“I wanted to pull together some guidelines for what I believe are the best practices for app (home) dashboards with the goal to maximize adoption and engagement for our customers. I've referenced generic UX best practices and UX studies with some personal opinions based on over 8 years of UX experience. Hopefully, this is useful and can be used to help persuade some customers who are on the fence about things like the feed or simply unsure what they should do.”
“The core principles of web navigation are similar to those of wayfinding and signage in the physical world: clarity, visibility, and obviousness matter. If you’re driving down the freeway, for example, you’ll generally see lots of highly-visible signs giving you updates on distances, reminders about upcoming off-ramps, speed limit signs, turns, possible dangers, etc. Now imagine if all those signs were hidden by default and that you had to push a button in your car to see them.”It would be dangerous for drivers because they are forced to commit other actions that cause them to lose focus of their primary objective. The same applies to the context of intranets.
“The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.”The carousel should also be set to ‘Showcase’ layout to maximize the exposure of content. The carousel is one of the only places in the app where less is not more. Users have a very small attention span (8-10 seconds) and are unlikely to paginate the carousel. Interestingly because of a concept called 'Banner blindness,' users have become conditioned to ignore large sliders (carousels) and banners as they usually contain advertising or irrelevant content. So it’s important to increase the selection of content from one to three. Changing the visual appearance creates a significant advantage in readership. To demonstrate the impact of the carousel on the page, try ‘the squint test’ - squint at the page so that all of the components are blurry and you can’t make out the details. The size and boldness of the blocks should correlate directly with how important it is. When there are three slides (showcase) vs. one slide, they look very similar in the squint test so no importance is lost in the visual hierarchy.