In the 1990s, we had the friendly “you’ve got mail!” In 2017, we have the trying-to-be-friendly push notification. Push notifications are ubiquitous in the internet experience — but most developers don’t use them effectively. Push notifications present a huge challenge for app developers. All but one industry have an opt-in push notification interaction rate of less than 60% (figure for iOS devices). The best app push notifications are those that integrate seamlessly into a user’s day, and provide more value than annoyance. If your push notifications are on the wrong end of this spectrum, you could be driving users away who are otherwise perfectly fitted for your product. Follow these best practices for designing push notifications and enhance your user’s experience, without crossing the line into nagging. When to Provide a Push The only industry with an opt-in rate above 60% is that of ride sharing apps. The reason is obvious: notifications from these apps provide a valuable, timely, and relevant update on the location of a user’s ride. The information provides instant value — all apps should strive for this. Unfortunately, most apps nag rather than inform. This is because they don’t take into consideration the three elements that should be present in all push notifications: information must be valuable, timely, and relevant. In order to successfully create timely and relevant notifications, you must align external and internal triggers. External triggers include the push notification itself — a nudge to get people to take a certain action. Internal triggers include what your user is feeling: bored, hungry, in need of a vacation, etc. Combining the two creates a useful push: i.e. timing your food delivery app to send a notification around dinnertime, when people are already thinking about their next meal. This creates the “you just read my mind” sensation that feels delightfully gratifying in the user’s experience with your brand. Creating a push notification that provides valuable user information is more challenging, but possible. Here’s an example: language learning app busuu totally redesigned the user experience around push notifications, upping its open rates by 300%. It did this by creating personalized and variable push notifications for users. This included asking users if they remembered a recently learned word or phrase. The push notification also linked users to a part of the app directly relevant to the notification. If the notification asks you a question, you can click through to a quiz that answers said question. Developers found this much more effective than simply linking back to the home screen of the app. When determining content for your push notifications, ask yourself: am I providing valuable information at a time when my user needs it? If the answer is yes, is the push notification linking users to the place where they can appropriately take that action? Push Notifications for Wearables and IoT Wearables and IoT devices benefit from the fact that people have purchased these devices to stay informed. Therefore, users are more likely to want and appreciate push notifications; still, considerations should be made to keep the experience a positive one. Since wearables and IoT devices are more deeply integrated into our lives, push notifications here must be even more seamless than mobile notifications. Aim for a simple user experience — opt for shorter, grouped notifications rather than lengthy ones — and avoid irritating users. This can mean getting creative with your notifications; for instance, have a wearable or IoT device panel that lights up softly when a new message comes in, which can be a much gentler nudge than a jingle or vibration. The practice of personalization is even more key with push notifications for wearables and IoT devices. Fitness wearables should send notifications encouraging users to continue their exercise streak, and the more personal these are to each user’s exercise preferences and routine, the more your app becomes part of their life. IoT devices can use internal data to “learn” about their owner — if a smart fridge realizes a given household goes through a lot of milk, then a notification can be specifically sent as a reminder to purchase that item regularly. Personalization enables notifications to be perceived as more friendly, helpful, and welcome; just as a coach may encourage you to jog another mile, or a family member may remind you to add milk to the grocery list. Push Notifications for Enterprise Apps Enterprise apps are developed for internal employee use, so push notifications in these devices must be personal, professional, and positive. Here are the features enterprise apps should consider: Individualized performance data: Everyone likes a confidence boost on the job. Push notifications highlighting positive performance are an excellent way to prompt an employee to open your enterprise app. It doesn’t hurt that employee recognition has been proven to create better workers. Chances are your enterprise app is already logging data on each of your employees — ask your developers to create a way to share this. Location-relevant data: Employees in Kansas City don’t want regular push notifications updating them on what’s happening in Boston, and employees on the Red Campus don’t necessarily need to know about the lunch specials at Blue Campus. Location-based push notifications offer timely and relevant updates for staff based on where they are. Every notification a user receives that appears irrelevant to his or her individual situation is a rift in the user experience. Information based on position: When developing your app, segment your employee pool by position in the company. That way, you can send relevant push notifications even across a large geographic area, based on staff position and rank — for example, a reminder of the upcoming all-manager meeting could be sent to people holding a manager title; a new sales training program notification could be directed at users with the title of “senior sales staff.” Push notifications give developers a unique opportunity to start a conversation with their user — don’t make it an annoying one. Need help crafting and implementing your app’s push notifications? Looking to improve your user experience as a whole? Reach out to our team at Barefoot Solutions, to chat about your app project. Our development team has the skills and experience to guide you in crafting a smooth and enjoyable user experience. We develop apps for both web and mobile with a focus on designing user interfaces that are beautifully simple to use, and offer true value to your consumers.

Looking to launch the next hot ecommerce app? You can learn a thing or two from the biggest grocery shopping apps that have captured what was once a strictly brick-and-mortar market. Picture this: you sit down to eat a bowl of your favorite granola, with berries and yogurt. It’s sweet and crunchy, with the perfect ratio of nuts to oats. You’re using your favorite retro sundae glass to highlight those delicious layers (while you’re at it, you may as well post a quick pic to Instagram, right?). This bowl of granola is more than just your breakfast; it’s the perfect blend of User Interface (UI) design and User Experience (UX) design. UI and UX are part of virtually every product you use. In the case of your breakfast, the nourishing blend of granola, fruit, and yogurt is the UX. The bowl that makes your morning fuel Instagram worthy is the UI. How you bought that granola and yogurt in the first place is another story, but one in which UI/UX is equally important. Consumers are increasingly favoring the UX provided by shopping apps instead of the UX found when walking amid grocery aisles, picking out ripe tomatoes (or, frozen pizza rolls and bakery cheesecake). Today’s hottest grocery shopping apps are gaining more users every day, because they deliver a smooth, supportive experience and eye-catching, functional aesthetics. Get ready to take notes. Here are some of the top UI/UX lessons we can learn from the leading grocery apps. Keep Sign-Up Simple Apps are all about convenience — signing up shouldn’t take longer than a trip to the grocery store. Popular grocery apps like Instacart offer the option to sign up via Facebook or Google+; A connected account sign up means fewer passwords to remember, and a one-touch start. While most users love this convenience, it’s a good idea to offer a traditional sign up form as well, for those wary of connected accounts. Traditional doesn’t have to mean complicated; Instacart’s traditional sign up form includes only five fields to fill out. Take the hint: the easier and faster it is to become a user, the more people will give your app a try. Display Costs and Totals Clearly It’s hard for grocery shoppers to stick to a budget with that bag of chips sitting right in front of you, begging you to pick it up. Staying on budget and accurately predicting the cost of a trip to the grocery store is one of the major complaints of in-store shoppers. Where the physical store fails, your app can triumph. Adding a feature that clearly reflects the cost of the shopper’s virtual basket helps reduce post-purchase regret — and improves your customer’s chance of return. It may seem counterintuitive, because you want people to spend more but, by giving your shoppers a visual aid to help them stick to their spending goals, you can actually foster a more positive shopping experience. You’re doing one better than the physical store, by solving a common problem consumers face when shopping. They may spend less with you in a single shopping trip than they would in a store, but they're much more likely to choose your app over and over. Customer loyalty is worth much more than the revenue from one transaction. Desktop to Mobile Continuity is Key When you put your basket down to check your grocery list or answer a text in the store, you assume it won’t go anywhere. Shoppers love an app that mimics this — across different devices. Companies like Tesco in the UK offer a desktop feature that syncs to a user’s phone app, ensuring that the cart a shopper began filling on his phone is also accessible on his desktop (or any other device he may use to complete the order). Designing for continuity means tailoring the existing layout and functions of your app to various devices, to create a smooth transition between them. If a user creates a shopping list on her laptop, she should see that same list waiting for her when she opens the app on her mobile phone to continue shopping. Put Barcodes to Work Barcode scanning is one of the most popular features of most grocery apps, and a fabulous example of how a digital app can complement the in-store experience. BagIQ helps shoppers stay on budget by tallying their items by barcode as they shop. Apps like ListEase make it easy for shoppers to add products they've bought before and want to reorder, by simply scanning them — without any searching, typing, or hassle. Incorporating a feature that allows your app to interact with the physical store products is a great way to capture new users. A consumer may not be ready to take grocery shopping entirely online, but may use an app to quickly scan the pantry and make a list. Do research into consumer shopping behaviors in your brick-and-mortar stores, and think about how your app can add convenience to that experience. Build Loyalty From coffee stamp cards to frequent shopper clubs, loyalty programs are a great way to engage and reward your customers. Good UI/UX design will help you maximize the impact of your loyalty program. One of the best ways to get more customers to use your loyalty program is to simply remind them that they can. Canada’s popular PC Plus program helps users track their points online, and notifies them of weekly offers as they come up, to encourage strategic purchasing. Your app’s UI/UX should also be designed to gamify your rewards program for users. After all, the appeal of a loyalty program is the thrill of racking up points and “winning” something. Give users a satisfying animation whenever they achieve a new prize, or a motivating visual that tracks their points, and you'll find them coming back again and again for those sweet rewards. Pictures are Worth… No one has time to read 1,000 words on their phone. When you're searching for your favorite cereal at the store, you look for the bright color of the box (and perhaps an iconic cartoon character) to find it quickly. Consumers want the same ease of searching and finding eye-catching products digitally. Popular grocery chain Morrison’s uses images that mimic the visual inventory of a grocery cart. Using images with no text (or minimal text) helps people quickly find the products they're looking for. Images also allow users to visualize their haul better when they look at their virtual carts. Make it just as easy and aesthetically pleasing to scroll through products on the screen as it would be to walk down the aisles in a brick-and-mortar store. Find Recipes for Success Apps offer unique opportunities to engage your customers, outside of strictly advertising your own products. Grocery stores like Whole Foods and Wegmans include recipe features in their apps, allowing shoppers to create grocery lists based on specific recipes, or vice versa: to find recipes based on ingredients they already have on hand. The recipe feature adds value to the user's experience, while encouraging increased purchasing. Try to find something relevant to the way consumers use your products, and design your app to support it. You may build app features to introduce shoppers to some of the specialty items you stock, announce brand new products, or inspire creative ideas for using your products. Apps for Branding One thing all the leading grocery apps have in common: they recognize that the app is not just a tool to sell groceries — it’s a tool to sell the brand. The most successful grocery shopping apps aren’t working at odds with their brick-and-mortar counterparts. They're working to enhance the entire brand, whether shoppers choose to get their food online or in the physical store. This is where UI becomes extremely important. Your app should echo everything from the colors, to the font, to the tone of your brand. If this isn’t your area of expertise, don’t be afraid to reach out for help. At Barefoot Solutions, we pay close attention to both the consumer experience and your brand image. Our designers excel in carrying your branding through to your app. At the end of the day, your ecommerce app should focus on serving your customers. Some of the biggest turn-offs for users include a complicated interface and a lack of clear instructions. If your app doesn’t make it easier and more pleasant for them to shop, why would they choose it over the brick-and-mortar store, where they already know how to find what they want? If you want to ensure you're truly meeting the needs of your target market, Barefoot Solutions can help you with market research and audience insights to determine what your customers want — and then work with you to design an app that delivers. Consumers are hungry for convenience, and designing an effective UI/UX is one of the best ways to satisfy it.

As a custom app development shop, our answer to client questions is almost always yes. Can you build social login? Yes. Can we add @mentions? Yes. Private Messages? Yes. Camera effects? Yes. Yes. Yes. Software development in 2018 is more powerful than ever, and so is the temptation to add all sorts of bells and whistles to your app. But should you? No. Because what you don’t build is just as important as what you do. The concept of oppositional forces is pretty common in other design disciplines, but much less so in UI/UX design. For example note the deliberate use of negative space in these popular logos, including FedEx’s famous arrow. Music is another example, where the silence is every bit as important as the sound itself. In the world of UX design “negative space” takes the form of functional constraints, or all the things you can’t do.  Perhaps the best illustration of this is Twitter, which famously decided to limit messages to just 140 characters. Over time this seemingly arbitrary constraint became the critical seed for a massively popular communication platform. Because make no mistake, we all WANT to write longer messages. But Twitter’s UX forced us to play by their rules, and in doing so created something unique. Facebook offers another great example of leveraging UX constraints. We all know the story- Facebook began as a small shrub living in the shadow of the social networking juggernaut MySpace, which Rupert Murdoch bought for $580 Million in 2005. But Myspace is now essentially worthless while Facebook is valued at $500 Billion. What’s fascinating from a UX standpoint is that Facebook didn’t beat MySpace by doing more, they won by doing less. Specifically, there were two critical UX decisions generally accepted as the reasons why they won the social network war: • Facebook did NOT allow everyone to sign up. At the start they limited accounts to college students only, which gave it a critical sheen of exclusivity and maturity just as MySpace was being overrun with younger kids and spammy content. • Facebook did NOT allow the ability to customize profile pages, allowing for a consistent and clean UI that stood in stark contrast to MySpace’s abrasive user-generated layouts. Instagram offers a more contemporary example; at first I found it frustrating that when re-opening the app, it ditches what you were previously looking at and auto-refreshes to more recent content. For example if you scroll down 20 pictures, when re-opening the app it will jump back to the top of those 20. But over time I came to realize that NOT saving my location and refreshing the content was causing me to compulsively check the app by feeding my “seeker” brain with new content every time. Another fascinating Instagram constraint is the inability to create web links. Hyperlinks are a fundamental currency of the internet, and yet when commenting on Instagram, their UX team has made a very deliberate decision to prevent users from including linked URLs in comments. The only hyperlinks you can create are #hashtags and @mentions. And consider the consequence of that decision: it prevents users from leaving the app and forces the social engagement to remain very basic, both of which work towards supporting Instagram’s primary identity as a lightweight picture based experience. And that’s an important point, because the key to leveraging constraints in UX design is to do so in a manner that strengthens the focus on your app's core identity.  Constraints that work against your core value proposition will be damaging, but constraints that pull users back into your sweet spot are invaluable to your success. A great example of this two-sided UX coin is Snapchat, which became the hottest new app in town by introducing a wonderfully simple constraint: disappearing messages. In a world of oppressively persistent social media, where mistakes we made 10 years ago float into our job interviews, Snapchat offered an oasis of consequence free pictures and video. It was brilliant, and the platform took off like a rocket. But over time temptation crept in, and Snapchat couldn’t resist adding new features that directly contradict the temporary messages which defined their identity. Take for example the “Memories” section which saves your old Snaps so you can repost them again. On the surface this may seem like a neat new tool, but if we dig a little deeper, what is the Memories section doing to their core value proposition of not saving messages? It obliterates it. I could elaborate further (public stories!) but the bottom line is that over time Snapchat added new functionality that undermined the key ephemerality constraint that defined their platform. If you go find a millennial and ask them why they like Snapchat, most likely they will mention Snapchat's awesome face filters, because the mental model of disappearing messages has been almost entirely eroded. Certainly they won't know why the logo is a ghost. And not coincidentally, Snapchat is currently in crisis- numbers have leaked showing adoption has started to flatline. The easy explanation is to blame Instagram for brazenly ripping off Snapchat’s stories, but that view overlooks the many ways in which Snapchat removed its own key constraints and evolved itself into basically the same service as Instagram. Instagram could never have competed with Snapchat if the playing field was privacy and disappearing content. There are many more examples of this, including Twitter's recent decision to double their character limit to 280, but I'll take my own advice now and wrap this up. The key takeaway for UX designers and product developers is to ask yourself: What are my key constraints? And do I offer any functionality that could be removed to improve focus on my product's core value?