mobile – Engineering The Design

Conversion rate is an essential measure of the performance of any online-based business. Along with churn rate^[1], it gives the most accurate indication of a business’ growth. Conversion rates are highly affected by the experience the users have to go through during signing up for a service or a product. Conversion rates are typically around 5%, but for unoptimized-for-conversion experiences, conversion rates drop to a value between 2.5% to 3.1% in online markets^[2][3]. I had the chance to work on a conversion rate optimization in a live environment of a subscription-based app in the United States market with ~35,000 paid customers (paying $49 to $69 per month).

Continue reading Conversion Rate Optimization: Onboarding as a Case Study

A common challenge that we all face, especially with the trend of making bigger phones, is reaching widgets far away from our thumbs reach, on our phones screens while holding them. Designers try to optimize that by placing most frequently accessed buttons in the most comfortable reach for the thumb (by using heat maps from test sessions or from live products). A recent paper proposes a model for calculating the thumb functional area[1]. By giving the algorithm four values, it calculates the area and plots it. The four values are:

Finger Span or Hand size (s): the distance between the thumb and index finger as shown in the figure
Index-finger distance (d): the distance of the index fingertip from the point of intersection of the hand with the phone
Hand orientation
Hand position from origin

Continue reading How Far Can Your Thumb Reach?