July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Parham Aarabi teaches a graduate course on Advanced Mobile User Interfaces and is the CEO of ModiFace.

When conceptualizing your mobile app’s user interface, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. Some of the basic things such as clarity of interface, consistency from one view to the next, and making sure that tapping on any button or UI element provides feedback to the user are fairly straightforward and are generally, though not universally, followed by most app designers.

There are a few things, however, that are often ignored which can equally impact the user experience.  Below are some of these often-ignored UI design elements:

1 – Expert vs. novice users – the tale of two audiences

Often, we think of our app users as a ubiquitous set of users with similar intentions and expertise.  However, there are often several distinct user groups with different intentions and levels of expertise.

Novice users, for example, tend to move slower throughout the application, are prone to making more touch errors, and are more uncertain about the functionality of each button. Expert users, on the other hand, tend to have the app elements memorized and move quickly and with intent throughout the app.

When creating your app’s user interface, you want to make it efficient enough for your expert users while being informative and simple enough for novice users.

2 – Ideal button size

This is a fairly obvious issue.

Button sizes are generally limited by the size of our fingers, and so if they are too small, users will be unable to touch them accurately.  Button widths below 1cm are harder (and slower) to touch.  Aside from the minimum size, there are some benefits to non-uniform button sizes (they give an indication to novice users as to which button is more important).

As a general rule of thumb, the size of a button should be proportional to the square root of the likelihood that an expert user would need to select it (there are more scientific reasons behind the size-proportional-to-root-probability rule, but that is a discussion for a different day).

3 – UI location

Usually, application UI elements are either placed at the bottom of the app (most common) or at the top.

However, the way most users hold their phone is by using their thumb as the primary finger for touching buttons. If the user is right-handed, the thumb will more easily reach the region at the bottom right of the screen (or, for left-handed users, the bottom left).  Reaching the top screen corner that is opposite to the thumb is much more difficult, and more intrusive with the application flow since the user has to reach over the screen.

Generally, it is best to keep the primary application buttons at the bottom of the screen, and ideally, to place the more important and often used buttons at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

4 – Accounting for motion

The location of buttons is not the only consideration related to how we hold our mobile devices.

We also need to keep in mind that the thumb generally has a specific flow direction.  For example, for a right-handed person, circular flows with a pivot point at the bottom right of the screen are much easier than linear flows (flowing out radially).

So if you have a user interface control that requires motion (i.e. a slider, a selection list, etc.), keep in mind how a user is holding the phone and that certain motions are generally more natural for the user.

5 – How much is too much

Some applications tend to pack quite a few buttons into each of the application views.

Now, even if the buttons are of a decent size so that a user can click on them, there is another issue that app designers should be aware of.  The more buttons presented to the user at one time, the more difficult it is for the user to choose one of them (this is especially true for novice users).  It is interesting to note that as an analogy, a touch screen device can be thought of as a communication channel where the goal is to minimize the entropy of the interface (i.e. require the least information from the users for each touch selection).

Generally, most user-friendly apps tend to have an interface entropy under 3.5 bits (the maximum entropy for an interface is approximately 5.5 bits on an iPhone 5, accounting for average finger size and screen size).  What this essentially means is that you should keep the total number of touchable UI elements to less than 10 per view.

There is a lot more involved in creating great mobile user interfaces.  But hopefully you will find some of the above suggestions of benefit.

Parham Aarabi is an Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he teaches a graduate course on Advanced Mobile User Interfaces and directs the Mobile Applications Lab.  He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and was twice selected as a Canada Research Chair.  He has been the recipient of MIT’s TR35 “Top Young Innovator” award and the IEEE Mac Van Valkenburg Award.  He is also the founder and CEO of ModiFace Inc., the leading provider of virtual face simulation and virtual try-on technology.

photo credit: Alexandre Van de Sande via photopin cc

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

Yet another critic has stepped up to call Microsoft’s still-fresh Windows 8 operating system a usability nightmare, saying it is “a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.”

Jakob Nielsen, one of the world’s foremost web usability experts, slammed Windows 8 in a lengthy blog post today. He calls out the OS for hiding features, reducing discoverability, low information density in “Modern” apps, overly active live tiles, and overall reduced power using a single-window interface.

One of the biggest problems Nielsen addresses is Windows 8′s two distinctly different interfaces — the desktop and the “Modern” Start screen merged into one.

Unfortunately, having two environments on a single device is a prescription for usability problems for several reasons:

• Users have to learn and remember where to go for which features.
• When running web browsers in both device areas, users will only see (and be reminded of) a subset of their open web pages at any given time.
• Switching between environments increases the interaction cost of using multiple features.
• The two environments work differently, making for an inconsistent user experience.

Another major problem for Nielsen is how much the OS gives preference to tablets over desktops, something we’ve also noted before.

Windows 8 on mobile devices and tablets is akin to Dr. Jekyll: a tortured soul hoping for redemption. On a regular PC, Windows 8 is Mr. Hyde: a monster that terrorizes poor office workers and strangles their productivity.

This used to be Microsoft’s core audience, and it has now thrown the old customer base under the bus by designing an operating system that removes a powerful PC’s benefits in order to work better on smaller devices.

While Nielsen is down about Windows 8, he at least thinks that Windows 9 could fix these mistakes, just like Windows 7 fixed Vista’s problems.

I have great hopes for Windows 9 on mobile and tablets. Just as Windows 7 was “Vista Done Right,” it’s quite likely that the touchscreen version of Windows 9 will be “Windows 8 Done Right.”

I’ll stay with Win7 the next few years and hope for better times with Windows 9. One great thing about Microsoft is that they do have a history of correcting their mistakes.

While I agree with Nielsen that there are several problems with Windows 8, the OS is an important step for Microsoft to make Windows usable on tablets. I would add one major caveat to Nielson’s criticisms — Windows 8′s desktop environment works extremely well, and using that primarily instead of the Start Screen makes for a mostly good experience with the software. (Read our full Windows 8 review for more.)

I’m in Detroit checking out the local startup scene, and one of the standouts is Are You a Human. The company is reinventing something everyone loves to hate: captchas.

Captchas are those annoying hard-to-read letters and numbers that you need to type into a web form before submitting something or accessing a section of a site. They prove, in effect that you are human — and not a automated spider or bot that is just scraping content or generally being a bad boy.

I spoke to cofounders Reid Tatoris and Tyler Paxton today about Are You a Human’s business, revenue model, competition, and startling growth.

The first problem with captchas, says Tatoris, is that people hate them:

“Twenty-five to 35 percent of people leave a site when they see a captcha,” he told me. “It drives people away.”

Sample captcha replacements from Are You a Human.

The second problem is that they’re hard. Because bots are getting smarter at pattern recognition, captchas have gotten so hard that 25 percent of the time, the people who did stay on the site, leave.

Together with those who leave right away, that’s like getting 10 visitors to your front door, turning three of them away without even talking to them, and then turning away another two when they can’t answer a skill-testing question about the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow.

So Are You a Human does something different.

Instead of testing skill, the company lets you play a little game. For example, it might show you a washing machine, a shirt, and a tire and the ask you to do the laundry. Put the shirt in the washing machine and not the tire and it’s a good bet you’re human.

“We make it fun and engaging,” says Tatoris. “In a survey we did, 98 percent of people preferred Are You a Human to a captcha … and in live random testing, people were 40 percent more likely to submit the form.”

Those are big numbers, and they’re important. Because Are You a Human is fighting two massive enemies: Google and free.

Google-owned ReCaptcha owns about 10 percent to 15 percent of the captcha market, and free, open-source solutions are most of the rest. While ReCaptcha is generally regarded as most secure, it’s also the hardest — something I have personal experience with. Freeware tools are big because they’re free, but they vary in terms of both usability and accuracy.

In addition, ad-supported competitors such as Solve Media are also trying to reinvent captchas with a see-this-ad, type-in-the-name-of-the-company model.

But Are You a Human seems to be doing well in spite of all the competition. Launched just last year, the company’s volume is growing fast — 500 percent in just the last two months to 10 million uses on 2,300 sites. That’s 10 times the volume they had when we last talked to the company.

“Our big push now is growing the number of our publishers and the size of our publishers,” Tatoris told me.

And working on monetization.

The eight-person company has multiple product version: a free version that may include branded games, a subscription-supported version that is ad-free, and a subscription version with customized games for any publisher own brand.

The publisher one is perhaps most interesting — Coke could use it to create a minigame around opening the can and drinking the soda, or GM could create a game focused on parking the car. In other words: on-message targeted games specific to a brand. Potentially, pretty powerful stuff.

Are You a Human started in a University of Michigan startup accelerator, Tech Arb, and it has since raised a large seed round of $750,000 from Detroit Venture Partners. The company will soon be raising a series A round.

But only from humans.

photo credit: Ѕolo via photo pin cc

5 things Google+ does better than Facebook and Twitter — Google+ has only been active for a month, and tech enthusiasts can’t seem to get enough of it. There are a few concrete reasons why: A handful of new features that Google just does better than other social networks.

World of Warcraft subscribers fall for second straight quarter — The number of active subscribers for Blizzard Entertainment’s most popular online game, World of Warcraft, fell in the second quarter of 2011, the second decline in a row.

Microsoft undercuts Google’s Android patent tirade with 2 tweets — Google finally took its Android patent battle to the streets this week. And Microsoft’s response, in the form of two tweets, is sort of hilarious.

19 year old gets $1M to launch a social app. Watch out, Zuckerberg — He has $1 million in the bank, a promising new company and a rolodex that makes Silicon Valley swoon.

Could Google+ be the first prominent open social network? — Google+ has an incredible amount of buzz surrounding it at the moment. But one element the young network lacks is open standards compliance.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, fun, or all of the above:

Excuse me while I turn off your insulin pump — Diabetics beware. It is possible to hack your insulin pump, from a distance, so that it can harm you rather than save your life.

Tesla CEO: Model X unveil coming in December — Tesla Motors will unveil its sport utility electric vehicle sometime in December after finishing up development of an alpha model of the car, chief executive Elon Musk said.

Google self-driving Prius gets into first accident, thanks to human error — For the first time, one of Google’s much-hyped self-driving cars has been in a car accident. But it’s actually a mere human’s fault.

Google+ usability shows promise, but still has a few hitches — Google+ looks unlike anything Google has ever produced, and that’s a good thing.

WTF: Microsoft praised by hacker for “spectacular” security approach Yesterday, one of the independent security researchers at the Black Hat conference praised Microsoft’s progress on improving security.

Yet there’s still plenty of room for improvement in Google+. As is typical for Google, the company is attempting some bold new ideas with the service. But, at least at the moment, not everything is working out well.

If Google can manage to smooth out Plus’s current usability quirks, it has a better chance of stealing away users from Facebook and cementing Plus as the next great social network.

I chatted with Patrick Neeman, director of user experience at Jobvite and creator of Usability Counts, about his thoughts on what works, and what doesn’t, with Google+’s usability.

The good: Circles and followers

Neeman praised the service’s interface, and in particular the Circles feature for grouping friends.

“There’s a few quirks, but what I like about the usability of Google+ is it doesn’t feel like a Google app,” he wrote in an email. “The Circles interface is phenomenal, and it makes me want to organize my friends. Facebook has a better algorithm for matching friends, but Google has a better look and feel, which is quite the flip.”

Many have noted that the Circles implementation, which is full of slick animations, is unusually elaborate for Google. Compared to the Spartan way you manage contacts in Gmail or add appointments in Google Calendar, Google+ Circles seem downright glitzy.

It appears that Google has realized that good usability isn’t just about making interfaces as simple as possible. By making friend grouping fun and engaging — overall making it more human — Google will likely be able to encourage more users to actually sort their friends. (VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig recently listed Circles as something Google+ does far better than Facebook and Twitter.) Facebook’s friend lists, on the other hand, are a chore to deal with.

Neeman also thinks Plus’s use of a follower model is particularly ingenious: “The follower model is the best of Twitter. From a marketing standpoint, this is tremendous, and actually makes Google+ more of a threat to Twitter than Facebook. You still get Friends by matching people who you follow, but they follow you. But you can still build your personal brand by having people follow you.”

He says that he’s been able to drive a decent amount of traffic to one of his side projects, the UX Drinking Game, through Google+ posts alone, even though the service’s audience is still limited.

Just like Twitter, Google+’s follower model means there’s less pressure to follow everyone who follows you. That’s in stark contrast to Facebook, whose friend model assumes reciprocity. For Google+, this means that there’s less stress around dealing with your followers — instead you can just focus on sharing content and actually using the service.

Another Google+ feature Neeman is fond of, and which has earned Google considerable praise, is its emphasis on data portability. In the “Data Liberation” section of your Google+ settings, you can download all of your data from the service, as well as data from individual sections (like your contacts and Circles). Good luck trying that trick with Facebook.

Next page: The bad, mobile apps and sparks

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