Lesson 1: Make it visible

Help your users to understand

Our App was quite simple, you just pushed a button and the Camera view displayed, then you could scan graphic content to summon an Augmented Reality Experience. When designing the app the CEO asked that it was necessary to reinforce the brand of the company inside our app, the team agree, so we thought it was a good idea to use our logo as the start button. Being that simple to operate, I couldn’t understand when friends couldn’t make it work.

While in web we frequently click the logos, in iOS the user looks for OS Button shapes.

After watching many user’s interactions with the app, I realized that almost everyone — mostly non-tech-focused users — had trouble understanding that our big logo was a button. And they were right, each and every Operative System (Android, iOS, Windows Mobile…) has a particular way to signal actions.

Using certain shapes and colors the users learn that a particular space of the screen has an associated action, when you disrupt that learning by introducing your own way to do things you just confuse your users.

Lesson 2: The Model and Mapping

Don’t make users guess

So you had a big logo in the center and a floating toolbar in the bottom side of the app with 4 buttons: News, FAQ, Contact Us, Settings. At the time, I thought it seemed better (cooler) to leave the icons with no text, as the graphics were self-explanatory. But it wasn’t.

The feed icon resembles the RSS logo, one that many non-tech users don’t get. Instead of discovering its action, users lend to omit it. Info, Main and Config are default and easy to understand.

The most important button, after the “Start” one at the logo, was the Newsfeed one, where users could look for new products that had AR Experiences; so we found strange when we got emails asking about new content to later found out that users didn’t know what the newsfeed button was about but didn’t care to push it.

A more familiar cue would have solve that by the time.

Labels are not always necessary, in fact, as Don Norman state in Design of Everyday Things:

“Rule of Thumb: When instructions have to be pasted on something(…) it is badly designed”

As we were introducing a new “idiom” for users to check the newsfeed I should have added a label to the icons to help the users or use a default graphic.

Lesson 3: Feedback

Every action has a reaction

When users could start the AR Camera, some of them got confused about what to do next. At the beginning users had no idea how much time they had wait until they could see the AR experience and other times they got a bit frustrated when scanning a featured content and nothing happened.

The first issue was solved by adding a loading bar, that solved this confusion experienced by the users. The second issue was a bit more difficult because it was hardware related and it was solved by adding a little screen before the camera loaded explaining the amount of light required for the experience to successfully load.

User must always know what is the status of the latest action they did. Is good to remember another important quote from Norman: