Guidelines for Designing High Performance Mobile User Experiences

I came across a nice article on Smashing Magazine outlining some design guidelines for optimizing performance on mobile devices. Performance plays an important part in creating a valuable, enjoyable and trustworthy experience for the user, that will encourage users to continue using your application/product. Not only does the application need to look amazing, it needs to feel and work amazing as well.

The seven guidelines are as follows:

• Define UI brand signatures
• Focus the portfolio of products
• Identify the core user stories
• Optimize UI flows and elements
• Define UI scaling rules
• Use a performance dashboard
• Champion dedicated UI engineering skills

For example, front-end design can help speed up the perceived performance of a back-end delay by providing intermediary steps displaying the load progress (showing loading animations, text content, etc.) This creates the impression to the user that the system is progressing through various steps rather than experiencing a delay if they simply jumped from screen 1 to 4 as illustrated below.

Read the article here.

{ Tags: mobile, UI }