22 May, 2017

How to Improve Payment Forms Using Four Interaction Design Patterns on Mobile Devices

This article was originally published on Linked In.




Payment forms are critical on mobile apps, to sell products online. Conventional payment forms have at least 4 input controls — Name on Card, Card Number, Expiry Date, CVV and in some cases, even Card Type — Visa, Mastercard, American Express and so forth. We seek card type although we can detect which type of card it is using first two digits of the card number. We seek detail to this level in the name of providing freedom and control to users.




Typing through each field, by looking intermittently at the card and the payment form to ensure correctness can be a daunting task. Payment form listed above can be simplified by reducing the number of input controls from 4 to 1.




Great! It’s a given that this single input control gathers all the information previously done but in a more elegant and simplified way.

Interaction Design Patterns
Good experience only begins from here — the single input control. Four intuitive interaction design patterns can be used to improve the input experience further.

1. Contextual Keypad
Tapping on the card number field displays a keypad. A lot of mobile apps display qwerty type keypad. The user has to switch to the numeric keypad with few taps to enter the card number.




Reducing the effort required to switch between multiple keypads while entering input is a big relief to users. Displaying a numeric keypad (input type=tel) since.

2. Input Masks
As a user types the card number, after typing first 4 digits, he/she pauses to decide whether to give space or hyphen symbol. The user needs intuitive guidance here on which separators (space/hyphen) to use and how many digits are remaining.




Input mask is the answer. Input mask can be implemented in many ways:
  • Use ‘XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX’ and gradually reveal the input structure as user types along
  • Use real text like ‘Expiry Date’, ‘CVV’ to hint users
  • Auto-populate card logo based on card number as user types first two digits of the card number. This provides feedback to the user that he/she has indeed, entered the right card number.
3. Animation
An improved design pattern for payment forms is to introduce animation using card metaphor by designing a virtual card layout. As a user enters the data, it is auto-populated on the card to give a real card visual experience.




4. Machine Input
Tired of typing input manually? There is a simpler pattern :). The built-in camera on mobile phones can be used to retrieve card information by just scanning the card.




The user doesn’t need to enter card number manually anymore. Many mobile apps are adopting this approach these days [This approach might need intense machine learning algorithms to work with precision.]

Using small/big fingers on small screens to perform input operations can be challenging for many users. Payment forms are particularly risky given the secure nature of operations. Intuitive interaction design patterns listed above can soothe stressed out users by simplifying payment forms to a large extent.
How simple are the forms in your apps?

09 May, 2017

How Linked In Got Skeleton Screens Wrong


A skeleton screen is essentially a blank version of a page into which information is gradually loaded.
Luke Wroblewski introduced Skeleton Screens in 2013 through his work on the Polar app, later acquired by Google. I also wrote a short write-up on Facilitating Better Interactions Using Skeleton Screens last year by applying it to mobile apps.
Following Luke's work and Medium's implementation of skeleton screens for images, Linked In implemented it roughly a year ago. The Linked In team picked few pages/screens for this implementation.

Notifications


















The skeleton screen on the mobile web appears as shown in the screenshot above. The content appears to load in a gradually revealing fashion. It looks neat and clean.

So, What Went Wrong with Linked In Implementation?










Let us consider Notifications screen on Linked In, accessed over a mobile device. There are many additional elements on the actual screen, compared to the number of elements on the skeleton screen. For example, the carousel section, time component and ‘Send InMail’ button are not present in the skeleton screen. The user looks for a 1:1 content mapping which is missing in this case, hence leading to greater confusion.

Can This Be Fixed?
As you might notice, a natural mapping is missing in the Notifications screen.
Mapping is a technical term meaning the relationship between two things.
Consider the steering wheel in a car. To turn the car to the right, one turns the steering wheel clockwise (so that its top moves to the right). The mapping is easily learned and always remembered.

Natural Mapping
Natural mapping takes advantage of physical analogies and cultural standards (Another example - red traffic light means stop; green means go). The human mind is trained for natural mapping. As a result, products, in general, should exploit natural mapping to design enchanted experiences.

Skeleton screens need a worthy implementation. When poorly done, users are put off by the experience rather than feeling joyful about it.

How do you want your users to feel?