The best error message is the one that never shows up. It is always better to prevent errors from happening in the first place by guiding users in the right direction ahead of time. But, when errors do arise, well-designed error handling helps teach users how to use the app as you intended. In this article, Nick Babich will examine how the design of apps can be optimized to prevent user errors and how to create effective error messages in cases when errors occur independently of user input.
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There are several actions you should take when improving an app engagement, but one of the most crucial is to get up close and personal with users. If you don’t segment and personalize your users’ journeys, then you should expect lower rates of conversion and retention. Understanding the individual user’s journey and how they are using the app overall is key to personalizing your mobile app experience. Mobile users have high expectations of the mobile experience and brief attention spans, so careful personalization and in-context awareness are crucial for effective communication and engagement with them.
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Improving every tiny thing by 1% dramatically improves performance. This applies to what Marko Dugonjić did in the SGS project and its intricate navigation. By focusing on the finer details, improving each detail by a tiny bit, he significantly reduced the complexity of the navigation and improved loading times, while keeping the navigation appealing and engaging for users. No web project is ever truly complete; there are always a few more things on the to-do list. That’s perfectly fine, as long as you keep on testing, refining and providing the best experience for users.
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Getting an app just right, getting it to work across all possible devices, with different OS versions, display resolutions, chipsets and other hardware characteristics, and making the user experience smooth across all possible configurations, is a challenging task. In this article, Ville-Veikko Helppi will look at what’s available for testing React Native apps. He’ll explain some key features of React Native, before looking at how to implement these tests, and then he will categorize testing methods and frameworks on three levels, providing examples for each.
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Many people think localization is as simple as translating in-app content and app store pages. It’s more complex than that. In this article, Bruce Wong and Anna Pratskevich will look at the top Chinese apps, including local market leaders such as Dianping, the Yelp of China, and the few US apps that are successful in China, such as the NBA app and Uber, and discuss how content, graphics and tone can make or break an app’s success, providing you with a few valuable tips to get you started on the right path.
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PWAs take advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. Think of it as a website built using web technologies but that acts and feels like an app. In this article, Kevin Farrugia will look into recent advancements in the browser and the opportunities you, as developers, have to build a new generation of web apps. This is merely an appetizer for progressive web apps. You could do a lot more to create that app-like experience users are looking for, whether by supporting push notifications with the Push API, making the app re-engageable, or using IndexedDB and background syncing to improve the offline experience.
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In the previous article, Clayton Anderson showed you how React Native can help you make iOS and Android apps with a shared code base, without sacrifices in quality. But what about the web? React Native for Web is intended to let you write a single app that runs in a browser using standard web technologies, or on iOS and Android as a real native mobile app. While I don’t think the project is ready for production use yet, its potential success could mark a massive change in how large multi-platform applications are built. Let’s jump in!
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Nic Raboy is an application developer that has been developing mobile applications as a hobby for the past five years. In this article, Nic is going to tell his story about mobile application development. He will look at some of the common problems with developing mobile applications, both native and hybrid, and how NativeScript by Telerik fills the gap. He’ll proceed to develop a NativeScript Android and iOS application from scratch, and then convert the same application to use the bleeding-edge Angular 2 JavaScript framework.
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Whether you’re working on digital products or chocolates, prototyping plays an important role in any successful project, and if you work in user experience or software development, chances are you will have encountered Axure RP at some point. In this article, Pierre Croft will help you gain a good understanding of the new features available with Axure 8, and how they could improve elements of your daily workflow. There are definitely some really useful new additions.
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Transitions between pages can enhance the experience by retaining the user’s context, maintaining their attention, and providing visual continuity and positive feedback, while also being aesthetically pleasing and fun and can reinforce branding when done well. In this article, Luigi De Rosa will create, step by step, a transition between pages. He will also talk about the pros and cons of this technique and how to push it to its limit.
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