- #NPR ONE LISTEN LATER WORKS ON AIRPLANE MODE OFFLINE#
- #NPR ONE LISTEN LATER WORKS ON AIRPLANE MODE DOWNLOAD#
Keep everything users gather or enter on a mobile device, including application states, until the data is synchronized. This will help ensure systems are useful and usable under all network conditions. To solve users’ problems with poor or transient connectivity, there are a few principles you should follow. and ensure sync works well on high-latency mobile networks. Designing to Sync Design data for sync services to be as compact as possible Often, you’ll want to sync a whole lot of data. You analyze the information and functionality, understand the audience, and learn how they will use your app. How do you decide what features you should make work offline? The same way you design your information architecture, your task-flow diagrams, your navigation, and everything else. People won’t be using the app while driving. On the way to a second site, they may pass back into an area with mobile connectivity, and their tablet will automatically sync the data they’ve entered to the server and bring in fresh data updates they can use to better deal with their next customer.īut making users press a button to sync their data or having an app retrieve data only while users are looking at the app won’t work. If the customer resides in a rural area with no coverage, that’s fine-as long as remote workers can use your app’s synced data and can take notes about their work. While these people may start their day at home or at the office, they drive to the customer’s site based on the live data they receive. Say you’re building an app for a remote worker like a repairman, salesman, or installer. The Traveling-Worker Problem Making users press a button to sync their data or having an app retrieve data only while users are looking at the app won’t work. Just drive into the suburbs or between cities to see what mediocre coverage really looks like. But very, very often, they simply have to suffer poor connections.Īnd, remember, this is not a third-world issue that you need to pay attention to only if your product will launch outside the US. They may switch SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards to use the cheapest network. Your users may choose to wait for Wi-Fi or better connectivity. Does your app require a weekly 500-MB download?įor much of the world, connectivity is always poor, transient, or simply expensive. Right now, we build functionality that works in our offices and at the corner coffee shop. It also means that, for most apps, across most of the world’s surface, we cannot design apps that require constant connections-or even large file transfers. That sort of terminology expresses connectivity as being either on or off and implies that users can select their network connectivity. Specifying that you need to cover these people by saying things like “provide airplane mode” is poor practice. Low speed, high latency, and frequent loss of connections are common occurrences. While mobile is by far the default way in which people get online, connectivity varies in quality from moment to moment and place to place. The 4G LTE service I encounter in every big city in the US is something they’ve only heard of.Īnd they are lucky to have reliable mobile service at all. I’m often reminded of a line that someone used in opening a talk at a conference in Eastern Europe: “Not everyone has good 3G service.” Yes, he said 3G. That’s where we come in, as UX designers, and prove that user experience is not just about picking the color of that button.
#NPR ONE LISTEN LATER WORKS ON AIRPLANE MODE DOWNLOAD#
If the project charter says they need to create a download-and-sync feature, you can likely expect to end up with a button labeled Download and Sync rather than the app’s doing this on its own.
All too often it’s a little like the joke about adding the feature “easy to use.” Instead of building for the reality of networks, airplane mode becomes a line item in an app’s required features.Īnd, far too often, teams still think too literally when building features. Certain organizations, including some of my clients, are getting used to the fact that not everyone has great connectivity, so we should all offer many of our new mobile tools as apps that work when a device is disconnected from the Internet.īut some have a strange perception of what bad connectivity means.
#NPR ONE LISTEN LATER WORKS ON AIRPLANE MODE OFFLINE#
Over the past year, I’ve seen a small, but happy resurgence of offline capabilities. We neglected to think about this reality for a while and built a few years worth of apps that act too much like Web sites that users must install.
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