WWDC17 brought a lot of exciting news for developers and businesses alike. One of the most exciting announcements was the changes we will see in iOS11, and how these changes will improve the user experience of different types of apps. While not every business or app will need to implement all of these features, businesses wanting to distinguish their apps from competitors should look to implement these changes to make their user experiences stand out from the crowd. Here, I have identified some of the features that businesses should look to adopt now, and some others that might be useful in the near future.
Firstly, here are five core changes that can be implemented quickly and easily to improve the user experience of your apps.
5 Upgrades You Can Make Right Now
1. Confirm Password Autofill support
It is common knowledge that Safari on iOS can save your login and password details for many sites, and users really appreciate how easy this makes signing in on mobile devices. Now, in iOS11, this functionality has been extended to apps.
While Apple claims that this feature should work out of the box for most apps, there are a few things that you can do to make sure it works perfectly with your app, such as setting a textContentType for your username and password fields, which will allow iOS to know where to put autofill data. Also, if you have not already associated your domain with your app for deep linking, doing so now will allow your credentials to be suggested directly, instead of forcing your users to pick them out of a list of sites.
Getting users into your app and using the features is why you make an app in the first place. So anything that reduces the friction and gets users in and using your app quicker is going to make users happier about using your app and more likely to use it more often. This is achieved while also not compromising security for your users, which would be the case when implementing other quick login methods, such as a 4 digit pin or similar.
2. Update your Mapkit icon style and behaviour
This is my favourite of the items in this section. In iOS 11, Mapkit icons have been given a complete revamp. These new icons are much closer to the annotations that users are used to seeing on Apple Maps or Google Maps.
The new map items feature text permanently written under the icon, built in support for clustering items, and the option of showing only the most important items when zooming out. These icons feel more like a part of the map and are much easier to interact with. Even better, once all of your map items have been converted to this new style, each of these additional features requires only a single line of code to activate.
3. Update designs to use large titles
If you have used Apple Music at all since its launch last year, you will have noticed the larger, more bold titles that are featured in the app. As is often the case with new features and design patterns, Apple has been trying them out on their own apps before releasing them to 3rd party developers.
By setting the ‘prefers large titles’ option on your navigation controllers, you will be able to adopt this style. It will make sense for most apps to run through each of the possible screens and check that they still look good with some more of the screen real-estate taken up by the navigation bar. Some small adjustments may be required to fit this into some existing designs.
While this style might not be the best for every app, it definitely appears to be the direction that Apple’s designers are moving towards.
Apple’s design team are constantly working to update their guidelines for iOS app designs. These guidelines, called the Human Interface Guidelines or HIG, give a set of recommendations that are proven to facilitate great designs. Diverging away from these guidelines will often mean creating custom user interface components which comes at an additional cost. Following Apple’s design guidelines will ensure that your app feels familiar to users, and reduces ongoing development costs.
4. Know what content is being loaded in your app with WKWebViews
This is a big one for security-conscious apps that deal with private and/or financial data. Up until now, WKWebViews would not give developers any control of anything that was not part of an initial page load. This meant that pages could potentially load javascript or other content that had not been vetted by the app, therefore creating a risk to both the business and the user. This violates the security policies of some organisations which need to know what content is being loaded to ensure that user data and the business’ reputation is protected.
It is now possible to add a set of content rules to a WKWebView. These will apply to all resources that load within that WKWebView, from html, to javascript, to css, and even iFrames.
With these new rules, we can white- or blacklist URLs to load, automatically attempt to upgrade all http resources to use https, stop certain requests from receiving cookies, and even load resources but not render the content in the final view. Doing this allows you to ensure that 3rd party content inside your webviews does not compromise your users’ security.
If this was the sticking point stopping your app from upgrading from the now deprecated UIWebview, then you can now safely transition to this new API without worrying that your business’ reputation will be compromised.
5. Render your PDFs in PDF Kit
Anyone who has had to render a PDF in iOS knows that support has been very poor for a very long time. PDF documents are either downloaded and read completely outside of an app or rendered in a very generic looking fashion that gives the impression that the user has left your app.
While the QuickLook framework on iOS supports PDF, the user experience has traditionally been very poor: it feels like it takes the user outside of the app, it is hard to style, and harder to integrate with your app’s navigation. As a result, the user is presented with content that doesn’t fit with your brand, and is difficult to interact with.
Adopting PDF Kit removes all of these issues. It embeds within your app as just another view which you can include in your UI in any way that you like. It can also be customised to present PDF content in different modes: for example, you can have the entire document scroll as a single page if desired.
Being able to embed PDFs in your app’s user interface has several key advantages. Firstly, maintaining your branding colours and theme throughout all of your content will make it easier for users to quickly differentiate your content from that of competing services. Additionally, integrating PDF content that you already have can make it significantly cheaper and easier to present important content to users rather than converting this content into other app-friendly formats.
3 Things To Consider For The Future
In addition to the quick-win items above, Apple has announced several additional features designed to improve the user experience of your app, but which will probably require more thought and planning to implement. These items will typically take more investment and time to deliver, but, when used appropriately, they represent large jumps in functionality rather than just incremental improvements.
1. Connect with your users directly with business chat
Support is essential to any consumer-facing business. This system allows you to hook conversations with iOS users into your existing Customer Support Portal (CSP) systems, allowing you to reach users more easily without needing to buy new software or do as much retraining of customer support staff.
For more advanced customer support scenarios, this feature interfaces well with iMessage apps, allowing users to interact with the app in iMessage and have that conversation data automatically forwarded to your customer support team.
In Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report earlier this year, ‘easier access to online support’ was identified as the number one improvement users want brands to make to their customer service, with ‘faster agent response times’ coming in at a close second. Implementing business chat through iMessage means that your customer service channel is right at your customer’s fingertips, and allows them to interact with you using an interface and style of communication that they’re already familiar with.
2. Streamline complex interactions using drag-and-drop
Drag-and-drop is a really powerful feature and one that is well-known already by anyone who has used a desktop computer. This gives it a unique advantage, because, unlike other interaction styles, it can be implemented without worrying as much whether your users will understand how to use it (as is often an issue with other powerful new interaction features like 3D touch).
On iPad, drag-and-drop allows users to easily share content between apps, and removes the need for cumbersome photo and file picker UIs. For iPhones, the features are a little more constrained, as data can only be moved within your app, not to/from other apps.
Even with these limitations, drag-and-drop is still worthwhile for any interaction where a movement or copy/paste analogy is possible. For a retail app, for example, it would make sense to be able to pick up items and drop them straight into your cart rather than having a dedicated ‘add-to-cart’ button or needing to move to a detailed information screen.
Implementing drag-and-drop will allow your users to interact with your app in a more intuitive way, and will save them significant time and effort, all of which contribute to a more positive user experience.
3. Really bring content in your app to life with ARKit
ARKit is probably the most hyped update to have come out of WWDC this year. Augmented reality (AR) allows you to overlay interactive content onto images of the real world using a device’s camera. While there are many dedicated AR devices such as Google Glass and Microsoft Hololens, they are yet to really take off with consumers. Third party libraries exist for AR on mobile, but they are mostly difficult to use and to integrate into an app.
However, the introduction of ARKit has made AR much more accessible to users, with anyone owning an iPhone 6S or above able to interact with ARKit experiences. Would your customers like to see how your furniture would look in their own rooms? Maybe they would like to visualize how large a pile of gold bullion their bank balance could buy? AR offers the chance to create fun new spins on your existing functionality.
Conclusion
Keeping an app up to date with all the latest features might seem like a lot of work but the payoff in terms of keeping users happy and engaged with your app is definitely worth the effort. When users see apps that are up to date with the newest features and conventions on a platform they will know that the teams behind the apps are actively working to keep improving their experience. This trust leads to greater engagement with your app.
Tristan Burnside is an iOS Developer at Outware Mobile.
Image credit: Apple Inc., 2017.
Originally published at www.outware.com.au.
