Hands down, forms are probably one of the most annoying topics when it comes to user interfaces. For users as well as for designers it seems to be an odyssey, brimming with bad experiences. In the last couple of months, I have been working in a lot of projects involving interfaces for mobile devices in all shapes and colors. For me, it was very interesting to observe in user testing how my designs as well as the designs of colleagues, although all of them seemed to be very informed and sometimes clever solutions, finally were torn apart by users.

As designing mobile interfaces is still pretty much virgin soil for a lot of people and as there are not a lot of useful guidelines, I started to write down all the common problems, that I observed. Embedded into a little bit of prose, the guys from Smashing just recently featured those notes. The original article can be found on Smashing Magazine.

Recently I have to deal a lot with user experiences of services and products that live simultaneously on websites, microsites, mobile, in mail or social media, in-store and even in call centres. These services and products, to which we refer to as multichannel experiences, can be quite challenging to get right.

Thoughts about design as well as assessment characteristics relating to consistent multichannel experiences have recently been published via Foviance (here) and also got referenced in the UX Storytellers project (here) to support designers as well as researchers in the UX field dealing with these sorts of problems.

In a nutshell, the most relevant characteristics to consider when assessing or designing for consistent multichannel experiences are:

• Coherent - basic idea of the service is perceived as consistent across channels.
• Complementary - coherent service experience delights with specific benefits within chosen service channel.
• Simultaneous - benefits of service channel can be combined as needed.
• Shiftable - service adapts to customer flexibility and present needs.
• Synchronized - service allows shifting between channels and shared features across service a shared among channel.

Naturally, multichannel experiences design is far more complex. Consistency however has been observed to be one of the most important factors.