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Nidhi Mittal, a 2013 graduate of UMBC’s Cybersecurity Master’s in Professional Studies program talks about her experience. In this video Ms. Mital talks about the value of the cybersecurity program’s instructors, who bring with them a wealth of experience in the public and private sector. 

UMBC offers a variety of master’s degree and certificate options. Our cybersecurity graduate programs leverage a student’s experience toward a range of opportunities within the cybersecurity profession. UMBC’s in-person cybersecurity programs are designed to prepare computer science, information systems, and other experienced professionals to fill management and leadership roles in cybersecurity and cyber operations.

If you're building an icon system for a site, you have some options. If you know the icons need to be raster images, then you'll likely be using CSS sprites. If the icons will be vector images (much more common these days), you have some options. Two of those options are using inline SVG and using icon fonts.

Let's compare.

Icons are Vector

There are big advantages to vector icons: resizable up and down without losing quality, extra sharp on retina displays, and small file size among them.

In a recent personal example, while converting some icons from fonts to SVG on CodePen, some of the font icons were noticeably less sharp than the ones I converted over.

CSS Control

The big win for inline SVG here is probably multi-color icons.

Positioning

Weird Failures

Semantics

Accessibility

Ease of Use

Browser Support

Winner

It all comes down to browser support. If you can go IE 9+ / Android 3+, inline SVG is better at pretty much everything than icon fonts. If you need the deeper browser support, I feel like an inline SVG fallback would be too big of a pain to be worth it (maintaining a PNG copy, inserting an additional element to display PNG version, hiding SVG element... it's weighty).

Inline SVG vs Icon Fonts [CAGEMATCH] is a post from CSS-Tricks

I try to learn something new every day. It might relate to personal finances, physical health, computer programming, or any other topic — and the learning might take place for a few minutes or from sunrise to sunset. Every time I learn something, I typically observe a corresponding increase in my quality of life. This is why I believe it’s so critical to establish learning as a lifelong skill.

Learning to Conquer Fear

Everyone has a natural fear of the unknown, which can be a huge driver of stress: Am I saving enough money? Should my car be making that noise? Am I doing this exercise correctly? Is there a better way to write this code I’m working on?

A lack of information can make the world feel like it’s closing in.

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A few years ago I had a fairly thin physique, I ate terribly, and I lived a very sedentary lifestyle. I decided I needed to take control of my health, but the idea of a signing up for a gym membership and completely changing my diet was extremely overwhelming.

When I started exercising, I didn’t even know the difference between a rep and a set. It sounds absurd to be afraid of entering a building that contains exercise equipment, but I was terrified. My total lack of knowledge made me feel like I would either embarrass myself, hurt myself, or both. It’s two years later, and I’m now in the best physical shape of my life. I’ve gained about 30 pounds (13.6 kg) in muscle mass, I eat a much better diet, and I lift weights three days a week.

The first year I wasted a lot of time and didn’t see any real results. I decided to take the “head first” approach and just start running on a treadmill at the gym. The running wasn’t all bad; it helped me get over some anxiety and get used to going to the gym consistently. Looking back, though, I should have started my journey with a few weeks of learning. As soon as I picked up a book, read some blog posts, and watched some videos about working out, I finally started to see real change.

Lifting weights at the gym for the first time was scary, but I was able to conquer my fear by learning how to do it properly. (Photo from Flickr user midiman)

Now, before I go to the gym, I’ll spend about 10 minutes reading or watching videos on the web. Just six months ago, I was doing squats and deadlifts in cushioned running shoes. I would have thought that somewhere along the way a book would have pointed out this common mistake to me.

Instead, it was during one of my 10-minute learning sessions that a video emphasized the importance of keeping your feet as close to the ground as possible by wearing the proper shoes. This simple change increased my balance and helped me break through a plateau almost immediately. It seems so obvious in hindsight. But you don’t know what you don’t know, which is why it’s so important to always continue learning.

Learning is not a Luxury

I’ve always been a huge fan of video games. I love this hobby so much that I decided to start a big multi-year side project to make a game of my own. If you’re not familiar, writing game code (I’m using C# in Unity) is very different from writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, and many of the other web languages we teach on Treehouse. It’s a different programming environment with different paradigms.

I keep this small plaque hanging in my kitchen. The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still have left to learn.

I also want to make my game work with VR (virtual reality) hardware like the Oculus Rift, which adds a time pressure: The clock is ticking, and I need to work quickly before the market is saturated. At first glance, it seems crazy to spend any of that time learning. Why hit the books when I can instead draw upon my previous programming experience and dive right into the work?

Wasting time at the gym made me learn an important lesson: Learning is not a luxury. Rather, learning is a necessity that should be built in from the onset of any project. Learning is work, just like other seemingly ancillary prototypical project phases, like testing and QA. If you don’t continuously spend time sharpening your skills, then eventually they will become dull, and other competition in the tech jungle will eat you for lunch.

In a previous post about coding tips, I touched on this idea briefly:

When you’re crunching between one deadline and the next, learning can feel like a luxury. A programmer who isn’t learning, however, is just treading water. Almost every time I learn something new, it helps me work faster and more efficiently.

This idea has carried over into my game development hobby. For the first two months, almost all my free time was spent learning about game development. I absorbed as much as I could about best programming practices, how to build a solid asset pipeline, how to create engaging gameplay, and more.

Just like when I go to the gym, I start my coding sessions with about 10 minutes of learning. In those little 10-minute sessions, I often pick up a new tip that saves me hours of work. I also have a month-by-month plan for my game and, midway through, I’ve planned a month where I’ll do nothing but learning again. It might seem extravagant, especially when there’s a key market window I want to hit, but I feel confident that I’ll save more time than I’ll actually spend learning.

Learn for Life

It’s simple: Learning saves time, and time is the most precious resource available. We all have a limited life to lead, so it’s important to make the best of it. If you don’t maintain your mind, it will eventually fall apart, just like your personal finances, your car, or your body. So feed your curiosity and make it a habit to learn something new every single day. You never know what you might discover.

The post Learning, Every Day appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Amanda Langley (Photo courtesy to Treehouse)

A few years before she graduated from college in 2013, Amanda Langley shifted her focus from filmmaking to computer engineering.

Langley was good at math and liked the challenge of logic and abstract thinking in her computer science class. She was just one of a handful of women in her class of more than 100 students at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. But the lack of gender diversity didn’t stop her from excelling in her courses and landing a job at Centare in Milwaukee six months before graduation. She is now a programmer for the software development company.

Langley now reaches out to high school kids at career fairs, explaining the opportunities and challenges for women in technology.

“Adding women to the room changes the dynamics on a team,” Langley says. “I tell these high school girls that they should believe in themselves and not be afraid to tell people what they’re thinking.”

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Langley is member of Girls in Tech Milwaukee and volunteers about once a month to talk with young people about her career path.

Technology jobs, historically a man’s field, are still overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women hold only about one-quarter of all information technology jobs and nearly half the women in science, engineering and technology jobs quit the field early, according to a report by the National Center for Women and Information Technology.

Recruiting top talent is a challenge, especially when technology companies are keyed-in to the need for diversity. But Ann Bly, senior recruiter at Base2 Solutions in Bellevue, Wash., says she’s seeing more female applicants now than she was a few years ago.

“We are working on building relationships with some of our local colleges and universities,” Bly says. “I also work with some local groups that encourage second careers in programming. “

On average, Bly receives 10 percent to 20 percent female candidates for her posted positions, a figure that’s in-line with the national averages.

Despite the outreach, only about 20 percent of software developers are women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The good news for women in software engineering is there are plenty of jobs. Some 1.2 million computing jobs will be available in 2022, yet U.S. universities are producing only 39 percent of the graduates needed to fill them.

“I believe that women graduating with degrees in computer science or engineering degrees would have many choices for positions with large and small companies in the cities of their choice,” Bly says.

Members of the Girls in Tech group in Milwaukee. (Photo courtesy to Treehouse)

Bias Still a Concern for Women

But some women in the field warn the tech world can be a battleground, and some say they often find sexism in the male-dominated industry.

A recent notable case is that of engineer Julie Ann Horvath, who claimed she was the victim of gender discrimination at the startup GitHub. In an email to TechCrunch, Horvath wrote: “I had a really hard time getting used to the culture, the aggressive communication on pull requests and how little the men I worked with respected and valued my opinion.” (GitHub said on April 21 it had been exonerated by an independent investigation.)

Langley, the Milwaukee programmer, admits when she was working on projects at school, “the boys would take over, and it was difficult to have her voice heard.”

Langley and other women are fighting back with their own brand of girl power. Langley is part of a LinkedIn group, Women In Software Engineering, that’s become a platform for women to share information about job openings and female-friendly companies. It has more than 3,000 members. By banding together, the women in the group say they also hope to erase the pay gap in their field. Census Bureau figures show annual earnings for women were 77 percent of what men earned in 2012.

This month, President Barack Obama signed directives aimed at bridging that gap. His executive measure makes it easier for workers of federal contractors to get information about workplace compensation, and he directed the Labor Department to write rules requiring federal contractors to provide compensation data by race and gender.

Langley, for one, remains positive. “The future holds some cool things for computer science, and this is the time for women to be part of the network,” she says.

The post Women Finding Footing in Software Development Careers appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

For decades, The United States has controlled domain names through ICANN, much to the shagrin of the international community. Now this has all changed. Here is the story.

U.S. Aims to Defuse Tension Over Control of Internet

Some Nations Push for New Supervisory Body

By Loretta Chao, Gautham Nagesh and Frances Robinson

April 21, 2014 6:10 p.m. ET

The U.S. has agreed to give up supervision of the Internet policy-making body that controls domain names, hoping to satisfy countries that want more international control over the Internet. This week, Washington will find out if its actions have eased global tensions over its cyberspying activities [NewzGuyz thinks there is more to it than this, but alright].

World representatives are arriving in Brazil for Net Mundial, a two-day meeting about Internet governance that starts Wednesday in São Paulo. The meeting comes amid fallout over spying by the U.S. National Security Agency that has renewed concerns over the U.S. government's credibility and over longtime U.S. oversight of the Internet [actually, these concerns have existed for well over a decade, even before the revelations about NSA spying].

Revelations that the NSA targeted foreign leaders, including Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, have soured U.S. diplomatic relations and opened American technology and telecom companies up to increased scrutiny abroad [Though this information is not necessarily false, it is superfluous, possibly an attempt to implicate the President in what has happened]. The U.S., where the Internet started, is now under increasing pressure to share its supervisory duties.

At the top of the agenda will be negotiations for a plan on how the Internet will be overseen globally in the future. The U.S. Commerce Department said last month that it would give up its supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann. The move would decrease the U.S.'s role as the caretaker of the system of handing out domain names and Web addresses.

Organizers also expect privacy, security and freedom of expression to be part of the talks.

Discussions over how the Commerce Department should be replaced will begin this week and continue over the next year, including talks in Istanbul in September.

The U.S. is pushing for a transition to supervision by a "multistakeholder" body that includes representatives from governments, the private sector and academia. This could mean creating a new supervisory body, or empowering an existing body such as the Internet Governance Forum, which includes participants from various parties around the world and convenes annually.

Russia and China, along with some other countries, have urged that the United Nations assume oversight of domain names. They say that Internet governance has been disproportionately influenced by the U.S. As its proposal for Net Mundial, China's foreign ministry submitted a copy of a letter to the U.N. secretary-general jointly signed in 2011 by China, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The letter calls for deliberation on any international code of conduct for the Internet be done "within the United Nations framework."

Critics of this proposal say it could weaken protections for Internet users. "There are still some countries that find a purely governmental [organization] much more comfortable," but "is not well thought out in terms of making the system actually work," said Vint Cerf, Google's chief Internet evangelist and a computer scientist who is widely recognized as one of the founding fathers of the Internet.

The "enormous benefits" of the exchange of information on the Internet "are balanced or counter-balanced to some extent by people who use the network," he said. Not including different stakeholders runs the risk of designing a system that "ignores important protections that are needed for the users."

U.S. officials [NewzGuyz finds it curious why anonymous sources would be used here. More detail should be presented. What agency they are from, for example], for their part, are hoping the decision for the Commerce Department to step away from its contract overseeing Icann will assuage international complaints and head off the move to U.N. governance. They admit that the agency's contractual relationship with the organization has been "an irritant" in discussions concerning global Internet governance. They have been adamant that they won't accept any government or U.N. involvement in the Icann transition, or they will delay the planned transition for up to four years.

Despite ongoing strains in relations between Brazil and the U.S. resulting from the discovery of the NSA's spying and disagreements such as over data jurisdiction [Again, is this necessary? Probably not], Brazil also agrees at least in part with the U.S. position on the matter. "We are emphasizing the importance of this [multistakeholder] model. We think that a decentralized structure of Internet governance should be maintained and strengthened," said Virgílio Almeida, Brazil's IT policy secretary and chair of the Net Mundial meeting, in an interview.

Europe has wanted to make control of the Internet's architecture a more globally shared responsibility. But Neelie Kroes, the European Union Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, said earlier this year that the U.N. shouldn't be responsible for Internet oversight because more authoritarian governments could use it to restrict freedom.

The governments of China and Russia, for example, censor the Internet in their countries using Web filtering technologies and policies.

In her blog ahead of the meeting, Ms. Kroes said that in the draft conclusions for the meeting, "some of the language related to human rights [is] unnecessarily weak," and that both human rights and data privacy should be strongly protected in leaders' decisions.

For Brazil's part, however, Mr. Almeida still cautions that greater representation would be needed from emerging economies in any new governance model. Brazilian officials have expressed frustration over a number of global Internet issues, including data jurisdiction. For example, Brazilian courts cannot easily access data from U.S. Internet service providers for judicial proceedings, even if the data involves Brazilian users in Brazil [Finally, a real reason why these changes are being sought by the international community!].

Meanwhile, the country is looking to build direct cable links between countries in Latin America, and between Brics countries—Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa—to decrease routing of Internet traffic through the U.S.

"The next billion users will come from the south," Mr. Almeida said. But "if you look at Latin America, there are few countries present at discussions of Internet governance."

Write to Loretta Chao at loretta.chao@wsj.com, Gautham Nagesh at gautham.nagesh@wsj.com and Frances Robinson at frances.robinson@wsj.com

BIAS DETECTOR:

We at USDemocrazy don’t just care about Putin cartoons, presidential selfies and political corruption. We are passionate proponants of vital governing. That starts with democracy close at hand.

That starts with the most local of local governments to college students – the Student Government Association.

Each year, three days (April 21-23, 2014) are set aside for undergraduate students to elect their SGA President and Executive Vice President, Treasurer, Vice President for Student Organizations, Senators and Finance Board Representatives.

But here’s the deal – don’t just vote for whoever comes up to you first in a bright campaign t-shirt with a handful of quarter cards. It is worth your time to educate yourself about the candidates.

Ask yourself, what issues are on your mind? What do I want to advocate for on campus and which candidates agree with me? Who has experience in leadership positions? You pay tuition, fees, room and board and are granted the right to vote in the election.

Use your vote wisely, because every single vote counts.

If you want to vote on campus rather than your own time, stop by The Commons Main Street and hit up a voting booth between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. (this Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday). You can grab a snack and a 2014 SGA Election T-shirt while you’re at it!

Here is the link to cast your vote.

Pattern libraries are a great source of inspiration and education for designers. But common practice doesn’t always equal best practice. In this post, we’ll look at why many common tutorial patterns are ineffective and how you can leverage game design principles to increase user engagement.

After the release of the first edition of Mobile Design Pattern Gallery, Intuit asked me to speak with its mobile team. I spoke at a high level about the value of patterns across industries (fashion, architecture, software and others) and how they are a useful teaching tool.

Alissa Briggs, a senior UX manager at Intuit, followed my talk with a case study from Snap Payroll. Imagine my surprise when she walked through each of the “invitation” patterns from my book Dialog, How It Works, Tour and Transparency, and showed how they failed to onboard users effectively. Users were confused or frustrated (or both) by these extra “helpful” screens.

Some of the test concepts from Intuit’s Snap Payroll tutorial (from “Dialog, How It Works, Transparency and Tour”) (Large preview)

Shortly thereafter, I was working with RetailMeNot, tasked with designing its iOS and Android app tutorial. The product team wanted to make sure that users were clear about the value proposition of the tool and knew where to access certain actions (favoriting a store, saving a coupon, etc).

We thought that a very short tour (three steps) or a video demo might work. Some of the stakeholders really liked the idea of a transparency, so we tested that as well. But instead of engaging users, these designs just frustrated them.

One of the RetailMeNot test participants said:

“I just want to get in the app and start exploring.”

In summary, user testing showed that users skip or otherwise ignore dialogs, tours, video demos and transparencies. At best, users find them a minor inconvenience. At worst, the patterns significantly aggravate new users who are trying to get into the app.

Some of the test concepts for RetailMeNot’s tutorial: transparency, video demo, three-step tour (Large preview)

Why Do These Patterns Fail?

So, why don’t these patterns work? I turned to the field of game design for answers. Game designers have always known that you can’t drop new players into the middle of a firefight and expect them to enjoy the experience. Most players would be dead before figuring out how to fire their weapons and fight back.

In game design, some methods of driving deep engagement are much more effective than others. The same holds true for mobile apps. While the stakes might not be (virtual) life or death, the frustration that users experience when they don’t know how or what to do is the same. And when that happens to too many of your users, it’s game over for your app.

Portal offers a safe environment for players to figure out the controls while advancing in the game. (Large preview)

Extra Credits’ online video series thoughtfully looks at various aspects of the gaming world from an insider’s perspective. “Tutorials 101” is one fantastic video in particular that every app designer would do well to watch. (Get past the annoying chipmunk voice narration — it’s worth it.)

“Tutorials 101” lays out some basic rules for crafting an effective game tutorial that we can extend to the world of mobile design:

1. Use less text.
2. Don’t frontload.
3. Make it fun.
4. Reinforce learning through play.
5. Listen to your players.

Rule Number 1: Use Less Text

When we want to explain something, words often seem like the easiest tool to use. But when we want the user to learn something, the written word is often a turn-off. According to “Tutorials 101,” we should avoid relying only on text because “it kills pacing, it destroys immersion, and it will often be skipped by the players who need the tutorial the most.”

Too much text makes for a “tell, don’t show” approach, which works against the strengths of mobile apps. Instead, tutorials should “show, not tell”; they should be interactive, so that users learn by doing. When someone practices an action beforehand, they’re more likely to remember how to do it when they need to than if they’d merely been told how to do it.

Here are some examples:

Boomerang vs. Mailbox

Boomerang for Android has too much text (see also rule 2: “No Frontloading”). (Large preview)

Mailbox for iOS’ tutorial text encourages the user to learn by doing. (See video) (Large preview)

DigiCal vs. Fantastical

In DigiCal for Android, the text is abstracted from the activities it describes. (Large preview)

In Fantastical for iOS, the tutorial invites the user to work through the gestures that they need to learn. (See video) (Large preview)

Catch (2013) vs. Clear

Catch for Android’s tour describes features and actions but doesn’t let the user try them. (Large preview)

In Clear for iOS, the default view is preloaded with tasks that the user learns by doing. (See video) (Large preview)

Resist the urge to use text if there are ways to show rather than tell. Use text to prompt the “cause,” and let the user observe the “effect” by doing.

Rule Number 2: No Frontloading

“If you frontload your tutorial and teach the player everything at the beginning,” Extra Credits says in “Tutorials 101,” “they’ll be overwhelmed with information and undersupplied with engagement.” Replace the word “player” with “user” in that sentence, and its relevance will be obvious to app designers.

Rather than overwhelm users with information that they will probably forget by the time they need it, provide the information in short, easily digestible chunks precisely when they need it. Remember that you’re making a first impression here. Wouldn’t you rather make a first impression that leaves users wanting more rather than less?

Dooo vs. Todoist

Dooo for iOS’ frontloaded information goes on and on for an overwhelming 11 pages. (Large preview)

In Todoist for iOS, a tip invites the user to add a first task; then, another prompt introduces the options menu. (Large preview)

UserTesting’s recent post “Six UX Lessons Learned From the New Facebook App, Paper” affirms that “users love a guided tour” — “guided tour” meaning a series of interactive tips during the user’s first experience.

Facebook’s Paper app uses interactive tips in the context of a flow. (Large preview)

Don’t overload users up front with all of the information they will ever need. Give it to them in bite-sized chunks, just where and when they need it.

Rule Number 3: Make It Rewarding

Actually, you may recall that the rule from “Tutorials 101” is “Make it fun.” Of course, “fun” is not appropriate for all apps. But when the video’s narrator says, “Your tutorial should be as engaging as any other part of your game,” we can see that in every other sense, this rule applies to our world.

Even if we can’t make learning our apps fun, there are certainly ways to make it rewarding and flow seamlessly into the app’s overall experience. And a good way to do that is with interactivity that enables the user to actually accomplish things. This imparts a sense of agency that reinforces what the user learns.

Even when “fun” is not the right tone to strike, instilling a sense of playfulness is still sometimes appropriate. Let’s look at two apps that take different approaches to this, NBC News and Flipboard, the latter of which exemplifies the right approach. Despite its “playful” font on the five transparency screens, NBC’s tutorial still feels like a lecture. Flipboard, on the other hand, feels dramatically different on first being opened.

There is no instructional text, and the bottom half of the screen playfully flips up a bit, teasing you with a peek at some content before flipping down again. After it does this once more, you’ll probably get the hint that you need to swipe up to reveal the underlying content. But if by then you still haven’t swiped, you’ll get an embedded invitation that says “Swipe up to continue.”

Every subsequent flip transition reinforces the swipe gestures that a new user needs to make in order to explore the content in their Flipboard. Playful and rewarding.

NBC News vs. Flipboard (2013)

NBC News for iOS has a playful font, but the long lecture isn’t rewarding. (Large preview)

Flipboard for Android and iOS embeds playful prompts to engage the user and reinforce the key gestures needed to navigate the app. (See video) (Large preview)

Make deeper engagement with your app rewarding. Consider adding elements of playfulness where appropriate, and create a sense of urgency by enabling users to learn by doing.

Rule Number 4: Reinforce Learning Through Use

Remember those “A-ha!” moments in science class when you came to understand a concept by testing it in a simple experiment? That’s what we’re talking about here. Of course, the teacher had explained the concept to you, but it was by performing the experiment that you actually learned it.

The same idea applies with tutorials. And if you follow the first three rules, this reinforcement will largely take care of itself. It could be as simple as accompanying an action demonstrated in a tutorial with a very subtle bit of visual or aural feedback.

Then, when the user subsequently performs the action, the same feedback would reinforce what they have learned. (If you do use audio feedback, provide a way to turn it off so that it doesn’t become annoying once the user is familiar with the app.)

This rule complements the “No frontloading” rule. Rather than trying to show off everything in your app at once, craft an experience that invites the user progressively deeper into the app. By revealing more advanced features over time or by giving unexpected “rewards” as they progress, you’ll reinforce what the user learns as they use the app.

Polar offers a tip to power users after a few polls have been answered. Duolingo users earn rewards and level-ups by mastering skills. (Large preview)

Any.do puts a widget on Android’s home screen to encourage engagement and offer spontaneous rewards. (Large preview)

Learning isn’t a one-time thing. Using an app should reinforce what the tutorials have helped the user learn.

Rule Number 5: Listen To Your Users

Considering that you’ve been deep inside your app, building and refining it for months, who is the best person to explain how it works? Probably not you, according to “Tutorials 101,” whose narrator says:

“When you’re a designer who’s been working on a project for a year or two, it’s very easy to think things are intuitive or obvious that are actually totally incomprehensible.”

Simple, properly conducted user testing will reveal any stumbling blocks. Observe your users to see where they get stuck and where they have problems. Listen to their comments as they interact with the app. Don’t question them until later; if you question them as they are using the app, you will likely lead them unconsciously to the answers you want to hear.

The designers of Snap Payroll ultimately discovered through user testing that a guided experience, or contextual tips, yields the best results. And after four rounds of testing at RetailMeNot, we arrived at the same findings.

Snap Payroll’s contextual tips tested very well with users, as did RetailMeNot’s. (Large preview)

Familiarity blinds you to what users need to learn. Let users show you themselves through unbiased user testing.

Dive Deeper…

• Mobile Design Pattern Gallery: UI Patterns for Smartphone Apps, Second edition, Theresa Neil
• “Gamification Design: 4 Phases of a Player’s Journey,” Yu-kai Chou
• “4 Experience Phases in Gamification (#2): The Onboarding Phase,” Yu-kai Chou
• “Game Mechanics: Onboarding Card,” iGamify
• “First-Time User Experiences in Mobile Apps,” Krystal Higgins

(al, il)

The post Rethinking Mobile Tutorials: Which Patterns Really Work? appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Infinite scrolling has became a common design pattern in recent years.

With many high profile social networks adopting the solution, it’s come to be one of the most widely adopted patterns out there. Though however popular, every design pattern always has its own unique strengths and weaknesses we have to plan for.

Done badly, and infinite scrolling will wreck your UX and guarantee total failure as users desert you in droves. Get it right, and you’ll have an intuitive, popular and successful site.

Understanding why infinite scrolling drives engagement

When implementing a design pattern, it’s always critical to evaluate the pros and cons for each unique scenario. What resulted in more user engagement for someone else, may actually result in less user engagement from your own users.

For infinite scrolling in particular, it’s all about the type of content users are interacting with.

Being able to determine what type of content goals you have for your users will be able to provide you with insight as to which design patterns will work best in your situation. This applies to any pattern, but especially to infinite scrolling.

High engagement content

Content that seeks to grab and keep the user’s interest for a prolonged period of time, or seeks to be interactive, is simply not an ideal candidate for typical infinite scrolling. If your goal is to have your users read, like, and share each individual post, giving them dozens to work through at a time may seem overwhelming.

That being said, Medium has found a way to implement it successfully with content that wouldn’t typically benefit from infinite scrolling.

Instead of presenting the user with the next ten or twenty posts, Medium provides a single recommendation at the end of each article. This stays true to the high engagement function, but offers the browsability benefit that infinite scrolling brings. So while high engagement may be your goal, don’t let that deter you from making a creative solution of your own.

Low engagement content

Infinite scrolling is at its best with content that requires low engagement. Sites like Twitter and Facebook are spectacular examples of this. The typical user of these sites simply scrolls down the list, consuming content but rarely actively interacting with it. While these type of situations don’t score high on user engagement, they do end up keeping users interested for longer periods of time.

Uncontrollable variables in content type

While it’s sometimes obvious what type of content your website may have, what about those that aren’t so black and white? Tumblr is a good example of this, with content that could have high or low user engagement goals depending upon what type of blogs the user follows. While these situations are rare, they do pose a problem in that infinite scrolling would be beneficial only to half of the users. Interestingly enough, the solution in this case is to minimize a user’s options of interaction with each individual post. This allows for the high engagement users to narrowly focus on individual posts, and low engagement users to consume much more content without being required to interact as much.

It’s also worth noting that Tumblr does a fantastic job of allowing users to decide the value of content on an individual basis. Giving users the option to enable or disable infinite scrolling in their preferences provides further control over how they consume the content.

Hybrid scrolling solutions

Many places choose to implement a hybrid approach to infinite scrolling, prompting the user to load more content when they reach the end of a page. By doing so, they give back the control to the user to decide how much content to load – which is critical on mobile. This solution also helps with maintaining a consistent data load on the server. After automatically loading a predefined number of pages, a button would appear prompting the user to load more manually.

When Infinite scrolling goes bad

There are countless examples out there of websites using infinite scrolling, and more than a few do so to the detrement users. Dan Nguyen wrote an interesting article back when Etsy attempted to implement the feature. What ended up happening is Etsy went ahead with implementing it before testing their assumptions. Loading more search results, at a faster rate would seem to be a good thing at first… But when the content requires high user engagement—as is the case with shopping—things can quickly turn sour.

In this particular case, users are actively searching for something of interest. Attempting to find the perfect product out of a sea of choices. So when the user is flooded with an seemingly infinite amount of choices, they give up and seek other avenues to find what they’re looking for.

Best practices for infinite scrolling

As with any design pattern, there are best practices that are usually good to follow. These aren’t the laws of using the pattern; rather they are what the majority of successful implementations do.

• Have a graceful fallback: Ensure that users without JavaScript aren’t left out in the cold. Design for old fashioned pagination first, and then use JavaScript to hide it and implement infinite scrolling.
• Give a visual indication of loading more content: Providing users with a loading animation informs them of what’s going on. Without it, the page will seem to have hit a dead end on slow connections.
• Keep back button functionality: Although many implementations forget this major detail, make sure to keep basic browser functionality. If a user browses away from your website and then travels back, they typically don’t expect to reload back at the top of the page.
• Keep navigation visible: While users will primarily want to consume your content, they’ll also want to browse to other areas of your website as well. If they’re forced to manually scroll back up through hundreds of posts… They may opt to leave instead.
• Lazyload content ahead of the user: The whole point of implementing infinite scrolling is to have it seem like an endless stream of content. While it’s important to have some form of a loading indicator, users will hopefully rarely, if ever, see it.
• Links should open in a new window: This is a highly debated practice; it forcefully chooses for the user, but with the intention of helping them. Forcing links to open in a new window or tab prevents users from accidentally navigating away from the infinitely loading list and losing their place.
• Footers may get in the way: Often times implementing an infinite scrolling solution means giving up the option for a website footer. While it’s definitely annoying to try and “catch” a footer when you’re automatically loading more posts, there are other options. For example, using a hybrid loading solution would allow you to keep a footer well within users’ reach.

In conclusion

While infinite scrolling can be a trendy feature that gives the user endless content options… It has to be used correctly.

While we want to expose the users to more content, we don’t want to detract from the value of each individual piece or have them feeling overwhelmed with information. After all, users are there for the content itself—not the fancy scrolling feature.

As you can see, Infinite scrolling itself isn’t inherently good or bad. But rather, its use could result in better or worse user engagement depending upon the content type being presented. With that in mind, we can attempt to predict where implementing it will be beneficial.

Featured image/thumbnail, escalator image via Shutterstock.

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