demanding that users register or log in before they can use an app or see website information has high interaction cost and defies the reciprocity principle.

  • Instructional Overlays and Coach Marks for Mobile Apps

    Instructions in mobile applications must be designed for optimal scannability, as users tend to dismiss them quickly and do not read thoroughly.

  • Usability Testing for Mobile Is Easy

    Testing phones, tablets, or other mobile devices with real users requires special consideration for recording equipment, room setup, and even the test users.

  • Maps and Location Finders on Mobile Devices

    Maps of business locations may be more visually appealing than a simple list view, but they introduce too many usability issues on mobile devices.

  • Smartwatches Are the Future—But Samsung Galaxy Gear Only Partway There

    The Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch poses unique problems due to the tiny touchscreen. The use of gestures and streamlining content are reasonable solutions, but need to be implemented in a more usable manner.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Shopping Cart or Wishlist? Saving Products for Later in Ecommerce

    On ecommerce sites, saving shopping-cart items for possible later purchase must be discoverable and low-effort.

  • Mobile Login Methods Help Chinese Users Avoid Password Roadblocks

    In China, QR-code scanning and verification codes are popular mobile-login alternatives that circumvent the problem of remembering and typing passwords.

  • 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

    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.