Mobile Interface Redesign for Improved Usability
Written on Tuesday, April 12, 2011
An excellent post from UX design guru Jakob Nielsen - if you're in this field and don't know him stop your work now, go read his stuff and go back to your work a different person.
In one of his latest posts he goes through the redesign of an already good-enough mobile interface into one that would follow all of his (and his team's) suggested mobile usability guidelines for mobile website design. Here's some key points from the article:
Head on over for more details on the changes they made, as well as more info.AllKpop does many things right:
- Most important of all, it supports a task that's perfect for mobile use: celebrity gossip. We've known since our first mobile usability studies in 2000 that killing time is a killer app for mobile. Many other tasks make little sense in the mobile scenario; no matter how great the design, the mobile versions wouldn't get much use and creating them is a waste of time.
- Almost as important, it has a separate mobile version. Desktop computers and mobile devices are so different that the only way to offer a great user experience is to create two separate designs — typically with fewer features for mobile.
- Because the server auto-senses whether they're using a mobile or a desktop device, users don't have to manually choose their version. As we know from testing, usability drops dramatically when the mobile and full sites have different URLs because users often end up with the wrong user interface.
- Touch targets for each headline are fairly large.
- Content-carrying keywords usually appear at the beginning of the headlines. For this site, the pop star's name is the most important information for users, and it typically appears first.
Our redesign included 10 major changes:
- Fewer features
- Bigger touch targets.
- Full headlines
- Enhanced scannability
- Even more information scent
- Using pop star photos instead of date icons.
- Room for 4 full story tiles without scrolling.
- Showing the publication date only as a divider between stories published on different dates.
- Adding more space between the navigation bar's two options so users are less likely to touch the wrong one.
- Labeling the drop-down menu instead of simply denoting it by a triangle.
Posted in
mobi,
mobile apps
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I really liked this article a lot. I found it very interesting, like where you talked about how a "separate mobile version" is necessary. I very much agree, and completely hate when you're on a website on your phone and you have to enlarge it, to just read the text! I found this wonderful software that I think you'll really be interested in because it very much goes a long with this concept. It's called Web2Mobile, and it takes only 3 steps to make a mobile site. Take a peek at it, Web2Mobile.co I hope you do use it, and like it! Again, this article was great. Keep up the great tech-savvy work!
well marketing always a key factor for Technology.
Very Interesting and informative article about mobile websites. Particularly I find it very informative because my experiences when surfing the web through my mobile phone have been not that pleasant. Why? because there are not that many websites that have gone mobile yet! so I really hate when I have to scroll to a side, zoom in, scroll up to only find a phone number address or just some info.
When everybody is going mobile, I do not understand why many companies are still hesitating to go mobile and deepen the reach of their audience!
It is not that is difficult to do it because today there are many companies providing mobile solutions where you can build a website instantly, like for example http://Build.mobi. As I was researching about mobile solutions, This platform offers the possibility to easily create and manage one website or multiple websites very easy.
I must say that it is one of the best post I have ever read. Thanks a lot for sharing such nice information.