Don’t design for mobile, let’s go for mobility

This Cmsmart design article argues that designers should plan for mobility, not just mobile, since wearables and connected devices mean real context comes from many touchpoints rather than one screen. It reframes responsive design as actively listening and communicating with users across unpredictable, changing environments.

To capture the current taste as well as the demands of industry, the most accurate and simplest way is looking at device landscape. At this moment, the biggest trend is smartwatches and other connected wearables. If you are the fans of anime, Energy meter glass is no longer only in the imagination anymore, the items in comic can totally come to our real life. If you search on the Internet, products like SmartWatch (smart meter) and Google Glass (wearables) is one of the hottest products, most of giants such as Samsung, Google, Apple, Sony, etc. have a market share in this segment. In short, the fact leads to the future when mobility, rather than mobile, will take a higher position in changing environment. Mobility means a broader approach to design, it requires us broader thinking and to zoom out from specific devices to look at the ecosystem we tend to design.

Mobility is about the context, not the device.

In reality, the determinant of how much of our context an app or platform can capture is a combination of several touchpoints, but not a single device. In other words, Context-awareness refers to the case that the amount of information is limited or even unavailable. Even when we are designing for a single, known device: under certain conditions, data access or location services can be unreliable or cease to function entirely, it is still true.

Redefining “Responsive”

The fullest and perspicuous meaning of responsive should be mentioning to the ability to respond, andestablishing a communication with the user. A great and truly responsive interface needs to satisfy the condition that is actively listening to an unpredictable environment, from being aware of a lost Internet connection to responding to a sudden heart rate change, and other related things.

Screens are slowly reducing their presence

Screens are getting smaller and becoming more capable, that’s the truth. In this era, visual interfaces are not only in shape of glowing glass rectangles, the availability of auditory and haptic feedback will provide us more choices in communicating with our users and reinforce messages. Mobility is on a pair with unobtrusiveness; our systems should adapt to users.

Designing Notification-first

Due to the variety as well as continuous changes of media, it is necessary to simplify the way information transferred by lowest common denominator: notifications. Three main characteristics of ideal notifications are simple and brief, limited in ability of designing and actively interrupting the user. Notifications and its other form like cards or bite-sized units of content will drive user engagement and interaction for many apps. Prioritizing notification-first will bring your value’s app to multiple media and forces you to think on valuable information first and transitions, layouts and color palettes second.

Designing around bits of value tied to context

Notification is actually useful, this fact is undeniable but when it is abused, users may be interrupted to deliver content that they have never requested. Notifications should be designed as the technique to deliver value rather than an opportunity to buzz users into turning back to apps.

Technique gives us with data to build context, but we still need to understand the context. Firstly, you should study it carefully then conceptualize better products and services and infer properly the context to which we will respond.

You can read more article in https://magentothemesfree.net/

Further reading

• Think with Google mobile insights
• Statista mobile commerce research