Medium Constraints
1. Display size
[How would the current design be affected if the screen/medium size changes?]
In our diversified omnichannel world, businesses are venturing their products into more than one type of medium. Furthermore, portable mobile devices may have very limited screen size and displaying huge information can be challenging. It is always best to conduct user testing through the smallest medium. Ideally, for mobile devices, use a screen size of ~4 inches.
Display size: The quickest way to cater for an omni-channel experience is to use a responsive design. However, Spotify recognises how each channel has its own respective use cases differences hence, they allocated different product owners to develop design for the specific medium, following closely to the brand and design guidelines.
Restrictions: Pinterest differentiates their two types of users: Public users who can freely browse through galleries of images and Registered users who sign in to a more personalised feed.
2. Display quality
[Can the product and CTAs still function with low visual quality?]
Lower end devices usually have lower contrast in their screens. Users here are also generally more concerned with resource usage such as processing power, loading capacity, eye comfort etc. and they are more likely to dim their display to conserve battery. With the ability to customize the display through the settings on certain devices, this might also affect how users view and engage with the product.
Display quality: Always test final design output in low brightness setting and toggle between light and dark mode if there is separate design for it.
3. Storage space
[How can there be affordance to reduce storage/memory space of the product?]
Phone memory/storage space is precious to the users as not many are able to afford large capacity within their devices. An average person has 40 apps installed on his phone and more than half of those apps are unused or remain inactive. These users are likely to judge whether an app is worth downloading/keeping based on the size it occupies.
App Usage Statistics 2021
4. Processing power
[Can the product still function under slow processing speed for intense heavily-powered devices? What should be prioritized?]
The speed and efficiency that an application can perform is largely impacted by the phone’s processing power, which in turn might affect productivity and timeliness of the service. For an ideal case, it is recommended to have all functions and/or services to be held within the same medium or allow for app control while it is still in the background. The best scenario to test the performance of any application is on a ~8GB phone with a few apps (games, social media etc.) opened within them or have multiple tabs open in the browser.
Processing power: For contact tracing purposes, the TraceTogether app has a moving animation of an otter to ensure that the screen is live and that users are rightfully checked to enter malls and public areas. The low processing version of the app is a more washed out color gray and a still image of the otter which still allows it to serve minimal functionality.
Comments