The Elements Of The Mobile User Experience

The mobile user experience encompasses the user’s perceptions and feelings before, during and after their interaction with your mobile presence — be it through a browser or an app — using a mobile device that could lie anywhere on the continuum from low-end feature phone to high-definition tablet.

Creating mobile user experiences that delight users forces us to rethink a lot of what we have taken for granted so far with desktop design. It is complicated in part by mobile-specific considerations that go hand in hand with small screens, wide variations in device features, constraints in usage and connectivity, and the hard-to-identify-but-ever-changing mobile context.

Dissecting the mobile user experience into its key components gives us a conceptual framework for building and evaluating good mobile experiences, within the context of auser-centered approach to designing for mobile. These components shape the mobile user experience — including functionality, context, user input, content and marketing, among others.

The relevance of these elements will change depending on the type of device (feature phone versus smartphone versus tablet) and the presentation interface (app versus Web). This article briefly describes each of these elements and elaborates on each with selected guidelines.

Functionality

This has to do with tools and features that enable users to complete tasks and achieve their goals.

GUIDELINES

• Prioritize and present core features from other channels that have especial relevance in a mobile environment. For an airline, this includes flight statuses and flight check-ins. For cosmetic chain Sephora, it includes supporting in-store shopping via easy access to product reviews on mobile devices.
• Offer relevant mobile-only functionality (like barcode scanning and image recognition), and enhance functionality using the capabilities of mobile devices where possible to engage and delight users. Old Navy’s app serves up surprise games or savings when users snap the logo in a store.
• Ensure that fundamental features and content are optimized for mobile. For example, make sure the store locator shows the nearest stores based on the device’s location, and make the phone numbers click-to-call.
• Include features that are relevant to the business category. For retail websites and apps, this would include product search, order status and shopping cart.
• Offer key capabilities across all channels. Users who sign in should see their personalized settings, irrespective of the device or channel being used. If certain functionality is not offered on mobile, then direct users to the appropriate channel, as TripIt does to set up a personal network.

Information Architecture

This has to do with arranging the functionality and content into a logical structure to help users find information and complete tasks. This includes navigation, search and labeling.

GUIDELINES

• Present links to the main features and content on the landing page, prioritized according to the user’s needs. Mobile Design Pattern Gallery has examples of primary and secondary navigation patterns for mobile, many of which are vertical instead of horizontal as on desktop websites.
• Enable mobile users to navigate to the most important content and functionality in as few taps or key presses as possible. Navigation optimized for small screens is usually broad and shallow instead of deep. While three clicks (or taps) is not the magic number, users need to be able to recognize that each tap is helping them complete their task. Every additional level also means more taps, more waiting for a page to load and more bandwidth consumed.
• Address the navigation needs of both touchscreen and non-touchscreen users. When designing for touch, make sure the tap size of the navigation item is at least 30 pixels wide or tall. Provide keypad shortcuts for feature phones, so that users can enter, say, a number (0 to 9) to quickly access a link:

• Provide navigational cues to let users know where they are, how to get back and how to jump back to the start. Mobile breadcrumbs are often implemented by replacing the “Back” button with a label showing users the section or category that they came from. For mobile websites, use standard conventions, such as a home icon that links back to the start screen, especially when navigation is not repeated on every screen.
• Use concise, clear, consistent and descriptive labels for navigation items and links. While always a good practice, it becomes even more important on tiny mobile devices.

Content

Otherwise known as “the stuff on your website” (as Lou Rosenfeld and Peter Morville refer to it in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web), content is the various types of material in different formats, such as text, images and video, that provide information to the user.

GUIDELINES

• Present an appropriate and balanced mix of content to users (product information, social content, instructional and support content, marketing content).
• Use multimedia when it supports the user’s tasks in a mobile context, adds value to the content or supports the goals of the website. Most of the time, multimedia content is best provided when the user is looking for distraction or entertainment (such as news or funny clips) or when it has instructional value (for example, how to use an app or new feature).
• Always give the user control over multimedia content by not auto-starting video or sound, by allowing the user to skip or stop multimedia content and by being mindful of the bandwidth it takes up.
• Ensure that content is mobile appropriate. Just as we had chunking guidelines when going from print to Web, copy should be written for shorter attention spans on mobile devices. Optimize images and media for the device; this means scaling down for smaller devices and making sure images are sharp enough for the new iPad.
• Ensure that primary content is presented in a format supported on the target device. Even now, websites such as Volkswagen’s ask iOS users to download Flash.

Design

This has to do with the visual presentation and interactive experience of mobile, including graphic design, branding and layout.

GUIDELINES

• Remember the sayings “Mobilize, don’t miniaturize” (popularized by Barbara Ballard) and “Don’t shrink, rethink” (of Nokia). Both make the point that mobile design should not just rehash the desktop design.
• Design for glanceability and quick scanning. Glanceability refers to how quickly and easily the visual design conveys information.
• Maintain visual consistency with other touchpoints and experiences (mobile, app, Web, print and real world) through the use of color, typography and personality. Identifying Amazon in the stack below is easy even though the brand name is not visible.

• Guide users from the initial and most prominent element of the design to other elements to help them complete their tasks. This is known as visual flow. A good design brings together visual elements as well as information architecture, content and functionality to convey the brand’s identity and guide the user.
• Consider both portrait and landscape orientations in the design process. Devices increasingly support multiple orientations and automatically adjust to match their physical orientation. Maintain the user’s location on the page when they change orientation. Indicate additional or different functionality in the new orientation if applicable, as shown by ING:

User Input

This has to do with the effort required to enter data, which should be minimized on mobile devices and not require the use of both hands.

GUIDELINES

• Limit input to essential fields. Or, as Luke Wroblewski says in his book Mobile First, “When it comes to mobile forms, be brutally efficient and trim, trim, trim.” Limit registration forms to the minimum fields required, and use shorter alternatives where possible, such as a ZIP code instead of city and state. My favorite offender of this guideline is Volkswagen’s form to schedule a test drive; the mobile form has more required fields than the desktop version (the extra fields are highlighted below):

• Display default values wherever possible. This could be the last item selected by the user (such as an airport or train station) or the most frequently selected item (such as today’s date when checking a flight’s status):
  
• Offer alternate input mechanisms based on the device’s capabilities where possible. Apps take advantage of quite a few input mechanisms built into devices, including motion, camera, gyroscope and voice, but mobile websites are just starting to use some of these features, particularly geolocation.
• • Use the appropriate input mechanism and display the appropriate touch keyboard to save users from having to navigate their keyboard screens to enter data. Keep in mind that inputting data is more tedious on feature phones that have only a numeric keypad. For non-sensitive applications, allow users to stay signed in on their mobile device; and save information such as email address and user name because mobile phones tend to be personal devices, unlike tablets, which tend to be shared between multiple people.
    

Mobile Context

A mobile device can be used at anytime, anywhere. The mobile context is about the environment and circumstances of usage — anything that affects the interaction between the user and the interface, which is especially important for mobile because the context can change constantly and rapidly. While we often focus on distractions, multitasking, motion, low lighting conditions and poor connectivity, it also includes the other extreme — think using a tablet in a relaxed setting over a fast Wi-Fi connection.

GUIDELINES

• Use device features and capabilities to anticipate and support the user’s context of use. The iCookbook app allows users to walk through a recipe using voice commands — a nice feature when your hands are covered in batter!
• Accommodate for changes in context based on the time of day and when the user is using the app. The Navfree GPS app automatically switches from day to night mode, showing low-glare maps for safer nighttime driving.
  
• Use location to identify where the user is and to display relevant nearby content and offers. A Google search for “movies” on a mobile device brings up movies playing nearby and that day’s showtimes, with links to buy tickets online if available.
• Leverage information that the user has provided, and respect their preferences and settings. After the first leg of a multi-leg flight, TripIt showed me the flight and gate information for my next flight, as well as how much time I had to kill. United’s app did no such thing, even though it knew much more about me. It could have shown me how to get from my current plane to the connecting flight and highlighted the location of the United Club along the way, where I could comfortably spend my two-hour wait, since it knew I was a member.
• Default to the user experience most appropriate for the device (i.e. a mobile experience for small screens, and perhaps a desktop-like experience for tablets), but give users the option to have enhanced features. A big discussion on how to present this to the user recently took place, with Jakob Nielsen recommending a separate mobile website and Josh Clark arguing instead for a responsive design; yet others believe that Nielsen and Clark are both wrong.

ADDITIONAL READING

• “The Context of Mobile Interaction” (0.2 MB, PDF), Nadav Savio and Jared Braiterman
• “On Mobile Context,” Jason Grigsby
  Don’t miss the links to resources on the mobile context near the end.
• “When and Where Are People Using Mobile Devices?,” Luke Wroblewski

Conclusion

Mobile user experience is still a developing field, and opportunities for improvement continue to emerge. We’ve presented an overview of the key elements of the mobile user experience, along with some guidelines to get started in each. Focusing on these individual elements will help us create great overall mobile user experiences for our users.