Latest Articles on Ux by Our Team

This is part of the series on the Axioms of Software development. If you haven’t read the previous posts - you can see them here.

Axioms are self-evident truths. These axioms build on each other. Understanding the first one will aid your understanding of the subsequent ones. The axioms of Software Development isolate key basics underpinning successful software development.

As more and more people start using their mobiles as their primary devices, both for personal and work purposes, we have gotten an increasing number of clients requesting features that make use of the capabilities that their mobile devices offer over regular computers. While these are certainly more fun to develop than a (let's be honest) vanilla Rails app, they can offer challenges, such as how to test them effectively.

There are plenty of ways to do so; many browsers nowadays offer a way to simulate different screen sizes, device orientations, and pixel ratios, such as Responsive Design Mode in Firefox. You can also use emulators, VMs, and services like BrowserStack. You have lots of options to simulate, but I want to briefly outline how to use real devices to test your apps running on your local Rails server. The benefits of this approach are:

Back in 1976, the idea of personal computing was somewhat different to that of today. The Apple I computer sold 175 units, and was considered revolutionary for its time. It came with one small catch – you had to build your own case.

A modern comparison to the original Apple I computer would be the raspberry pi, which has sold an impressive 12.5 million units. It too, requires you to build your own case.

We’ve recently run usability studies on an application for a financial product where, after a user inputs a couple of screens worth of data, a tailored product solution appears. We had a nice prototype, and all was well except for one thing…

During the usability study, we received the following feedback: the recommendation arrived too fast. Wait, what? Yes, the results arrived too quickly after the user hit send, which made people think that it wasn’t real. Some of the user feedback was “there’s no way it could’ve looked at my data in such short amount of time…”, “I don’t think this is real, because it hasn’t spent any time thinking about it…”, “I wouldn’t trust this product, it made me fill in screens of data but then ignored it all when giving me the recommendation…”, or, in some cases, people were expecting to continue filling in more data and didn’t entirely believe that the screen they were looking at was the solution and not just another screen requiring more information.