As you read this, mobile design is evolving in complex, unpredictable ways.

Technology trends are emerging to shape the future of mobile design. New coding and design standards are being established almost as quickly as they’re being digested and incorporated. As a result, many businesses’ sites are lagging behind. Smashing Magazine has released an e-book featuring a number of graphs, charts and statistics that provide insights on mobile design. As an industry, there is change afoot. The internet itself is a mere sapling itself and mobile design is its younger off-shoot.…

By the year 2013, there will be 1.7 billion mobile internet users. Is your company’s website mobile-ready? Copyblogger has a guide to transforming your website from a page that takes forever to load on a smartphone to a crisp and streamlined mobile-web-ready user interface. Install a mobile plugin: WordPress users can install a mobile plugin to ensure your site will function appropriately. Create smart navigation: make your jump pages clear and cut down on extraneous links so users won’t get overwhelmed. Write clear content: a smaller screen demands sharper, cleaner content,…

As product developers are getting better at creating the best user experience possible, customers, too, are getting smarter. These developers understand the customer mindset—perhaps too

well. Henrik Werdelin explains: “As we get increasingly better at helping users navigate the sites we create—this also becomes an area where we face an interesting segue—we are getting so good at it, that we are able to use the expected behavior through a user interface, to sometimes trick our users to do something they don’t necessarily fully understand what is.” There’s a chance your savvy developers…

Need to enhance your website’s conversation rates? Paras Chopra at Smashing Magazine has a post discussing how to tweak website design—especially in terms of user interface streamlining and general usability—for generating more sales, downloads, membership rates or any other business goal. First: discover your challenge. Unearthing your challenge is always the first step toward defining your goals, which then builds a structured process in which to tackle and complete said goals. A big step is honestly assessing your website and building a hypothesis as to why your conversion rates are in…

One of the greatest challenges posed to developers by web-based applications involves usability.

When the user is dumbfounded, the application has failed. It should be the developers’ goal, then, to never encounter such a scenario. But how is this accomplished? First, issues with usability can be avoided with a direct focus on product and development troubleshooting. Through testing and designing, you can often catch snags. Web-based applications have their own demands and need to be approached with this in mind. There isn’t a blanket methodology to mend usability issues. A design best…

When it comes to web design, you want to build the most engaging and usable site possible. You also want to be persuasive—and here’s how. Smashing Magazine has a list of 7 Persuasion Triggers in Web Design. Persuasion triggers are the conscious use of website building techniques to influence user behavior. They are: Reciprocation Commitment Social Proof Authority Scarcity Framing Salience Let’s focus on scarcity. David Travis writes: “[Scarcity] isn’t just about the fear of missing out (a kind of reverse social proof). Scarcity actually makes stuff appear more valuable. For example,…

Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro That’s the mantra of Both Sides of the Table’s Mark Suster, who touts the belief of “less is more” when it comes to product design. In Suster’s experience with young and innovative web developers, they wanted to incorporate a multitude of choices, buttons, options—you name it. They were only keeping the “power user” in mind, and debates ensued: “Of course the debates raged about not wanting to make the system less powerful.  My view—power users always look at all of the menu options…

Moving behavior to data is the hottest new trend in product design. It involves two different forces: Larger values used in key-value stores Spotty cloud networks The latter is addressed in detail, using the example of Amazon’s poor cloud network. “Many developers have found Amazon’s network lossy, with a high and variable latency. Connections consistently drop which has caused a number to consider moving out of the cloud to get more control over the network.” Todd Hoff at High Scalability has several examples of this hot-to-trot product strategy, including Google’s “blessing” with the…

When something is sold out, you only want it more and more. Scarcity is a huge draw, an intangible consumerist tug … but why? “The simple answer is that people infer special value in something that has limited availability. This is true in dating, commerce, gaming and other fields. Everything from gold and diamonds to ‘limited edition’ candy bars to baseball cards prove this point.” That theory can be easily applied to devices like the iPad. It can also be integrated into your product design to enhance the user experience — and…

Web roles have shifted. Web designers no longer hold supreme power — the audience commands that role now, shaping their own user experience: “Visitor interaction has become vital to the experience of a website, and the need for positive feedback — now visible everywhere and uncontrollable — has reversed the roles: our audience now has the voice and tools it needs to be satisfied.” Smashing Magazine runs through the history Web functionality, how it was previously built … and how that has changed. One key point: take advantage of social media and…