InfoQ Homepage User Experience Content on InfoQ
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Android 15 Brings Desktop-Like Windowing UX on Tablets
The latest Beta 2 for the upcoming Android 15 release introduces desktop windowing for tablets as a developer preview. The new feature makes it possible to manage "freeform windows" that users can create to display multiple apps and resize or move around similarly to what they would do on a desktop computer.
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Jetpack Compose Embraces Adaptive UIs with Compose Material 3 Adaptive
Compose Material 3 Adaptive, a library meant to create adaptive UIs able to adapt themselves automatically according to the current window size or device orientation, has reached 1.0 and is ready to be used in production apps.
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Transforming Software Product Teams into Tech Investors
The key responsibility of an organisation lies in balancing user value with profitability. In a product organisation, software product teams invest their own time. According to Fabrice des Mazery, software developers are much more than stakeholders; they are the main investors as they are part of the product teams.
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How Lyft Leveraged iOS Live Activities to Enhance User Experience
Providing timely updates to users is key to improving their mobile experience, explains Lyft iOS engineer Max Husar, although it will increase development scope and effort. To achieve a balance between flexibility, reliability, and reusability, Lyft engineers used iOS ActivityKit to add dynamic content to their app.
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How Continuous Discovery Helps Software Teams to Take Product Decisions
Continuous discovery for product development is regular research that involves the entire software product team, and that can actively inform product decisions. Equating continuous discovery to weekly conversations with one or more customers can be misleading. Combining quantitative and qualitative research methods can help software teams gather data and understand what is behind the data.
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How Spotify Fights Global Warming by Taking Their Mobile App Size under Control
Adding new features has often a hidden impact on app size, with several undesired effects, including user disengagement and unnecessary carbon emissions. To keep app size under control, Spotify engineers established pre-PR and post-PR processes to help prevent an estimated 10MB app size growth over six months.
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Apple Adds Delivery Metrics to Its Push Notification Console
To help developers gauge delivery of notifications in production, the Push Notification Console now includes metrics to get insights into the behavior of an app and its integration with the Apple Push Notification service (APNs).
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Transitioning to SwiftUI at Airbnb
In 2022, the iOS team at Airbnb decided SwiftUI was sufficiently mature to be adopted for their official app. This required a careful transition, explains Airbnb staff engineer Bryn Bodayle.
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IDPs with Poor User Experience are Destined to Fail
User Experience design is of paramount importance for implementing an Internal Developer Platform, finds Fernando Villalba. In a comprehensive blog post detailing what great design and UX (user experience) means, Villalba expands on how to leverage these best to build an IDP (internal developer platform) that is user-friendly and hence more likely to be adopted widely.
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Platform Engineering Challenges: Small Teams, Build Versus Buy, and Building the Wrong Thing
The team at Syntasso wrote a series of blog posts outlining twelve challenges that platform teams face. These challenges include having a small platform team support a large organization, failing to understand the needs of the platform users, and struggling with the build-vs-buy argument.
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AirBnb Animation Engine Lottie Improves Performance by Adopting Core Animation
AirBnb has announced the fourth major iteration of its open-source vector-based animation engine Lottie. Thanks to the adoption of Core Animation, Lottie 4.0 provides significant performance improvements and reduces CPU load, says AirBnb iOS engineer Cal Stephens.
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Using Data to Predict Future Usage and Increase User Insights
By identifying usage trends, you can proactively adjust load, scaling, and routing to better handle the load on particular parts of the globe when you know it will peak there. Data about how users interact with your application can be used to design future features that better mimic these patterns and ensure that new features have a better chance of solving real user problems and getting adopted.
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Android Adds Experimental Support for Predictive Back Gestures
To help users understand where a back gesture will land them in an Android app, Google has introduced a new predictive back gesture. The new feature allows the user to decide whether they want to complete the gesture or not by showing an animated preview of the gesture outcome.
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How Getting Feedback from Angry Users Helps to Develop Better Products
Every time you change something in your product, angry users can show up. These users are engaged and they care about your product. Listening to them can help you find golden nuggets of user insight to improve your product.
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Google Embraces Large-Screen Android Devices at DevSummit 21
At its recent AndroidDevSummit'21, Google announced a number of new technologies aimed to help developers build better apps across different devices and device factors. Those include Material You for Jetpack Compose, support for large screen with Android 12L, extended Jetpack library, and more.