Skeleton Screens

Have you seen a screen like this one? This screen indicates that the app is loading the screen real slow, BUT bit by bit. The idea is to ensure that each UI element's 'skeleton' is loaded beforehand and then content is loaded one after the other in a lazy loading manner. This is a skeleton screen. A skeleton screen is essentially a blank version of a page into which information is gradually loaded. 

A skeleton screen gives a visual cue that content is loading one after the other into each UI element area. It has been found that skeleton screens play a major role in the perception of users who appear to think that these are not as slow as spinners or progress bars. In fact, many users seem to love them for its look and feel. 

Did you check out the latest Skeleton Screens on Linked In yet?

Contextual Device Support

Challenge
You work for a large corporate firm. You book meeting rooms online. Sometimes, you book recurring meetings for long periods of time. And, sometimes, you don't use the booked meeting rooms. Most of the times, you don't release the booked meeting rooms. You are too busy!

Evoko Room Manager

Opportunity

Evoko Room Manager can help you. If you have booked a meeting room and are about to use the room, you would confirm your meeting by tapping on the Evoko Room Manager interface. If the meeting room is not occupied in first few minutes, anybody who needs a room can walk up to this room, cancel the meeting and make a new request on this touch device. 

Of course, each meeting room would need one device, raising costs. It is about what is the priority - Saving Time or Saving Cost.

Time  is inversely proportional to Money. If you want to save time, you need to spend money. If you want to save money, you need to spend time.

Which one would you choose? Time or money?

Smart Defaults

Consider a phone number field on a registration form. It’s usually a simple text field. By just seeing a text field,  user might not know, in which format the data needs to be entered in. User might simply enter country  code, area code, followed by phone number or stick to a format that the error message might convey (if you are lucky). In short, users might go wrong many times, due to incorrect format or unknown validations coded into the product by programmers. In few cases, text field might allow alphabetic characters into phone field, paving way for more errors from users, for which users get into 'False Game'.

Whatsapp is one app which makes entering phone numbers easy. If you access the app from India, the country code is pre-filled based on location services by default. In case user wants to change it, he can delete current value and enter a new one. Additionally, country code field is separated from phone number providing visual cue to user on the format of the phone number expected. This is much simpler as ‘+91’ makes user’s job, not just easy, but lessens the number of steps as well. Whatsapp smartly defaults the right value into the country code field, whilst allowing users to modify it if they like to, specially, let’s say, if they are traveling to a new country.

In Luke Wroblewski’s words,

“Smart defaults are selections put in place to provide answers to questions for you. This enables people to complete forms faster. Every question we ask people requires them to parse it, formulate a response, and then input their answer into the affordance provided on the form.”

What's your take on smart defaults? 

"Best defaults are those that suit users most of the time."

Smart Defaults

In Luke Wroblewski’s words,