Pokemon Go changed the rules of the game and created a new trend in mobile design and gaming. The combination of Augmented Reality (AR) and flexibility provided by smartphone platforms helped create a whole new user experience. These emerging technologies will bring monumental changes to digital product design.

---

The gaps between smart devices (smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables) are being blurred with each consecutive product generation. Rapidly evolving hardware is bringing AR closer to mainstream users, even though the concept has been around for a while. There are many reasons why the interface will evolve. Technology no longer limits designers, their biggest limitation today is their creativity. It is also important that many of these emerging technologies are reasonably priced, or seamlessly integrated into new devices at no extra cost to the user. The design process in the future will change. For example, in order to make an interface for VR, we need specialist skills, and we need to create UIs in 3D. In addition to designing 3D assets, designers will also have to master certain skills, for example learn some Unity basics, or employ 3D design software.

User onboarding is the process of increasing the likelihood that new users will successfully adopt your product.

When launching a product, you need to spend a lot of time and resources to attract a sufficient number of users. There are a variety of means to attract users to your app, including advertising, referral programs, public relations, and content marketing. But when people finally download the app, they sometimes feel abandoned or let down. Therefore, you must do an excellent job at showing users why they need your app and how they should use it.

Onboarding can sometimes be an integral part of the app, where we show the user how to behave within the app. This dive in effect is especially useful if we incorporated some new features that might be unfamiliar to our users. Tooltips can also be used to show them how things work.

Iconography is a visual language used to represent functionality or content. Icons are used when we don’t have enough space to display textual content. Therefore, icons are meant to be simple visual elements that are recognized and understood immediately.

In practice, we will encounter both version of these icons. They can appear outlined or filled, but the whole icon set needs to be consistent and employ the same stroke. However, this is something that is more related to visual design. When it comes to UX, one thing is sure. If we use the outlined icons for the normal state, then we should probably use the filled icon for the active state of the button. It’s important to indicate which section is currently active by highlighting the icon in a specific way. Although we could change the color of the outline, this approach is not ideal when we are dealing with a light background, so it’s better to use the filled/outline approach. This makes recognition of active tabs and controls more straightforward. Icons at the end are here to serve as navigation to other section of the app.

There are several cross-platform solutions which compile the final code down to the native format for the mobile operating system and hook directly into the native libraries and APIs. Xamarin, which allows you to write your app in C# but still get all the benefits and features of a full, natively-built application.

There are many other options to choose from. Other cross-platform solutions, like Cordova for example, take a hybrid approach where the application is not a native application, but it looks like one.

Typically, native is going to be faster and look and feel more like the mobile platform the app is running on, but some of the cross-platform, hybrid solutions are getting so close to the native that can be difficult to tell the difference.

Mobile apps can be developed natively or as hybrid apps, while mobile-friendly websites can be developed as adaptive or responsive. The basic design process behind all of them is more or less the same. The only thing we need to consider when designing for mobile is that we have a specific set of rules we need to follow. Apple has its own, and so does Google.

When you’re designing for iOS or Android, the underlying process is the same. First, we do research that will outline best practices and show us what we can do on a certain platform and what not. Research helps us we learn restrictions and take advantage of possibilities a given field.

Designers are likely to work on both native app and responsive web designs. Native apps are important because we want the user to have them on their dashboard, and this way we want to help users in their everyday activities. Some native apps can work offline while others can’t.

Responsive web design is important for SEO and Google indexing. So, if we want to have your project well-ranked on Google, you definitely go for a mobile-friendly responsive design.