When conceptualizing your mobile app’s user interface, there are a few things that you should keep in mind. Some of the basic things such as clarity of interface, consistency from one view to the next, and making sure that tapping on any button or UI element provides feedback to the user are fairly straightforward and are generally, though not universally, followed by most app designers.
There are a few things, however, that are often
ignored which can equally impact the user experience. Below are some of
these often-ignored UI design elements:
Often, we think of our app users as a ubiquitous set
of users with similar intentions and expertise. However, there are often
several distinct user groups with different intentions and levels of expertise.
Novice users, for example, tend to move slower
throughout the application, are prone to making more touch errors, and are more
uncertain about the functionality of each button. Expert users, on the other
hand, tend to have the app elements memorized and move quickly and with intent
throughout the app.
When creating your app’s user interface, you want to
make it efficient enough for your expert users while being informative and
simple enough for novice users.
This is a fairly obvious issue.
Button sizes are generally limited by the size of our
fingers, and so if they are too small, users will be unable to touch them
accurately. Button widths below 1cm are harder (and slower) to
touch. Aside from the minimum size, there are some benefits to
non-uniform button sizes (they give an indication to novice users as to which
button is more important).

As a general rule of thumb, the size of a button
should be proportional to the square root of the likelihood that an expert user
would need to select it (there are more scientific reasons behind the
size-proportional-to-root-probability rule, but that is a discussion for a
different day).

Usually, application UI elements are either placed at
the bottom of the app (most common) or at the top.
However, the way most users hold their phone is by
using their thumb as the primary finger for touching buttons. If the user is
right-handed, the thumb will more easily reach the region at the bottom right
of the screen (or, for left-handed users, the bottom left). Reaching the
top screen corner that is opposite to the thumb is much more difficult, and
more intrusive with the application flow since the user has to reach over the screen.
Generally, it is best to keep the primary application
buttons at the bottom of the screen, and ideally, to place the more important
and often used buttons at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

The location of buttons is not the only consideration
related to how we hold our mobile devices.
We also need to keep in mind that the thumb generally
has a specific flow direction. For example, for a right-handed person,
circular flows with a pivot point at the bottom right of the screen are much
easier than linear flows (flowing out radially).
So if you have a user interface control that requires
motion (i.e. a slider, a selection list, etc.), keep in mind how a user is
holding the phone and that certain motions are generally more natural for the
user.
Some applications tend to pack quite a few buttons
into each of the application views.
Now, even if the buttons are of a decent size so that
a user can click on them, there is another issue that app designers should be
aware of. The more buttons presented to the user at one time, the more
difficult it is for the user to choose one of them (this is especially true for
novice users). It is interesting to note that as an analogy, a touch
screen device can be thought of as a communication channel where the goal is to
minimize the entropy of the interface (i.e. require the least information from
the users for each touch selection).
Generally, most user-friendly apps tend to have an
interface entropy under 3.5 bits (the maximum entropy for an interface is
approximately 5.5 bits on an iPhone 5, accounting for average finger size and
screen size). What this essentially means is that you should keep the
total number of touchable UI elements to less than 10 per view.
There is a lot more involved in creating great mobile
user interfaces. But hopefully you will find some of the above
suggestions of benefit.
Story by Parham Aarabi an Associate Professor of
Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, where he
teaches a graduate course on Advanced Mobile User Interfaces and directs the
Mobile Applications Lab.
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In case you hadn’t noticed, Pinterest has been in the
news a lot recently. In November last year, Pinterest started courting the
business community with the creation of its business-specific
accounts and a dedicated business
support page. Then earlier this month, Pinterest quietly
raised a cool $200 million at an astonishing $2.5 billion valuation – not
bad for a company that has yet to make a profit! Most intriguing of all though
was a study published last week by research center Pew.
It suggested that Pinterest has grown so quickly, it’s now on course to catch
Twitter in the battle for second place behind Facebook in the US social
networking market. These events indicate that Pinterest is quickly evolving
from being last year’s hot new upstart to a legitimate social network that
should be part of your marketing mix.
But how can you maximize your Pinterest activities
without spending a ton of time on it? Well, along with scheduling
your pins, one of the most effective but underutilized strategies to get
more exposure from Pinterest is by using group boards. Now, if you’re new to
Pinterest, you may only know of regular boards that only you can pin to. You
may have never have heard of group boards. Or maybe you have but you don’t know
how to use them or don’t think they apply to you. I’ve been dabbling with group
boards over the past few months and have seen a dramatic increase in followers
since I strategically introduced them to my Pinterest marketing.
A group board works like a regular Pinterest board.
The only difference is that along with the board creator, other people are also
allowed to pin. Group boards go under many different names – shared boards,
contributor boards, community boards and collaborative boards. Regardless the
term, they are all exactly the same thing. There is currently no directory of
Pinterest group boards. In order to distinguish a group board from a regular
one you need to look out for the group icon at the top of a board when you are
browsing someone’s page. This snapshot of a personal page of choices shows the group
Pinterest page icon with the little people under.
Group boards are not only a great way to organize
ideas and bring people together, but they can also have real tangible benefits
for your brand and business.
If users select to “follow all” of any contributor’s
boards, then they will be added as followers to a group board you are part of.
The increased exposure and visibility you get through group boards will
increase your follower growth at a faster rate.
The more followers you have the more likely they (and
their followers) are to see your content, repin your pins and click through to
your website. This means more traffic to your site and potentially more
subscribers, customers and clients.
Implement this strategy correctly and you could get
other people creating content for.
Certainly at the start, Pinterest can be
time-consuming but managed well, you could soon have a team of people
perpetuating your content for you across their networks.
Your customers may already be “liking”, commenting and sharing your content with their followers on Pinterest. But inviting them to pin to your brand’s group board will get them more engaged and involved in your online conversation. It will also elevate them to the role of brand ambassadors, who their followers are more likely to take note of.
Conclusion
The Pinterest
blog recommends that you should only send invitations to Pinterest
users who have expressed an interest in your pins and to avoid sending out
repeat requests.
One way of encouraging people to join
your group boards is to add a line in the board description. You could state
that you welcome contributors and that anyone interested in joining the board
should add a comment against a pin.
So there you have it, a whirlwind
tour of Pinterest’s group boards.
If you want to hear what I have to say in 140 characters or
less, please follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/erikpenn.
As a brand marketing yourself online, you understand
that branding your messages is very important; how else would someone know they
were your messages if they were not branded appropriately? Branding your
messages makes them easy to recognize as belonging to you. Your brand can make
sure that each message makes the right impression by making sure that each
message you publish carries an easily recognizable, consistent, and appropriate
reminder that your brand owns the content. Logos are a very important part of
branding – but don’t stop there!
You might be surprised to learn that there are
several different opportunities available to brand your YouTube activities in
such a way that they will be quite obviously and unforgettably yours!
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With most
smartphone makers endlessly obsessed with high-end devices sporting bigger and
better specs, Mozilla’s has focused on low-end devices with Firefox OS.

Today the
browser maker unveiled
two developer preview phones for Firefox OS that it’s offering in
partnership with the Spanish startup Geeksphone,
which is building the phones, and Telefonica.
True to
its low-end focus, Mozilla is placing the spotlight mostly on the
less-powerful Keon (above). It features a small 3.5-inch screen, a 1 gigahertz
processor, 4 gigabytes of storage, and 512 megabytes of RAM. With those specs,
the Keon would barely even cut it as a cheap Android phone in the U.S. today.
But in Brazil, where Mozilla is debuting Firefox OS phones later this year,
it’s representative of devices that many consumers will actually be able to
afford.
On the
slightly more powerful end, Geeksphone is also working on a developer preview
phone called Peak (comparison below). It sports a 4.3-inch screen, 1.2
gigahertz dual-core Snapdragon S4 processor, and a much better camera than the Keon.

These
aren’t phones meant to take on the iPhone — instead, they’re aiming to get
developers comfortable with Firefox OS and its complete reliance on open web standards, which is Mozilla’s big
selling point for the platform. Apps for Firefox OS are built entirely in HTML
5, but will have the same sort of functionality as native apps on iOS and
Android. That means the apps will be easy to build, even for amateur
developers.
“Developer
preview phones will help make the mobile web more accessible to more people,”
said Stormy Peters, director of developer engagement at Mozilla, in a blog post
today. “Developers are critical to the web and to Mozilla’s mission to make the
web accessible to everyone. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide use
Firefox OS to discover, experience and connect to the Web. A world wide web
based on open standards and open technologies. We couldn’t have done this
without web developers.”
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According to analysis by Mintel, the research
company, sales of MP3 players fell by almost £110 million – or 22 per cent – to
£381 million this year compared to 2011.
Mintel predicts that sales will halve again by 2017.
In its “worst case” scenario, the group forecasts that sales of MP3 players
could drop to just £25 million within five years.
MP3 players – or Portable Media Players (PMP) as they
are also known – are rechargeable pocket-sized devices that play digital music
and videos. However they have been usurped by smartphones, which carry out the
same functions but also allow users to make telephone calls and connect to the
internet.
When Apple launched its iPod in 2001 it changed the
way that people listened to music. Using its own ‘digital jukebox’ software,
the device – which was the same size and weight as a packet of playing cards -
could hold 1,000 songs in compressed digital files.
Prior to the iPod, music fans had to rely on
cumbersome portable CD players, short-lived mini-disc players or even cassette
players like the Sony Walkman to listen to music on the move.
24 Oct 2011
21 Oct 2011
21 Oct 2011
21 Oct 2011
Within a year of the iPod launching
Apple released a version capable of carrying 4,000 songs. By the autumn of
2010, around 275 million iPods had been sold around the world.
However the rise of smartphones –
like the Apple iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy - has halted this growth. Ofcom,
the regulator, recently found that two-fifths of UK adults now own a
smartphone.
Samuel Gee, a technology analyst at
Mintel, said that the decline in MP3 sales is “unlikely to reverse”.
“It is impossible to talk about the
current PMP market without extensive reference to smartphones. The devices have
directly contributed to the sharp decline in the value of PMP sales,” said Mr
Gee.
He said that MP3 players are being
“steadily outshone” by increasingly affordable new technologies, like
smartphones.
Ian Fogg, a technology analyst at
IHS, the research company, said smartphones are becoming as ubiquitous as iPods
once were.
Mr Fogg said: “The convenience of a
smartphone is greater than an MP3 player because it is always with someone. It
also provides more choice of mobile music because someone can play back their
own music – as they can on a MP3 player – but they can also access other music
services like Last FM or Spotify. Therefore there is a greater choice of music
available.”
As well as disrupting sales of MP3
players, smartphones have led to a decline in sales of compact cameras due to
the phones’ own in-built camera function.
Figures released in October showed
that there are more than one billion smartphones in use around the world.
Strategy Analytics, a consulting firm, said that growing demand for the devices
is likely to push the number to over two billion within the next three years.
Apple recently said that it had sold
5.3 million iPods globally in its most recent financial quarter, a fall of 19
per cent compared to the same period the previous year
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Size matters to some smartphone consumers. While Apple may have already sold millions of iPhone 5 smartphones since its launch in September, not every iPhone fan is thrilled with the new design of the device. And some say the iPhone 5 falls short of expectations, especially in the size department. You must decide if it's worth the hassle of switching from Apple iOS to Google Android for a bigger smartphone. And I provide some insight into which Samsung Android phone is right for you. Also why the iPhone 4S from Virgin Mobile can't be unlocked or even used internationally.
When
it comes to big phones, Google Android is your best option. And the biggest of
them all is the Galaxy Note 2. While Apple has made the iPhone 5 taller, it is
nowhere near the size of some of these "big" android phones on the
market today. So if screen size is your main criteria, then by all means go
with an Android device.

The iPhone 5 is slightly taller than
the iPhone 4S, the previous generation of the iPhone. There are perils of
switching from the iPhone to an Android phone, but there are apps and other
ways to make this transition easier. And in theory we should be able to move
most, if not all, of the contacts, music and pictures from the iPhone and
iTunes account to the new Samsung smartphone.
Samsung
offers some suggestions for making this transition.
Contacts:
The best way to move your contacts to a new Samsung device is to save those
contacts to the Apple iCloud and then export those contacts from the Internet
to Gmail and from Gmail you can populate your phone with all your contact info.
Music: To
load your music from iTunes onto a Samsung Android phone you have a few
options. Samsung says if you're using a PC it's as easy as creating a new
"Music" file for your Galaxy smartphone and dragging and dropping
your music into this file. (Since you have a Mac, you'd have to download the
Android File Transfer software from android.com/filetransfer.)
The
other option is to create a Google Music account. That way you can load all
your music to the cloud and play it on any Android device you own. But
uploading music to Google Music can take a while. I have about 7GB of music and
it took me all day to upload all the music to Google Music. But once the music
is there, you'll have lots of flexibility moving the music around to different
devices you want to use in the future. But it requires an Internet connection
to access your music.
The
final option is to use syncing software like DoubleTwist. You should be able to
download a free version of DoubleTwist that will let you transfer your music
via USB cable. The company makes you pay $10 for an app that will allow you to
sync your music from iTunes to your Samsung device over Wi-Fi.
Photos:
There are also ways to sync your pictures from your iPhone to the Samsung
devices. The first thing you'll have to do is transfer your photos from your
old phone to your computer. And then you should be able to transfer those
photos to your new phone.
While
there are ways to transfer all this information from one device ecosystem to
another, I'm not going to lie to you and tell you it's a piece of cake. I have
made this transition myself when I moved from an iPhone 3GS to a Samsung Galaxy
S3, and even though I had a little cheat sheet from Samsung to walk me through
the steps, I still fumbled a bit. For example, the free DoubleTwist software
that would have allowed me to sync my iTunes music via a USB cable wasn't
working on my four-year-old Macbook, so I had to pay for the app that works
over Wi-Fi.

Samsung's Galaxy S3. And even though
I got it to work, it took some time. If you aren't afraid of putting in a
little effort to make the switch from the Apple ecosystem to Google Android
world, then go for it.
The
Note 2 has a 1.6GHz quad-core processor and comes with 2GB of RAM. The Samsung
Galaxy S3 in the U.S. comes with 2GB of RAM and dual-core process. (The
international version of the same device has 1GB of RAM and a quad-core
processor.)
The
Galaxy Note also has a bigger and better battery for longer battery life as
compared to the Galaxy S3. The Galaxy Note 2 also comes with the latest Android
software Jelly Bean already installed. The Galaxy S3 comes with the previous
version of the software Ice Cream Sandwich. S3 users on Sprint and T-Mobile are
getting the Jelly Bean update. But AT&T and Verizon S3 customers are still
waiting.
What
does this mean for you? Based on specs and making sure you have the latest and greatest
technology, the Galaxy Note 2 has a smidge more to offer you. So based on specs
alone, I'd say buy the Galaxy Note 2. But it's a big device. And the size does
not appeal to every consumer.

If you want to hear
what I have to say in 140 characters or less, please follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/erikpenn.
In the old days, it was easy to
understand the customer experience. You had your manager or salespeople walk
around. You asked or incentivized your customers to complete comment cards or
surveys. Then you added in mystery shopping. All were good sources of
information about the customer experience.
But that won't suffice anymore.
Today, you have to think about your online reputation and what your customers
are saying about you in social media.
Customer feedback spreads like
wildfire: The
average online review is read by 150 people.
Comfort with social sites growin: Cumulative reviews on Yelp, for instance, grew 54
percent year over year to more than 30 million, and average monthly unique
visitors grew 52 percent year over year to more than 78 million.
Online reviews drive sale: A half-star improvement in online ratings can
lead to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a restaurant will be fully
booked during peak dining times.
The social world is here to stay.
And the best brands in the business use social media, or more specifically the
customer intelligence gleaned from these online conversations, to optimize
their supply chain, tighten service standards, and generally make their
customers happy.
Achieving these goals starts with
listening to the feedback -- really listening. And the feedback should
be categorized. For example, restaurants would assign feedback to specific
categories such as service, food, prices, wait times, and ambiance. Then brands
can improve strategically based on this data and communicate to let consumers
know they care. The results play out in operational improvements that earn
customer loyalty and affinity.
The effectiveness of using
data-driven intelligence to drive business strategy depends on a brand's social
media maturity. The more mature the company, the better they are able to leverage
social market intelligence. There are four stages to social media maturity:
read, engage, empower, and optimize.

During this stage you will find that you are visiting
15-20 review sites, bookmarking them, and reading every review. In most
organizations with less than five locations, it's the owner who does this task.
Once the business grows to more than five locations, this usually becomes the
responsibility of the marketing and promotions team.
Some reviews can be lengthy and have lots of
location-specific data. Some will be mostly positive and others mostly
negative, but the majority of the reviews will be nuanced. That is they will
contain several insights, positive and negative, and the corresponding star
ratings don't give you the full picture.
When it comes to reading online reviews, best
practices include:
Reading online reviews comes with challenges, such as
handling a large volume of reviews, remembering what was said over time, and
staying focused on this task. But if you can overcome those difficulties the
results will definitely benefit you as you use the data to make informed,
intelligent business decisions.
The next stage in social media maturity is to engage
with customers and let them know you're listening. Reaching out can be done for
a variety of reasons: to offer an incentive to come back after a bad
experience, simply to tell them you're listening, or to actually do something
about it.
By engaging with customers you can stop negative
reviews in their tracks, and you can take neutral and positive reviews and make
them more positive. The result is increased customer loyalty and ultimately
increased revenue.
Best practice guidelines for connecting with your
customers include:
When you engage with reviewers, the results are
impressive. Ultimately you are working to increase customer loyalty. Loyal
customers talk to friends, bring friends with them, and increase sales. In the
meantime though, by engaging with customers you can demonstrate that they
matter -- that you are a brand that cares.
Brands at this stage empower their general managers,
staff, operations team, etc., to use the intelligence gleaned from online
reviews to make the right operational changes in order to deliver a consistent
high-quality customer experience and earn customer loyalty.
Best practice companies know:
When you do all of this, you will deliver on your brand
promise, motivate your staff, keep customers coming back, and grow your
revenues.
This final stage of social media maturity is when you
change your business to better serve your customers. Usually regional managers,
owners and CEOs, or VPs of operations look at the social intelligence to
determine how to optimize the business. The goal is to drive the strategy, make
changes that improve the business, and monitor the results.
To change strategy or drive strategic initiatives
based on social reviews:
Moving through the stages of social media maturity doesn't have to be difficult. You can start by reading, and step through the other stages of maturity over time as it works for your business.
If you want to hear
what I have to say in 140 characters or less, please follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/erikpenn.
A few simple rules will help. Like replace your “a” with @ or “i” with ! or “e” with 3, then it becomes much easier. Don’t be fooled, computer programs love to figure out the easy ones:

Instagram now boasts more than 50 million users,
and it is adding new ones at the rate of roughly 5 million per week. More than
1 billion photos have been uploaded on Instagram, with 5 million-plus more
photos being added every day. This article highlights five brands
that have incorporated visual imagery and social curation via Instagram into
their broader digital strategies. Each brand offers a different value
proposition to its followers, but there are common themes demonstrated by each
example.
American Airlines
American
Airlines' recent "Get Mobile Get Moving" campaign amplified the
premise that travel and visual imagery are closely connected. American Airlines
published a weekly photo theme and invited users to submit photos via Instagram
and other owned social channels with the hashtag #AApic.
Selected
images were then featured on American's Facebook brand page and a brand microsite
photo gallery.
Every
image submitted also served as an entry to win weekly prizes and a larger grand
prize sweepstake. Ultimately, the
American Airlines program netted more than 69,000 total photo submissions.
Red Bull
Red
Bull has taken visual storytelling to new heights with its visually stunning
content that reinforces the key attributes of the brand. Their owned social
properties are impressive, with more than 315,000 followers via Instagram and
more than 600 photos published.
Red Bull uses multiple hashtags that represent different types of content, such as #GivesYouWings, #shareyourwings, and #FlyingFridays. Going beyond its content stream and "liking" other images also reinforces engagement by humanizing the brand.

Red
Bull has also created a branded hub for sharing images tied to its products. At
ShareYourWings.RedBullUSA.com,
fans of the brand can share via the #shareyourwings hashtag across Twitter,
Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr in exchange for free products.
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany
& Co. understands how visual storytelling can drive engagement for its
brand. For Tiffany's "What Makes Love True" campaign, Instagram
played an essential role in creating the mood that ultimately is an extension
of the brand.
Instagram has iPhone hooks that allow any other iPhone application to interact with the Instagram application. So if a brand wants to create custom filters, it can build the functionality into its branded application and publish into the Instagram photo stream. As a way to provide value and differentiate its iPhone app, Tiffany's incorporated three new Instagram filters. Users were treated with black and white, peach, and Tiffany blue. The images inspired from the campaign are posted to "True Love in Pictures."

Users
simply tag their photos through the Instagram app by including the
#TrueLovePictures hashtag in the caption. By leveraging Instagram's built-in
hooks, Tiffany's was able to create additional value for the consumer through a
complementary extension of its brand.
Ford
Ford has created something that focuses on visual imagery powering the brand. It is evident in its recently executed "Fiestagram" program rolled out to European markets. The campaign challenged Instagram photography enthusiasts to upload photos in several categories inspired by the technologies and features of the Ford Fiesta. Each week, Ford communicated the weekly challenge as a hashtag associated with technology related to the Ford Fiesta.

Participants
could interpret the categories in any way they saw fit and use any of the
filters and effects available on Instagram to enhance the mood of their images.
Running on the Ford Fiesta Facebook page, contestants could enter simply by
uploading photos with the hashtag #Fiestagram and #(weekly challenge) via
Instagram captions. All images submitted appeared in online galleries on
Facebook, and some of the best submissions also appeared on billboards and in
real-world photography galleries across Europe. A total of 16,000 pictures were
submitted, with 12,000 new Facebook fans gained during the course of the
promotion.
Nike
Nike's "How will you #MakeItCount in 2012" campaign takes the traditional New Year's resolution and turns it into a rallying cry to motivate and inspire individuals to meet and exceed their goals via visual imagery. Nike has enlisted the help of superstar athletes like Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, and Dirk Nowitzki as catalysts for sparking the #MakeItCount movement.

Since
launching in January, more than 41,000 Instagram images have been tagged with
the #MakeItCount hashtag. By
staying true to its core brand attributes, Nike's call to action and the
imagery that it evokes become the visual embodiment of the brand. That is
carried forward as a virtual representation of both the brand and the
individual.
Other noteworthy players
There
are many other brands making an impact with Instagram-generated content,
including Pepsi, Starbucks, Burberry, Volkswagen, Warby Parker, Puma, and
Maersk. With Facebook's recent purchase of Instagram and the launch of its own
photo-based app, no one quite yet knows what the future will hold for
Instagram. But with numbers continuing to grow across the board, Instagram is
not looking to slow down any time soon.
If you want to hear what I have to say in 140 characters or less, please follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/erikpenn.
Have you looked at all the options lately? Probably not, so let’s review just how many options there are to consider:
The moment I found this chart, I knew it was important. Many of the options I know and some are new. Understand this --> The industry has exploded over the last couple years with tons of options. This org chart helps categorize my needs and apply the right solutions. On your next project, this is a great reference!
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