👋 Design insights #25 - designing apps for kids, animation in UX and More

🧒There is no one who hangs up an incoming call faster than a kid watching a video or playing games on a parent’s smartphone. Many parents can testify, hands up high, to that. It’s annoying but again very hilarious. This is how kids truly relish and love interactive apps.

Developing an app for kids, especially those between the ages of 3-7, maybe easier said than done. Why? There are unique cases to be considered especially from a UI/UX point of view. Some of these considerations include:

📱Speed is one thing that the mobile industry embodies through and through. From the continued growth of the market to the desired speed of mobile applications as well as phones. This speedy industry is also hasty in the discovery and consumption of the “in thing” when it comes to mobile applications.

The mobile app developer has had to adapt to this speedy world when it comes to the frequency of app development as the app life cycles are becoming increasingly short. This has brought the importance of prototyping to the forefront as wasted development time is not only time consuming but also expensive.

📹 A first look at stunning video shot on the new iPhone XS - the highest quality video of any smartphone. Water, fire, metal and light were used to create thes…

📝Most people groan when they hear “product spec”. They think of weeks spent writing docs that no one reads. How can one be agile, and pumping out code like a ninja-rockstar, if one is encumbered with documentation?

This is good read for writing a new project spec, what should be included in the spec and why.

✔ If you consider that to have a successful product, two essential ingredients to this are to build the right thing and to get the design right. UI designers will naturally focus on getting the design right (i.e. visuals, interactions, design patterns etc..), where as UX designers will naturally focus on building the right thing, and evaluating designs with users (i.e. user research, user journeys, usability testing etc..). If you are lucky enough to find someone that can do all this, then chances are that you probably can’t afford them anyway because they are so in demand right now. I’m talking hot, hot, hot darling.

The most successful product teams that I’ve worked in have always had a UX designer, and a UI designer. This ensures that there is sufficient capacity and bandwidth to take a user-centred design approach, whilst still providing the engineers with all the design goodies that they need to actually build something.

💡Nowadays it’s hard to impress or even surprise with an interface animation. It shows interactions between screens, explains how to use the application or simply directs a user’s attention. While exploring the articles about animation, I found out that almost all of them describe only specific use cases or general facts about animation, but I haven’t come across any article where all rules concerning animation of interfaces would be clearly and practically described. Well, in this article I won’t write anything new, 

If the animation is built correctly, then it is unobtrusive and does not distract the users from their goals. If it does, you either need to soften it or even remove at all. That means that the animation shouldn’t slow down the user or prevent from performing the task.