Mobile Design Challenges

Remember when every car manufacturer decided physical buttons were "outdated"? Tesla, VW, Peugeot, Volvo - they all went full touchscreen. Everything from climate control to opening the glove box buried in digital menus. Minimalist. Futuristic. The future of automotive design. Looked brilliant in the showroom. Absolute nightmare on the M25. Then the crash data arrived. Distraction-related crashes in Europe jumped 20% between 2020 and 2024. Research by TRL found that using in-car touchscreens was as impairing as texting whilst driving or having a light tipple before getting behind the wheel. Tasks that took 2 seconds with a physical button were taking 5-40 seconds on a touchscreen. And taking your eyes off the road for just 2 seconds doubles your crash risk. Let that sink in. Car manufacturers built touchscreens into their vehicles that impair you as much as being over the limit. Euro NCAP, Europe's car safety authority, looked at the numbers and said: "Right, we're done with this nonsense." From January 2026 (this month), any car wanting a 5-star safety rating must have physical buttons for indicators, hazard lights, horn, wipers, and emergency SOS. Touchscreen-only? You lose points. Simple as. And here's the really mental part: Whilst Tesla, VW, and others were spending billions designing sleek touchscreen interfaces, Mazda just kept making physical buttons. They looked old-fashioned. Proper analogue. Like they'd completely missed the memo on modern design. Turns out they were the only ones who actually got it. Now VW is retrofitting physical controls back into newer models after customer backlash. Volvo's EX30, which controls mirror adjustment through a touchscreen (seriously), is suddenly facing a safety rating problem. And Tesla's minimalist interior, once their signature design flex, is now a regulatory liability. The manufacturers who bet everything on touchscreens are now spending money to reverse course. The manufacturer who stayed old-school looks like a genius. Touchscreens were cheaper to produce than switches and knobs. They enabled software updates. They looked modern. They photographed well in marketing materials. They also made cars objectively more dangerous to drive. Your big innovation could be making things worse, and you won't know until the data catches up. #Automotive #RoadSafety #Innovation #ProductDesign #EuroNCAP #UK

⏱️ How To Measure UX (https://lnkd.in/e5ueDtZY), a practical guide on how to use UX benchmarking, SUS, SUPR-Q, UMUX-LITE, CES, UEQ to eliminate bias and gather statistically reliable results — with useful templates and resources. By Roman Videnov. Measuring UX is mostly about showing cause and effect. Of course, management wants to do more of what has already worked — and it typically wants to see ROI > 5%. But the return is more than just increased revenue. It’s also reduced costs, expenses and mitigated risk. And UX is an incredibly affordable yet impactful way to achieve it. Good design decisions are intentional. They aren’t guesses or personal preferences. They are deliberate and measurable. Over the last years, I’ve been setting ups design KPIs in teams to inform and guide design decisions. Here are some examples: 1. Top tasks success > 80% (for critical tasks) 2. Time to complete top tasks < 60s (for critical tasks) 3. Time to first success < 90s (for onboarding) 4. Time to candidates < 120s (nav + filtering in eCommerce) 5. Time to top candidate < 120s (for feature comparison) 6. Time to hit the limit of free tier < 7d (for upgrades) 7. Presets/templates usage > 80% per user (to boost efficiency) 8. Filters used per session > 5 per user (quality of filtering) 9. Feature adoption rate > 80% (usage of a new feature per user) 10. Time to pricing quote < 2 weeks (for B2B systems) 11. Application processing time < 2 weeks (online banking) 12. Default settings correction < 10% (quality of defaults) 13. Search results quality > 80% (for top 100 most popular queries) 14. Service desk inquiries < 35/week (poor design → more inquiries) 15. Form input accuracy ≈ 100% (user input in forms) 16. Time to final price < 45s (for eCommerce) 17. Password recovery frequency < 5% per user (for auth) 18. Fake email frequency < 2% (for email newsletters) 19. First contact resolution < 85% (quality of service desk replies) 20. “Turn-around” score < 1 week (frustrated users → happy users) 21. Environmental impact < 0.3g/page request (sustainability) 22. Frustration score < 5% (AUS + SUS/SUPR-Q + Lighthouse) 23. System Usability Scale > 75 (overall usability) 24. Accessible Usability Scale (AUS) > 75 (accessibility) 25. Core Web Vitals ≈ 100% (performance) Each team works with 3–4 local design KPIs that reflects the impact of their work, and 3–4 global design KPIs mapped against touchpoints in a customer journey. Search team works with search quality score, onboarding team works with time to success, authentication team works with password recovery rate. What gets measured, gets better. And it gives you the data you need to monitor and visualize the impact of your design work. Once it becomes a second nature of your process, not only will you have an easier time for getting buy-in, but also build enough trust to boost UX in a company with low UX maturity. [more in the comments ↓] #ux #metrics

Turning apple waste into furniture? Material innovation is being redefined with a groundbreaking vegan-certified leather alternative crafted from upcycled agricultural waste. This innovative material offers a premium, bio-based option that seamlessly blends environmental responsibility with practical versatility. Manufactured on wide rolls, it provides a luxurious, durable alternative to traditional leather while addressing the urgent need for eco-friendly solutions. By utilising by-products of agricultural processes, this innovation exemplifies how waste can become a cornerstone for transformative design, challenging industry norms and fostering a more circular economy. Recently, this material has been introduced in the furniture sector, demonstrating its versatility and effectiveness in reducing carbon footprints. For example, when used in furniture, it achieves significant reductions in carbon emissions compared to traditional materials. This measurable impact highlights the potential of sustainable materials to advance both environmental and business objectives. Key Features of Bio-Based Materials →Transformative Origins: Converts agricultural by-products into high-quality materials. →Cross-Industry Applications: Ideal for furniture, fashion, and automotive sectors. →Design Customisation: Supports diverse finishes and textures, meeting unique design needs. →Supply Chain Transparency: Offers full traceability, ensuring ethical production and enhancing storytelling. Business Impact and ROI →Sustainability Leadership: Collaborating with material innovators demonstrates a commitment to Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals. →Cost Optimisation: By utilising waste-based inputs, businesses can reduce dependence on costly, resource-intensive materials. →Market Differentiation: Offering products made with innovative materials positions companies as leaders in sustainability, appealing to a conscientious consumer base. →Carbon Reduction: Bio-based materials deliver tangible emissions savings, supporting corporate decarbonisation objectives. This innovation exemplifies how rethinking waste can drive sustainability and profitability, empowering businesses to lead in the era of bio-based innovation. Link for more info: https://lnkd.in/dmtMrnP3 #sustainability #esg #biomaterials #decarbonisation #wasteupcycling #innovation #bioeconomy #climateaction #circularity #greendesign

Your AI model scored 95%. Your users still hate it. Most teams building AI products are stuck at offline evals, testing models against fixed datasets before real users ever touch them. The scores go up. Leadership feels good. But Mario Rodriguez, CPO of GitHub, calls out what actually happens: teams build incentive systems to pass the test, not improve the product (Episode 223). “When a measure becomes a target, it stops being useful” (Goodhart's Law). The discipline nobody talks about is moving from offline to online evaluations and measuring what users actually do in production. At GitHub Copilot, they track two metrics: AR (acceptance rate, did the developer accept the suggestion?) and ARC (accepted and retained characters, how much of that code did they actually keep?). A developer might accept a 20-line suggestion, then immediately rewrite 18 of those lines. Offline evals would score that as success. Production data tells the real story. Mario's advice? Expect offline and online performance to diverge. Don't panic when it happens. Build the online measurement infrastructure early, before you convince yourself the offline score means you're done. Are you measuring model performance or actual user value?

3.3 million sanitary pads, 5,000 metres of leather, 50 houses … all made from what we once threw away. A new wave of material innovation may well be transforming waste into sustainable products that could be worth billions. In recent months, I’ve been tracking enterprises rooted in material innovation — not just because they are climate-forward, but because they demonstrate what's possible when design, local sourcing, and business sense come together. Here’s what I found … → Bliss Naturals (Coimbatore) – Using kenaf fibre (a pickle-making staple) to create sanitary napkins. These napkins are 143 times less carbon-intensive than traditional ones. What began as a college project now boasts 3.3 million units sold. Their customer retention rate is 80%. → The Bio Company (Surat) – Transforming tomato waste into biodegradable, PU-free leather. India, the world’s second-largest tomato producer, grows 44 M tons annually. The company transforms 30–35% of this (around 13M tons of waste) into 5,000 metres of leather every month. This addresses both fashion and agricultural waste simultaneously. → Hexpressions (Jaipur) – Building cement-free homes using honeycomb panels made from recycled paper and fly ash. They’re built without cement and with local labour. They’re fireproof, waterproof, and shock-absorbent. They have an 80% lower environmental impact compared to conventional construction. However, these innovations face significant challenges … 📍 Biodegradable materials often have higher production costs and face raw material constraints. 📍 Despite growing consumer demand, regulatory hurdles and limited consumer awareness remain obstacles. At the same time, the sustainable materials market is projected to grow from $357 B in 2025 to $800 B by 2032 (Coherent Market Insights, 2023). In closing, these businesses may not just be solving today’s waste problem. They may well be designing the foundation for tomorrow’s new materials economy. P.S. What other sustainable alternatives like these have caught your attention lately? #MaterialInnovation #CircularEconomy #ClimateEntrepreneurship #Sustainability

40-60% of your engineering delivery time is lost to handovers and coordination waste. Not to coding. Not to testing. Not to requirements. To waiting, asking, aligning, and passing work between people. The DevOps Handbook and Lean Software Development research make this painfully clear. Your biggest delivery bottleneck isn't technical complexity. It's the space between people. Here's what most organizations do: They add more process. More meetings. More documentation. More alignment rituals. And they wonder why things get slower instead of faster. What actually works? Eliminating the handovers entirely. Concurrent product development puts all the bright people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place. Requirements analysis, coding, testing, and documentation happen simultaneously, not sequentially. No waiting for specs. No waiting for code. No waiting for test results. No waiting for documentation. The Three Amigos approach (business analyst, developer, tester) working together in real-time on the same problem creates something you can't get any other way: shared understanding that doesn't need to be written down and handed off. The result? Teams that apply true concurrent development report what used to take 3 weeks being completed in a single day. Same people. Same skills. Radically different approach to how work flows between them. What percentage of your team's time is spent waiting for someone else? #ContinuousDelivery #TDD #ProductDevelopment

I once worked on a project where one small button ruined everything. Users couldn’t tap it. They missed it. They got frustrated. We didn’t notice ( until user testing ). The problems? The button was too small. It was too close to other elements. Users with bigger fingers struggled the most. The fix: Minimum font size: 14px. Left/right padding: 20px. Top/bottom padding: at least 12px. The results? Tap success rate improved by 35%. User frustration dropped by 50%. Conversions increased by 12%. Lesson: If users can’t tap a button, it’s useless. Make them big, clear, and easy to press. Ever rage-tapped a button? What happened?

What if the strongest “wood” in a space did not come from a tree? What if it started as an olive pit on a farm in Cyprus? Every year, tons of olive waste quietly pile up after oil production. For most of us, it is invisible. For a few material innovators, it has become the starting point for some of the densest, toughest boards used in furniture and interiors. Scientists have shown that when olive stones are transformed into composites, they can boost stiffness, hardness, and durability compared to many conventional fillers. This is the kind of circular story that rarely makes headlines, yet it changes how we think about “waste.” Olive pits, once a disposal problem, become high performance surfaces in hospitality, retail, and residential projects. Designers get a material with character and strength; local economies get more value from existing harvests; the planet gets less pressure on forests and landfills. What inspires here is not only the science, but the mindset. Instead of asking “how do we clean up waste,” these teams ask “how do we design it out and turn it into an asset.” That mental shift is where the real innovation lives. It is a reminder that powerful sustainability stories often start in the least glamorous places: by-products, leftovers, and side streams that most value chains ignore. KEY TAKEAWAYS: · Olive pits are more than waste; they can become dense, high performance boards for furniture and interiors when used as composite fillers. · Circular materials like olive stone panels unlock new value for agriculture, reduce pressure on forests, and give designers fresh tools for storytelling and durability. · The real innovation is a mindset shift: seeing “waste” as a design input that can strengthen both materials and business models. What other “invisible” waste streams do you think could become the next high performance material in design and hospitality? #SustainableDesign #LuxuryHospitality #ImpactDesign #Architecture #Innovation #CircularEconomy #MaterialInnovation #InteriorDesign #HospitalityDesign #EnvironmentalDesign #BiophilicDesign

Taste over Touchscreens = Dangerous Distraction Digital touchscreens have made cars harder to operate — and less safe. Nested menus and the lack of physical feedback significantly increase driver distraction. Your eyes stay off the road longer. That’s not innovation. That’s risk. ADAC Autotest results tell the story: • 2019 average usability score: 2.3 • 2025 average usability score: 2.7 • Worst-rated car: usability score 4.0 More functions are buried inside screens. Longer interaction time = higher accident risk. Euro NCAP is stepping in. From 2026, full safety scores will only be awarded if key functions are physical buttons or switches, including: • Turn signals • Horn • Hazard lights • Wipers • eCall Everything else must be accessible within two menu levels max. ADAC advice for drivers: 1. Learn the menus before driving or after software updates 2. Locate essential functions (ventilation, visibility, safety) 3. Use voice control — if it actually works Message to manufacturers: Touchscreens aren’t the enemy. But for safety-critical functions, they’re the wrong tool. Drivers want buttons back. Tactile feedback = safety. A car is not a smartphone. And it never should have been treated like one.

We often frame plastic as a waste problem. It is also a materials problem. Researchers in China have developed a bamboo-based material that matches the strength of some conventional plastics while biodegrading in soil within controlled conditions. It is still early stage. But it signals something important. Material innovation is shifting toward solutions that balance performance, manufacturability, and end-of-life impact. The future of sustainable materials may depend less on replacing plastic outright, and more on reengineering what it needs to do. #SustainableMaterials #MaterialInnovation #CircularEconomy #InfrastructureInnovation #ClimateSolutions #Manufacturing #SystemsThinking Source: https://lnkd.in/gqjKXGtm AI Image Disclaimer: Visual is for representation purposes only.