July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Xanadu founder and product strategist Mariya Yao

You put in a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build your app only to launch and discover your product’s not the blockbuster success you fantasized it would be. Sound familiar?

If you’ve built an app people want yet you aren’t retaining users, you may have usability issues that are spoiling long-term engagement.

Luckily the internet has made it much easier to perform methodical studies on how people use and think about your app. We’ll be discussing user experience and more at VentureBeat’s upcoming Mobile Summit.

Meantime, here are some tools and techniques you can use to flush out problems in your mobile app design.

Get a professional evaluation

Non-designers make a lot of rookie mistakes that violate basic design and usability principles. Experience design professionals can flag many of these problems in usability audits of your product. Before you start testing with real users, consider getting an expert evaluation using services like uTest.

Check if people get your value proposition

You may think your landing page perfectly articulates why your app is awesome, but your wording might be unclear or unconvincing to others. Test this by using Clue which lets you quickly create a memory test you can use to see what users actually recall from your product page.

Track the right metrics

You can’t learn if you don’t measure. Flurry and Google both offer free basic app analytics like user session lengths and frequency of use. Advanced mobile analytics platforms like Kontagent, Localytics, and Apsalar offer additional features such as sophisticated user segmentation, detailed usage breakdowns, and flexible tools for measuring retention and conversion.

Record real users as they try your app

Trying to find local testers who match your target user profile and set up in-person usability studies is incredibly time-consuming. If you need user feedback quickly, try remote mobile usability testing services such as User Testing and Userlytics, which offer recorded videos of target users using your app for the first time and vocalizing what they find confusing.

Use heatmaps to track user actions and paths

Users often use your app in all sorts of unintended ways. On mobile, you can use touch-tracking tools like Heatma.ps, to visualize user taps and gestures. Heatma.ps also builds user paths to show you how people navigate your app and where they bounce. Learn if users pay attention to the right things and stick around long enough to take important actions.

Split-test different design assumptions

Split-testing, also known as A/B testing, refers to running multiple different designs in parallel to determine which one performs best. Services like Swrve, LeanPlum, and Arise.io make it easy for non-technical people to design and test multiple alternatives such as different tutorial screens or variable pricing for in-app purchases.

Results from mobile split-testing are often counter-intuitive. For example, Swrve customers discovered that dramatically increasing the cost of top-grossing in-app purchases surprisingly did not result in a decline in sales.

Discuss your design feedback with your team

Once you’ve done all this user testing, where do you keep track of all your design feedback? Notable is a collaboration tool from the creators of Clue that lets you bulk upload and annotate screen shots of your apps in order to share and discuss your feedback notes with your team.

What are your favorite mobile usability testing tools and techniques? Let me know in the comments below or tweet at me at @thinkmariya.

photo credit: premasagar via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

These days it’s not enough just to create a mobile app. To truly compete, you need an app that takes full advantage of the huge leaps we’ve seen in mobile design.

Kleverbeast, a new app creation platform for the iPad and Android tablets that is kicking off its beta test today, aims to unlock the best of modern tablet app design to just about anyone with a drag-and-drop interface.

With its focus on design, Kleverbeast is a step beyond current code-free app makers like iBuildApp (and plenty of others). And since its designs look high-end, you won’t need to worry about hiring a developer to truly make an impression with your app. For anyone in a design-related business, having a slick mobile app could be the difference between making a sale and losing a customer.

“We’ve looked at those do-it-yourself app creators, and we think our user experience is fundamentally better,” said Dinesh Moorjani, co-founder of Kleverbeast and the CEO of IAC’s startup incubator Hatch Labs. “We wanted to make it affordable and we’re not targeting developers.”

Kleverbeast subscription plans start at $29 a month, which Moorjani claims is “two orders of magnitude” lower than hiring a professional developer to create something similar. Creating an app with the platform can take anywhere from 15 minutes to a few hours, but it’s a far simpler process than other tools like PhoneGap and Appcelerator (based on my experience with those tools).

Moorjani and Kleverbeast’s other co-founder, Harman Kochar, showed me several apps built on the platform, and they were all gorgeous and surprisingly distinct. The platform is currently being used by major names like Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi and Emmy-winning photographer Lawrence Schiller. All of the apps sported slick and dynamic interfaces, but they were also all very different. You won’t have to worry about making a cookie-cutter app with Kleverbeast.

New York City-based Kleverbeast was founded in 2011 and has raised $2 million in seed funding internally. The company is planning to kick off another round of financing in the next few months.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

When a new medium emerges, eventually services change. TV initially aped radio before it found its own format and distinctive voice. The effect of the tablet on service delivery is only now becoming clearer.

Tablets are interesting territory, as they’re somewhere in between the traditional categories of desktop and mobile. This means they also subvert the “lean forward vs. lean back” model for thinking about how people use different platforms.

Tablets satisfy media consumption in ways that a typical smartphone screen just can’t compete with. They are comfortably used in many different contexts: for business use, for browsing while lying on the couch, and for reading and watching movies while traveling. They also have broad demographic appeal, children and older generations alike are fans of the tablet and such a wide reaching appeal makes business sense.

The combination of this ease of use and its demographic appeal is transformative. So with this “in between” device pulling us in new, interesting directions, what impact will that have on digital design?

Playful approaches
As the tablet has become an object in many homes, one of the exciting developments has been how designers have used the physicality of the object, and its place in the physical world, to create new kinds of experiences.

Toca Boca, a Swedish “play studio,” makes digital toys for kids. One of its games, Toca Tea Party, turns the iPad into a table that becomes the setting for a tea party. The player then sets the table, with one place on each of the four sides of the tablet. They can then sit with their dolls, bears, or friends around the “table” and enjoy the tea and cake while a radio plays old-time music. It’s a delightful experience that brings together the child’s treasured objects with a new digital setting, blurring the boundaries of physical and digital.

Design will always need to be visually stunning for any new service to succeed. Yet more than this, any experience that is designed for the tablet must have a decidedly post-PC feel.

Liquid experiences
Now that smartphones are ubiquitous and tablets more and more commonplace, users want services that move fluidly between platforms. For many people, the Kindle app has significantly increased the number of books they’re able to read, because now your book is always with you on your phone, wherever you go. At home or on longer trips, the switch to tablet often happens, as the larger screen enables a better reading experience. It is a far more comfortable and civilized experience to read a tablet in bed than to haul the laptop in there. These liquid experiences, provided best by services such as the Kindle and Instapaper, ask the device itself to get out of the way and become as light and convenient as paper. The service is the dominant thing, allowing us to use it wherever we are, in whichever way is most convenient to us at the time. The insight for design is to think not so much about the tablet itself, but what the service could be if it could permeate our lives, wherever we are.

Responsive design
In line with the idea of paying attention to new devices in order to ignore them, is the growing use of responsive design for web services. Responsive design involves designing for the Web so that the interface adapts to work for whichever screen size a user views the site on. The most oft-cited example of responsive design done correctly is the Boston Globe site, but many smaller sites use the technique, and we’ll see it increasingly in the corporate market. This “designing for the tablet along with every other device” will become even more necessary as the number of new devices and screen sizes continues to grow.

Native gestures
Multi-touch devices have been on the market for a while, and we are now starting to see new approaches to design using touch interfaces. For example, the Clear app is a to-do list app that doesn’t use buttons at all in its interface. Rather, it uses gestures and taps to create a smooth and delightful experience.

Market segmentation
On a market level, we can expect to see tablet size segmentation, ranging from small, to medium (iPad) and large – catering for all budgets, age groups, and usage requirements. Dual-screen clamshell designs will come to market as the screen size drops on some models.  Moreover, the way we use a tablet will change. It will become the new hard disk and ultimately the container of all our personal content, in a similar way to the DVR today.

Finally, we’ll see tighter integration between tablets and other devices such as smartphones, PCs, and the TV. In the living room for example, the tablet has a natural role as a screen that can be used in conjunction with the TV, while acting as a control screen.

These transitions will create a new dimension of experience beyond just the screen that will change the way the user interacts with the tablet. The form factor of the tablet allows new kinds of integration into our environment. We’ve already begun to see this trend emerging in retail with companies like Sephora and its in-store iPad displays (pictured) that create a personalized experience for shoppers.

Yet, on a far grander scale, the tablet will impact not only digital design but also every facet of society, from the provision of services to the way we work. It will be one of the most pivotal technological changes we have seen to date.

Mark Curtis is chief client officer and founder of service design consultancy Fjord. He will be giving the opening fireside chat at VentureBeat’s MobileBeat conference next week (July 10-11) as well as moderating a breakout session titled “Tabula Rasa: The Tablet Reset”.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

[Top image credit: Tyler Olson/Shutterstock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

There are a lot of ways mobile apps are changing how we view our world and consume media. And while some are revolutionizing productivity or remodeling business presentations, others are pushing the boundaries of art, nature, and storytelling.

The following six jaw-dropping apps have turned our tablets on their ears by re-imagining what the form is capable of producing, striving beyond the usual boundaries to become something both impressive and exciting. Anyone making a tablet app these days needs to up their design game to be truly competitive, and these apps set the bar very high indeed.

Astronomy Picture of the Day by Concentric Sky

Developed in partnership with NASA, the Astronomy Picture of the Day (also called APOD) features decades of high-resolution photos of space hand-selected by NASA astronomers, who also write the included descriptions. There are new photos added every day, and the app allows you to find photos by date or shake the phone for a random image, save photos and share them with friends. And that’s all well and good, but the stars of the show here are the astounding images themselves, showing the vast skies above, from interstellar dust clouds and nebulas to volcanoes and telescopes.

iTunes (free), Android (free); Video demo

Al Gore — Our Choice

This app, which was designed to accompany Gore’s book of the same name, examines the causes of global warming and the solutions being enacted to combat its effects. The app itself changes the way you read and experience a book by melding seamlessly with the photography, interactive graphics, animations, maps, and documentary footage contained within the app’s many functions. A narrative from Gore turns it into a portal to experience the book through videos, photos and infographics that turn your tablet into a powerful learning aid. Charts and data are entirely reimagined; sliding your finger along the screen allows you to see the world’s population grow, and blowing into the microphone turns the blades of a wind turbine. The exquisite photos can be enlarged and pinpointed on a map, making anything you see in the book, explorable in the app.

iTunes ($4.99); Demo video

National Geographic & Fotopedia

National Geographic and Fotopedia teamed up for two incredible journeys — one is through Burma, the other is a bird’s-eye view of France. Both feature the stunning images of the planet and its people that fans have come to expect from National Geographic; the Burma tour features over a thousand photos, while the France app touts over two thousand professional aerial shot. Both also have interactive maps, slideshows, wallpapers, options to share, and a trip builder feature, which, after taking these virtual tours, you may very well be tempted to use. The magnificent photos coupled with stories, history, and geography make for an engrossing experience.

Android fans get a slightly different options in the National Geographic app which acts as more of a companion to the magazine with photos and categories such as news, pace and photo of the day.

Dreams of Burma: iTunes (Free)

Above France: iTunes (Free)

National Geographic; Google Play (Free)

Living Earth World Clock

Hands down the most strikingly beautiful world-clock app available, the Living Earth World Clock provides clock, weather, and alarm features with a live 3D simulation of the planet at the current moment in time. It also has global weather and forecasts around the world, and will display sunrise and sunset borders as they are happening in real-time. Clouds will streak across your tablet as they are moving across the sky outside your window; tropical storms appear on your screen as they are happening. The alarm clock can be synched with your music playlist, waking you to the song of your choice.

iTunes ($0.99)

deviantART Muro

Here’s the thing… technically deviantART Muro isn’t an a tablet app. What it is, is an incredibly versatile treat for the eyes crafted out of glorious HTML5. Muro is a drawing app that works right within the web browser on any tablet (or computer), as long as that tablet’s browser runs HTML5 (which at this point is pretty much all of them — including the iPad’s Safari). Muro doesn’t require Flash or a special plug-in and it works with both touchscreens and Wacom’s pressure-sensitive drawing tablets. Muro users create some astoundingly beautiful 2D digital artwork, which can be easily shared using a solid set of drawing tools and a variety of filters to blur, sharpen, and emboss. Perhaps the best part of this web app is browsing the works of all the other phenomenally talented Deviant-artists.

On the web (Free); Demo video on Chrome

The Numberlys

This gem from Moonbot Studios is a story-in-an-app celebration that’s half Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, half Pixar-style genius animation (that’s no coincidence as Moonbot Studios was co-founded by a former Pixar employee. Read the full story of the Academy Award winners at Moonbot). Part story, part adventure, part mystery, and part game, the Numberlys follows five little friends who live in a black and white world where only numbers exist until they create the alphabet by jumping, spinning, smashing, and pulling apart numbers with tools. The video is instantly charming, intriguing, and astoundingly lovely all at once. The very cool companion website is equally fun and imaginative. Visually beautiful, unique, and highly enjoyable, It’s an app worth buying a tablet for.

iTunes ($5.99); Video