People will read apps based on their experiences, leading them to do things different than what you planned for. It seems simple enough, but as explained thoroughly here, it really isn’t. And the road to that superpower is empathy and research. Our job is to give normal people superpowers by making them immediately understand what a button does. In the end, the main goal of an app is help the user do what the user would like to do. I’m not saying that you should make apps for my grandmother, but it might be helpful to keep her in mind. She’ll probably never replace her phone with the T9 keyboard, even though it (for me) seems way more complicated. It’s no wonder that my grandmother didn’t pick up how to send messages through the iPhone. Having to look through a screen and analyse what 15+ icons/buttons represent is hard work if you have no frame of reference. Some buttons even reveals menus with even more buttons. Maybe just place an icon there?ĭo you know how many buttons there currently is in a conversation page in the Message app in iPhone? 15, plus all the letters and all the messages you can tap. We expect apps to have buttons in the top right corner. We want it to be accessible, but not so much that it takes our attention away from the apps main functionality. We might not want a button that says “Tap here to start search” as it could take up more space than want it to. So how do you design a search-button? Well, now we need to combine what we now know about information architecture and understandable UI components. And since we have pressed a vast amount of buttons before, only small hints make us understand what they are. The default button in iOS actually looks pretty much like the first hyperlinks – it’s just blue text. In apps, we have loads of components that we encounter time and time again, like buttons. So the step in itself might not have been as big, but its consequences were. The hyperlink was a logical next step, based on existing parts. To encounter a hyperlink, you would’ve been on a computer, so you had to know what a digital button was and how to control a pointer with a mouse. But consider this, how would you know what theywere back then? If you were to use 1993 internet today, you’d immediately recognise the underlined blue text as links. A button that shows you something different. Or, as we call them 30 years later, links. How do you design a “search” button? Or… how do you design a button in general? Maybe biggest revolution of the early internet was hyperlinks. Other apps have a search button places on the main page of the app.īut, what is this so called list-icon or the search field? Where will the users look for it? How does the user understand what they represent? The Apple Weather makes you tap a list-icon where they have a search field. Different weather apps have different solutions for this. But which taps? Should it be accessible from the first page? I’m a firm believer in not trying to minimise the amount of taps, but making sure that the user feels in control at all time. Want to see the forecast for other places? As it isn’t defined as the “main” task, that will take a tap or two. You’re most likely interested the forecast for where you currently are. You tapped the weather app – you want to see weather-info! And not just any weather-info, the most informant weather-info. Imagine if the weather app started out by asking what sort if info you’re interested in. In apps, the users expect that the main functionality is accessible instantly. This is easier said than done, as you need to know what the users are interested in and how they would “categorise” the different information and functionality. In other words, making sure that things are where you expect them to be. Information architecture is the art and science of organising data in a logical and weighted order.
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