Self Evaluate User Experience of Apps

Lora Heiny, Senior Program Manager, Windows Partner Ecosystem and Will Tschumy, Principal User Experience Advisor at Microsoft delivered a session at the recently held Build 2012, where they disclosed tips which should be followed to evaluate the UX of an application.

According to Lora, you should first identify concept and define scope. Then a prototype should be created and you need to study and evaluate it against the relevant guidelines in place. She suggests you to monitor user ratings, comments, feedback and verify the animations, interaction which are plugged into the design. Moreover, you should list what the users will be able to do with your application.

Lora advocates the need for using wide tile layouts with live, personalized content and the content should flow from edge to edge. You should make use of square titles only when there are no updates.

According to Lora, you should make use of horizontal panning for grid layout and should employ hierarchical system for apps with large collection. The team also suggest you to make use of semantic zoom to move quickly through big lists. The session advises you to use top bar of the user interface for navigation purposes and bottom bar for various commands such as pinning.

Lora also suggest few tips for the successful submission of apps to the Windows app store. It includes uploading promotional images in the dimension of 414x180 px. Moreover, the app should provide support for ARM, x86 and x64 processors. The apps should also include privacy policy and set age rating to 12+. Moreover, you should set content filters and enable it by default if your app contains 16+ content.

The session concludes by stating the fact that developers should continuously review their apps after submission to create stability and confidence including a list of resources from where you can gather more information regarding the UX techniques.