"interusability" entries

Cross-device interactions and interusability

Designers need to create a coherent UX across all the devices with which a user interacts.

Editor’s note: This is an excerpt by Claire Rowland from our upcoming book Designing Connected Products. This excerpt is included in our curated collection of chapters from the O’Reilly Design library. Download a free copy of the Designing for the Internet of Things ebook here.

In systems where functionality and interactions are distributed across more than one device, it’s not enough to design individual UIs in isolation. Designers need to create a coherent UX across all the devices with which the user interacts. That means thinking about how UIs work together to create a coherent understanding of the overall system, and how the user may move between using different devices.

Cross-platform UX and usability

Many of the tools of UX design and HCI originate from a time when an interaction was usually a single user using a single device. This was almost always a desktop computer, which they’d be using to complete a work-like task, giving it more or less their full attention.

The reality of our digital lives moved on from this long ago. Many of us own multiple Internet-capable devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and connected TVs, used for leisure as well as for work. They have different form factors; may be used in different contexts; and some of them come with specific sensing capabilities, such as mobile location.

Cross-platform UX is an area of huge interest to the practitioner community. But academic researchers have given little attention to defining the properties of good cross-platform UX. This has left a gap between practice and theory that needs addressing.

In industry practice, cross-platform UX has often proceeded device by device. Designers begin with a key reference device and subsequent interfaces are treated as adaptations. In the early days of smartphones, this reference device was often the desktop. In recent years, the “mobile first” approach has encouraged us to start with mobile Web or apps as a way to focus on optimizing key functionality and minimize “feature-itis.” Such services usually have overarching design guidelines spanning all platforms to ensure a degree of consistency. The aim is usually on making the different interfaces feel like a family, rather than on making the devices work together as a system. Read more…