This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post here.
Sometimes, mobile products appear so simple that they feel obvious, as in anybody could make one, or frivolous, as in they will soon be out of fashion. Truth is, the most beautiful mobile products are the result of an enormous amount of work.
Mobile designers rely on two types of design elements: focusing and expanding. Focusing elements build trust by being predictable. Once trust is established, expanding elements allow the experience to be personalized to a user’s moods and environment.
Focusing design elements provide easy access to the information a user is looking for.
Focusing design elements can be an obvious call to action like the “Ok” button of a subscription form or a navigation bar, but they also manifest as more subtle, sometimes seamless interactions that just as effectively immerses people in the world around and deepens their relationship to it.
They are a necessary component of a solid relationship between a user and a mobile product. They build trust, respect, and familiarity over time. They make life easier for users by establishing simple and predictable rules of communication. Through them, mobile products add transactional value and with time, they become indispensable, almost as an external limb would.
On the home screen of your smartphone, a focusing design element might be the red badge with a number at the top right corner of the app icon. It conveys that something new has happened since you last checked that screen. You missed something and need to get up to speed on what’s going on with your friends. Time to reconnect!
Focusing design elements come in five types:
Focusing design elements build trust, respect, and familiarity over time. As trust builds, users start to expect more. This requires access to personal information which is where expanding design elements come in.
Expanding design elements enable deep personalization to a user’s mood, time and place.
Expanding design elements look like a simple request for permission. Permission to access a user’s address book, or to track their location, or to send them so-called push notifications. They enable mobile products to mesh with their users, to become extensions of their bodies and minds.
Users get more value out of doing less because the product itself notifies them about ways they can use it to simplify their life when and where it matters. Expanding design elements make a product so easy to use that they let us know when we should use them.
Expanding design elements come in two types:
Because of how powerful they are, push notifications should be handled with utmost care. Mobile companies’ efforts to deliver push notifications will be wasted if users opt out of receiving them or decide to turn them off because they feel spammed or interrupted at a bad time or for the wrong reason.
In mobile, design gets out of the way because mobile products exist to enhance rather than obstruct a user’s connection with the real world. Mobile designers rely on two types of elements: focusing and expanding. Focusing design elements build trust by making it easy to do something that seems hard to do. Expanding design elements personalize people’s experiences and deepen their connection to their environments. Mobile products that can do that become virtual extensions of their users’ minds and bodies.
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