Micro-hints for User Experience
Challenges of mobile apps
Smartphones have disrupted our interaction with devices, moving away from keyboards & mice to gesture-based touches & swipes. Since the proliferation of smart devices, traditional gadgets i.e. computers and laptops have been restricted to content creation machines with big screens. The combination of keyboards and mice work beautifully in this setting and few interactions are sufficient to complete any action. On the other hand, handheld smartphones & tablets are content-consumption, portable devices where gesture actions are the best interface mechanisms. It makes sense, one can’t have keypads especially when they eat into real estate that can be used for content.
Screen size v/s experience shift
As we go back-and-forth between our machines and handheld devices millions of times every day, there is a need for seamless transition and good user experience. As screen size shrinks, visual design (VD) morphs from a show-it-all to highlighting primary workflows compartmentalising non-important flows behind menus. However, as more activities go mobile, there are many more primary workflows that don’t get visual space. Systems reach a limitation under the pure VD thought process, but here’s where user interaction design takes over.
It is an experience problem more than a design problem.
There are different ways of solving this challenge, but doing it without additional cognitive load on users is the sweet spot, we do just that through Micro-hints - subtly nudge users to complete specific actions based on their activities.
What are these ‘micro-hints’?
Excellent question! You have seen them, but generally don’t register in your mind unless you are finicky for detail. Here are some examples; spend sometime thinking about which ones work well and which don’t.
For the curious, here’s some more reading about tooltips and inspiration (here& here).
Humans are pattern recognition animals sensitive to even tiny variations in their environment. It’s amazing how quickly you can pickup on minor variations (a few pixels here and there) on your apps. That’s our leverage; by making subtle visual changes aka nudges, we grab the user’s complete attention to convey any message. You get the timing right for these messages and jackpot! However, the big risk is if a hint is off by even a couple of seconds, it fails the purpose.
You will repost this.
Solution: Set rules to determine when hints show up. Using Jedi mind trick (oh it’s real!), users proactively get all the information they need without looking for it. It gets better, this scope extends into other segments like marketing, navigation, feedback, support and training.
Why now?
I see two reasons (would love to hear more thoughts on this):
- Different apps have different navigation patterns despite ground rules set by various Interface Guidelines and these guidelines are limited by it’s scope in addressing the problems of in-app contextual help.
- Increased capabilities making apps feature-rich. Irrespective of whether it’s used by individuals or custom-built for enterprises, much of these features go unnoticed by users because they do not discover them.
With short attention spans, those first few precious seconds of app engagement determine a valuable user or 1-star review on Google Play or App Store. When it comes to internal business apps, they are designed to save time and energy for employees and it is a failure if app does not do this.
So What?
Mobile users look for instant solutions instead of navigating through the maze of hamburger or three-dot menus to find help section. Personally, I don’t tap many 100s of characters over chat or email to report a problem and definitely don’t jump through multiple hoops inside IVR. Micro-hints however, fit the bill of instant solutions. They are subtle, always in the background and never the primary focus of users. They are not in-your-face despite having many micro touchpoints. Combined with the right timing, micro-hints work wonders to engage users in new dimensions. All apps need to do is anticipate when users need a nudge and be quick to act on it based on prior data.
Here’s an example of one type of micro-hint (In this e.g., as users navigate in the app, contextual help button pops-up to guide user on subsequent actions using tooltips). More to follow.
Next steps
We’ve been working on it for a year now with alpha and beta releases and early customers. For us, it’s just the beginning with customers sharing feedback on what worked, what did not and how do we build on top of what we have today. We are launching on V1.0 product on 1st August 2017, but write to me for a sneak preview.
It is so good, so good, really bigly good.
