A Noteworthy Guide Highlighting the Growing Need For Cross Device Usage

We are living in an era, wherein people are increasingly switching to Smartphones and tablets to access the content on the Internet. What's more, most of the people today are using multiple devices to consume the web content, viewing a certain part of the content from their Smartphone and the other part on their tablet or may be desktop. Performing an operation on one device and completing it on the other has become a common practice for most of the people today. This clearly suggests the critical about designing cross-device user interfaces.

Understanding the Cross-Device Reality

How we access the Internet, connect to people and access the web has significantly changed. Lots of marketers are worried about the fact that as people increasingly access the content on Smartphones and tablets rather than the personal computers, because of the personal nature of mobile devices they can't possibly determine the kind of advertising that will work best on those devices.

However that might not be the only problem, according to a new research authorized by Google has been observed that: People are not only going mobile, but also are using multiple devices to access the content on the web at the same time. As per the research, we're now living in the “New Multi-screen World” and thus need to understand consumer behavior towards cross-platform device usage. Below are a few highlights from the research:

• Around 90% of people juggle various device screens for completing a task.

• 67% of people shop online using one device and continue the task on another device.

• Majority of people make use of multiple device screens sequentially, where the main operation is performed first using the Smartphone and completed on some other device, particularly a PC.

Moreover, research also show that apart from using the multiple screens sequentially, a few others use the device screens simultaneously including watching TV and browsing on another device.

Looking at all the data, you'll certainly understand the growing need to develop applications that could communicate across several devices.

Luke Wroblewski's Explanation to Designing For Cross-Device Usage – An Insight

Luke Wroblewski one of the leading UI experts cites that when designing for cross device usage we'll need to examine four components such as access, flow, push, and control. This means that processes that move ensures their continuation across multiple screens.

For example, when looking for a place in Google Maps via your Smartphone, you can easily found a great place. You'll most likely want to read the complete address details about the place and maybe customer reviews regarding the place. Chances are that you would find accessing the content difficult on your Smartphone screen and will require a wider screen such as the likes of tablet to view things clearer.

If you want to offer a better cross device usage experience to your users, a viable solution is to create an “automatic saving system”. This will help to synchronize your data without requiring users to carry out an action explicitly. For example, as soon as a user fills out some fields or selects any option in the check box, a request is sent to the server by the system and the data is saved. This is a good solution but has a downside to it, the device where the change was not made to view the change, users will have to “refresh” or “reload” the page.

In order to implement the above discussed solution you'll need to develop a system that not only sends updates but also receives them the server. This can be accomplished with the help of “Long polling”, “Server-side events” and “Web sockets”. As a result, you'll get a fluid experience and can view content that remains consistent across devices. Now as your able to access the content that freely flows between different screens, make sure that the push and control cross-device usage works for users.

With better control, one device handles the functions for the other. For example your Smartphone can work as your TV's remote control. But for this purpose, you'll have to allow one device to push content or information to the other device, or make one device control the operations of another device.

Conclusion

The purpose of this post is to make you understand the growing importance of making your content accessible to cross-device consumers. Reading this post will help you better understand about how cross-device usage has become a reality, and so, you should design and develop user interfaces keeping cross-device usage in mind. It's obvious, for any developer the first and foremost aim is to achieve user satisfaction. Since, consumers today are using multiple device screens to consume the content, it becomes essential to design an interface that supports cross-device usage to meet consumers needs. As Designs2html Ltd also follows the usage of cross appliance. They also use this in their services. Designs2html a PSD to HTML conversion service company has supported the mobile responsive cross device usage.