Misused mobile UX patterns | Hacker News Reader

Misused mobile UX patterns

medium.com

62 pointskeylimepie11 comments

Some people learn the rules, but the best also learn the exceptions.

1. It only appears like everyone opposes Hamburger menus, but it's really just an obstacle for publishers (blogs, magazines, deals) who are entirely dependent on discovery to drive engagement. Apps with naturally motivated engagement (music players, deep social, stores) do better with the menu.

2. I agree icons should be clear. The best way to design an icon is to search Google images and look for a common icon, pattern, or symbol. This greatly reduces the need to label the icon.

3. Only use gestures that are standardized. Follow the example of major apps by Apple, Google, & Facebook to determine which gestures are most commonly used per platform (iOS, Android). Don't deviate from those patterns unless your app's entire position is to be a gesture-based app.

4. Onboarding should be optional (skip button), informative, and rediscoverable somewhere in the app. Coach marks are only essential for complex screens. Don't show more that one or two highlights else people will ignore everything. Include an obvious "OK" or "Got it!" button.

5. Agree - don't show users an empty screen! That being said, apps have unique needs. Google's collections app expects lots of engagement so it shows the user how to use the app. Lootsy needs users to start selling ASAP so it's motivation is reduce steps towards populating listings.

Haha, I love the bit about pictograms. I have to use Xcode occasionally at work, and it's always a case of hovering over a few dozen buttons trying to guess which one might do what I want.

http://codewithchris.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/img/xcode_5_wor...

It's like that for almost all IDEs. I remember thinking the same thing for Visual Studio, Android Studio, Eclipse...

...what does the tuxedo button do?

It is the "assistant view" which opens a second tab with an editor where it automatically tries to open related files.

Although it is now looking like this: http://i.imgur.com/gA8AwmG.png

Limited space on a screen begs for condensed ways of expressing information and ideas. Icons make a ton of sense compared to sometimes 20-30 char strings.

Other IDEs do the same. I guess it's an special case: all of an IDE's users are pretty damn tech-literate, will probably agree to devote some time to learn its language and tricks, and value screen real state.

I've only had to use XCode a few times, and I felt lost and scared, but surely I also felt like that on my first times with VS.

Great article. I find disturbing how some apps are so hard to use not only by the poor choice of icons, but by not providing immediate and clear ways to perform the most basic actions.

The Youtube app "before" picture is very gory. A hamburger menu and the three-dots actionbar icon? That gives me a bit of a cold sweat.

Common UI interactions on mobile devices are beginning to make me feel old.

https://twitter.com/lukew/status/590911111358242816?lang=en

As best i recall, they come out of a misuse of Fragments elements.

The original idea of Google's Fragments framework was to produce something closer to desktop interfaces on tablets. But interfaces that could also "collapse" to fit the "card stack" thinking of earlier Android.

Meaning that what we now know as the hamburger menu was meant to show up as a sidebar in tablet layout, and as a first layer in phone layout.

Similarly, Fragments gave us the actionbar where earlier there was a dedicated menu button. The icon was for when the number of bar entries didn't fit the available screen space.

Again the thinking seemed to be that the bar would revert back to being the menu on phones.

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